Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Peeper! aka "Poor Penny"

I can't believe it's been 5 years already?! When the heck did all that time pass??

Why haven't I posted about her birthday before?! Oops! I guess, technically I missed it this time too, her birthday was actually yesterday, the 14th of April, but close enough!

Penny - 5 years old

There is a running joke in my family about "Poor Penny" because she doesn't do sports, and I must not love her. For the record, she doesn't do agility because she has bad depth perception and will crash bars at 6" which is really scary when you're tiny.

She's very different from the boys. WAY more independent. Barky too. REALLY does not care what I think. I did "everything right" with her. Puppy kindergarten, basic obedience classes, puppy agility. Lots of socialization outings. Still not a lot of desire to please. Very much a "love the one you're with" attitude.

Training isn't made any easier by the fact that she's tiny. Can't get in a lot of food reps before you're done since the dog is full.

Or dropped crumbs/cookies on the floor in those group classes. I think she's still received MORE reinforcement off the floors in all those classes than she has from me. Hard to block the dog from getting the wrong reinforcement without kicking the tiny Chi puppy in the head so she's VERY WELL patterned to vacuum the floor of errant cookies that dog!

Tiny baby Penny
Despite everything, she's a sweet little dog. So friendly. Love, love, loves the people. Maybe lacking a little in the impulse control department, but at 5 lbs it's a pretty manageable problem.

Happy Birthday Teensy-tiny!

We went down to the lake for her birthday on the weekend. They haven't brought the water up yet, so the dogs were zooming around on the beach like crazy.





















Saturday, April 11, 2015

Spectacular!

The only thing better than having a break through training your own dog, is a break through in helping someone else train theirs. So much AWESOME.

Flyin high!

So proud of my students today. And their dogs. AND my Fluff, who runs the "course" after with the young girl who comes with her Mom to train her Basenji to play agility.

Also with myself. For figuring out how to motivate that particular dog. For not giving up and deciding "that's not part of the course" or "not my problem" and for going outside the box to try something else ... not unlike training certain bad little black dogs! Love helping the people. So rewarding!

I love the look of Basenjis. I really like the dog. But they're definitely a challenge. So after class the daughter gets to run Baxter over the last, most challenging sequence and put him through equipment, like weaves and full height teeters etc.

The Basenji isn't going to be an easy dog to play agility with. It's hard when you have a brand new person to agility and a brand new dog, let alone a hard breed. It was her (the daughter's) idea to train their dog in agility, and I really don't want that quashed by the challenge that her dog poses. So Baxter will keep coming to class as long as they do!

Hopefully some day she'll be able to run him as a Jr Handler. It's so cute! I'm super proud of him for running with her. Back in the day we had an agility class where we swapped dogs. I ran a Sheltie but Baxter decided that he wouldn't run for the Sheltie's Mom. I'm very happy with him for running for a stranger now!

I think he'd be an awesome dog for a Jr. Handler. He runs the speed of his handler and pretty much takes the obstacle in front of him. Best part, I get to watch my pretty dog run =)