Can I Bring the Dog?

I can't remember, what was my life like before Chico was in it?

Chico joined my household two years ago today. He’s a shelter dog and the actual date of his birth was lost in the shuffle. He was about a year and a half old when my sister’s family got him, and they had him for about three and a half years, so I figured he was about five when he came to me. When I had to pick a date of birth for him, I picked January 10th, 2005.

As coincidence would have it, today I read an interesting post about reducing or eliminating the shelter dog problem. Spaying and neutering, writer Casey Lomonaco argues, are not the solution because “Most dogs languishing in shelters are not puppies. They’re not even strays. They usually started out in a family home that for, whatever reason, neglected their training or were otherwise a bad match. The simplest way to solve shelter overpopulation is responsible dog ownership. If you choose the right dog and train him for a lifetime of companionship, you’ll make sure you aren’t contributing to the problem!”

While poor training and lack of socialization may not be the sole causes for shelter overpopulation, they are doubtless major contributing factors. My guess is that at a year and a half, Chico was too much for his first family and that’s why he went to the shelter. Read more of Casey’s post here. What do you think about the idea put forth by a commenter that shelters could do more to help people learn how to train and manage their dogs?

Staying quiet in the crate between competition rounds is one of the skills Chico is working on. With that in mind, I made a sign to stick on his crate and left a big jar of small treats on top of the crate.

The sign said:

This is Chico. If he is being quiet, please feel free to give him a cookie from his good-dog cookie jar on top of the crate.

I don’t know how many people did that, but there were enough of them that when I came to get him for Jumpers with Weaves at about 3:30, he had a pile of uneaten cookies in front of him.

Chico and I have been traveling down and up the east coast for the last couple weeks, we’ve been doing a lot of visiting in new places. For New Year’s Eve we’re visiting K&A who live near fancy-pants East Hampton, NY. After a long week, almost all of it on leash, in Washington, DC, we both craved a long off-leash walk and our hostess kindly offered to show us the way to Louse Point.

She reassuringly said, “Lots of people take their dogs there to run in the off season.” In one way, that’s a relief, I know it is permitted and we won’t get in trouble. In another way, that phrase strikes terror in my heart because it means that there will be other dogs and Chico might do his silly dog-aggressive stuff.

But we went.

Plenty of room to run at the beach. The water tastes funny, but there's a lot of it.

And it went really well.

There were a number of other dogs and with sufficient application of treats and plenty of happy-voice commands, there were no problems, no snarling, no aggression. All the dogs we met were his size or smaller, I’m sure that helped.

it's always nice to be with someone who can take a picture of both of us. You'll notice that there are no pictures of Chico with other dogs, I was quite busy managing him when dogs were around.

This trip has involved going to lots of strange places in rapid succession, meeting lots of new people and dogs. Chico has done such a good job, he has handled all this with such aplomb, I can’t express how proud I am of him.

This was brought to my attention by Affordable Agility, who posted the link to this video, made by a dog training club in Hungary. Lots of work went into this video, both in training the dogs and in shooting & editing the footage. If you’ve ever trained a dog at all, you’ll have a sense of the what it took to do this.

Doggy Christmas surprise

As I said on Saturday, on Sunday Chico and I were entered in a real, AKC sanctioned, agility trial.  Since I am in this to give him exposure to a wider world to help him develop poise under pressure, not to win prizes; and since higher jumps add stress to an already stressful situation, we competed in the novice division, at a “preferred” height. That means that instead of a course of jumps set at 20 inches, Chico got to jump things that were 16 inches high.

He was a star, all day. He willingly went into his crate to wait until it was time for a walk or to run in the ring. He was tolerant of other dogs all day, he was happy to see people he knew from classes and he pretty much completely listened to me in the ring. I misdirected him once or twice, but all in all, I rate the day a total success.

Here’s the first class:

And here’s the second:

Chico and I are going to try an agility competition tomorrow. I am astoundingly non-competitive, so this is a big step for me and I swear I am only doing it so the dog can have the experience. This will be an easy course, and he is entered in the “preferred” section (that means he can jump at a lower height than is specified by his size), we’re doing this to see if he can concentrate on me and my handling when we go do agility in a different place with all sorts of new distractions.

A number of my fellow students are participating in the same event, so Julie scheduled a practice session, “run throughs,”  for us the other night.

2011-12-15 run throughs video at YouTube.

Chico did great at run throughs and I’m really excited to see how it goes tomorrow.