Friday, January 14, 2011

Why I don't like winter

We have had our first significant snowfall of the winter.  As a kid I looked forward to snow since it meant we could go sledding or maybe school would be canceled.  Now as an adult who doesn't like to drive in the winter stuff and loves agility it isn't so great.  We were to have our first organized agility practice of the new year and it was canceled because the ground is covered in snow....now what.  Well after some thinking there are several items Mac and I need to work on that doesn't require equipment.  One in particular is our start line approach.  Mac hates being touched on the head, has since he was a puppy at 14 weeks.  Most venues require the dog to run without a collar so I have nothing to use as a gentle placement to get him in place before a run.  I see so many dogs come to the start line and the handler places the dog between their legs and can step away using a stay or wait to keep the dog in position.  We will work on that over the next few weeks of winter.  I will keep you posted on our progress.
I have found a behavioral specialist that I hope can help with our problem dog Tucker.  So far we have gone several weeks without a dog fight so that is great.  He is certainly a challenge and I think will be for some time to come.  Seems that if we have all the dogs lose in the house and he is on a leash we have no problems.  He stays on his bed and it isn't as though we have to hold the leash just having it on allows us enough control that should things escalate we can break it up using the leash.  Not the ideal perfect world but I have to remember dogs are pack animals and there have been pack issues in the past.  Still it seems that he has issues relating to an incident at doggie daycare.  Hopefully the behavior specialist can help us understand his body language and how we can better manage the situation.  How does this relate to winter?  Well we can't get out and exercise the dogs like we would prefer so they tend to get a little punchy when the weather isn't good. 
Here's to hoping Spring is just around the corner and we can get back to agility very very soon!

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