A great day at the trial!

September 7, 2008 in Agility, Tests and trials

Our debut weekend is over and I have to say that I’m pleased. Yesterday was really not a good day for me and Shejpa. I think I was a bit overly excited and I wanted to qualify too much. She was eliminated in all three runs due to refusals. Good contacts though. Missy did a great run in jumpers, but jumped the side of the wheel and was eliminated since I kept running. She didn’t knock any bars! Pavlov was yesterdays superstar. It was his debut and Thomas first agility run ever. They had no faults coming to the last jump, but Pavlov ran beside it and Thomas had to take him back and around. You need three qualifying runs in each class to move to the next level. A qualifying run in the easisest class is any run with less than 5,99 faults. Pavlov had 5 faults and got his first qualifying run!

Today was my day. Missy made a qualifying run in jumpers, with five faults in the weave poles. Shejpa did the same thing in both jumpers and standard and she won her standard run. They were both faster than all the other dogs in their class even with refusals at the weave poles. That Missy pops out at the second pole is something that I’m not surprised by. That has really been a problem for us and she is just now starting to do it well in training. For Shejpa to do it was a much bigger surprise, but I think it was my fault. I tried to help her and handle her into the weave poles and she is not used to it. I don’t think it will be a problem in the future when we both get mor experience in trials. She is usually very good in training on all kinds of weave poles.

This means that all of our three dogs have managed to qualify once in jumpers and that Shejpa (who was the only one entered in standard) also has done a qualifying run in standard. We’re now off to the mountains for two weeks of hunting with Pax and Pi. Shejpa and Missy are staying at home with a friend of ours and Pavlov will be with Nina in Umeå.

National obedience championship finals

August 20, 2008 in Obedience, Tests and trials

Missy did a great job in the finals. Unfortunatly, she lied down when there was 5 seconds left of the long sit. I would have trained that more if I thought we were going to the finals. It’s hard for her to sit on her own with strange dogs and a big audience. She is not a very confident dog. I thought that she would be more affected by the distractions, but she wasn’t really. You can tell from the video that she’s not really as confident as she usually is. Her tail is wagging, but her ears and mouth tell another story. I’m very pleased with her and if she keeps this up we’ll soon have our OTCH. Here is a video from Sunday.

Missy in the finals!

August 16, 2008 in Obedience, Tests and trials, Videos

Missy and I qualified for the finals in the Norwegian national obedience championship today. We ended up in 10th place and the 15 best (out of 45 in the qualifying round) get to compete in the finals tomorrow. I wasn’t really prepared to get into the finals since we havn’t been training obedience a lot this summer. Missy is not very confident when there’re a lot of other dogs around and I’m not sure if she’ll be able to perform at her best in the big ring tomorrow, but we’ll try to have fun and not fail any exercises. Here is a video from todays trial:

Two agility videos

July 14, 2008 in Agility, Tests and trials, Videos

This is me and a friends border collie running a jumpers course at a trial in Lillehamer yesterday. He is a really nice dog and is wonderful to handle. Unfortunatly, he knocked a bar in the end of the run, but I think we were a good team.

When we got back home, we were inspired and built a sequence for Pavlov and Shejpa. Shejpa has had a boring weekend and she was very keen on running. She always looks slow on video, but this run was really fast!

Pi’s debut in obedience trials

May 17, 2008 in Obedience, Tests and trials, Videos

Pi did her first obedienece trial today and did really well. Her biggest misstake was sitting all through the long down, wich takes 15 points off the finall score. The rest was fortunatly good enough and she really surprised me with being very focused and correct. I was kind of worried that she would get distracted and start looking at birds or sniffing the air, but she was a focused and very happy setter. We got second place and are our final score was good enough to send us to the next class. These were her scores (points are out of a maximum of 10):

Long down: 5 (x3)
Greeting the judge and showing teeth: 10 (x1)
Heel on leash: 8 (x4)
Drop from heel: 8 (x2)
Recall to heel: 9,5 (x3)
Stand from heel: 9,5 (x3)
Holding dumbell: 9 (there was a strange misunderstanding between me and the ring steward, as you can see in the video) (x1)
Recall over jump: 9 (x2)
Generall impression: 9 (x1)

Final score: 167/200 (if you get over 160 points, you can move on to the next class)