We Did It! Baxter Earns his ATChC!!

So, so proud of my fluffy boy this weekend. And myself I guess, I did have to do the training with my dog to get this far. It just feels more like it's his accomplishment than mine!

Baxter earned his Agility Trial Champion of Canada Title (ATChC) with his 4th Master Gamble on Sunday under Yvonne Babij, at the first ever HyperHounds trial held out at WetNoses this weekend. He also got his Masters Gamblers Dog of Canada Title (MGDC), but that's a little like a after thought when you get the ATChC!

Judge Yvonne, Baxter and I

He's my first agility dog and this is my first ATChC. I just about cried when he successfully completed the gamble.

Play by play of the Gamble:
(you may want to just skip this orange part if you're not an agility person)

The gamble itself wasn't bad, as long as your dog with a running dogwalk would call off that jump at the end of it and come into the tunnel under the dog walk. The opening though didn't have any sections with a lot of points, I was a little stressed. It was get the mini, or we wouldn't get the points to qualify. The mini was similar to the final gamble, contact with a tunnel beside it. In the mini you flip into the tunnel which was a little further away than in the final, and in the final you call around after the contact and send them into the mouth of the tunnel under the contact.

First time over the mini Baxter didn't see the tunnel so I had to step in after wasting a little time trying to get him to send. Second time over the mini he still didn't flip into the tunnel (I think I was too far back on the AFrame for him to read the switch, he needs the body motion as well as the verbal and it's hard for him to see that coming down the Frame unless I'm really ahead.) BUT he did send to the tunnel!

Buzzer went, not bad positioning. Up the dogwalk, he hit his contact (they were a little sketchy this weekend, he jumped it in the Gamble on Saturday ...) around and into the tunnel. I remembered to stay back from the gamble line a bit so I'd have the room to step in and support with motion, but I didn't need it. Straight out over the jump ahead of him and then back over the next one. Good, good dog. He got it! I didn't almost explode with happiness. It just felt awesome. Was a good run, we worked as a team, I handled my dog well, and everything just clicked.

Kim, our instructor at HyperHounds who got us into doing agility in the first place and started me on positive dog training in the first place was videoing this run. She knew it we needed it but mostly I tried to keep it quiet how close we were to getting his ATChC. A few people we've trained with knew, some others had guessed that we should be close but didn't know what we were waiting on. Gambles are mentally a little hard for me, because we struggled with them for so long, and I didn't want to put any inadvertent pressure on me/us to get this!

After we got the final gamble she yell out "Is that your ATChC?" and that's when I teared up, happy, excited, too much emotion kind of teared up. Talking to her after she said she teared up too! Hugs all around. I love the people who play this sport. So supportive.

Such an awesome feeling.

I really wanted to get that last gamble this weekend. We'd started out with agility because I thought it looked fun when I saw the SuperDogs at the Stampede, but I was never sure if Baxter was doing good in class or not. Or when we should move up to the next level. I'd always ask if we should move on and Kim always assured me he was doing great. We finally made it into the 4th level of class where we'd run actual masters courses - which is hard when you're just starting out and have no idea what you're doing! Kim who kept pushing me (after we'd been training for 2 years) to actual go out and get a AAC number and start competing. Kim who kept telling me that we were doing great and that my "slow" little dog wasn't that slow, that he liked playing the game and we'd be able to earn our ATChC.

Getting his ATChC is special, but getting it at the first ever HyperHounds trial was even more special. Thanks Kim! We wouldn't have made it without you! =D

As a side note: If he was registered with the AAC as a Tibetan Spaniel (he's registered as a All Canadian, since he didn't have a CKC number and I didn't know any better at the time) he would be the FIRST Tibetan Spaniel to earn his ATChC in Canada)