Thursday Linktasticness

I am about headed out the door for my last dog-and-pony show with potential new employers. Keep your fingers crossed for me, this will be such a step up, if in no way other than working for and with not only rational, but just really nice, people.

So, here’s some linktasticness I have been hoarding up.

The AKC continues to make me want to slam my head against my desk. And yet I give them money. Why, oh why can we not have more USDAA trials in So Cal? Maybe I’ll have to start driving…

A nice story on Michael Vick’s Ex-Pitts on the mend, from NPR’s Fresh Air. A new book is out just last week called “The Lost Dogs” and it is getting crazy amounts of press, as it should.

Ian Dunbar’s Puppy plan, keeping this one for future reference. He’s actually giving a seminar right up the way in Irvine in only a few weeks which I wanted to go to. But there is also a trial that weekend. Guess which won? Sorry Mr. Dunbar.

This is old, but still pretty cool; dog park fashion in LA.

And, this is another “old news” item, and not so dog-related, but man, if this guy can train a parrot to do this, I can train Forest to do weaves. I am not a bird person, yet this cracks me up every time I watch it.

Happy weekend!!!

Thursday Linktasticness

Links of note:

• Hey there USDA! Welcome to the party! It only took you a few years of internal investigating to find out what most of us already knew! Puppy mills are seriously effed up, and the government turns a blind eye…
• Raised by Wolves breaks down the USDA report in detail, including noting that the fine worksheet for violators had a glitch that actually lessened the amount they were fined. Geniuses. ** Beware, graphic images on her post.
• This post from Smartdogs’ blog was very helpful to me this week in dealing with foster dog drama.

Speaking of, no one gets to play with toys or bones in the same room as Pierre any more. Last night’s scuffle ended in Diego with a minor eyelid tear. Sorry guys, I am still learning how to be a good foster mom… Crates and NILIF are our friends at the moment.

Have a private lesson with NT next week. I was worried after looking at her site that there was no way I’d be able to afford it, but she gave me a very good deal since we are already enrolled in classes, so I think we may actually be able to do it regularly once or twice a month. Looking forward to it…

Thursday Linktasticness

Oh good its Thursday… time to screw around…

• I havent found the time to make it through this yet, but so far, a really nice in-depth article about HSUS vs. the Ag Industry.
• And, I am struggling to find anyone/anywhere that really explains—in detail—the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the law against animal abuse videos. The best I have found so far is this NYT article. I understand the slippery slope of free speech, yet am missing the difference between child porn and animal abuse depictions (which is a case Alito made, the lone dissenter)? Maybe there’s a dog agility enthusiast who also happens to be a lawyer who can explain it to me better…
• I could have used this Behavior Modification training site this morning, before our totally disastrous walk. I even saw it coming, and yet, I managed not to hang on to leashes, dogs ran across streets, harassed multiple dogs, and me—Miss Positive Reinforcement—was not all that positive. Instead I was that idiot dog owner running around screaming “my dog is friendly!!!” as they circled innocent dogs and walkers like little piranhas. Awesome. A certain dog may have gotten exiled back into the house while the another may have had his little butt dragged at a jog all up and down stairs and hills and across the beach… Control Unleashed needs to be visited in a big way by Diego. Pack mentality was in full effect this AM, so anything Forest has learned went out the window in the presence of his BFF. Sigh.
• Update on Courage’s case. The abused GSD saga continues: Vet Tech gets fired, her previous employers vet hospital have been receiving death threats (no wonder the average public thinks animal advocates are all a bunch of whackos), and the trial is in a few weeks. Courage has gained 20 pounds since being surrendered on 4/7. You can donate to his recovery here.

Just found out my club practice got canceled as someone failed to properly secure the permit for the park on Saturday. LAME. I guess we’ll make our own practice, maybe incorporating the EVIL home weaves… Class tonight.

Latest Thursday Linktasticness

What is it about Thursdays that make me particularly useless? And or make my brain go into dog-training-info-seeking-overdrive? My chain of internet wanderings from the bottom up…

• Semi-misleading title, somewhat about Caesar Millan, more about the science behind Positive Training.
• Go “positively” brawl amongst yourselves.
• As usual, she is trying to sell you something, but still somehow remain interested in what she has to say.
• Everyone’s got their take on “the ‘D’ word”, but I always appreciate the thoughtful musings of Miss O’Connell.

Oh, and not part of today’s time-wasters (well not really “wasters” I’m learning stuff, dammit!) but been meaning to post this one for a while: old NYT article on designer dog breeding.

We are hopping in the car shortly to shuttle the dogs off to the Inland Empire for their vacation and our ski trip. Semi-ready for a break, but already looking forward to getting back at training after some time off…

Tried to very nicely talk my co-worker today into ditching her plans for a shock collar and working on Doggie Zen and some “interruption” cues instead… Her massive Golden has serious, serious vacuum issues. He has lately eaten plastic food wrappers, corn cobs, athletic tape, his dog toys… Its going to come back and bite her -hard- one of these days (bad pun, sorry). But I totally sympathize with her plight. We have the same problem though our dogs’ by default-smaller mouths seem to somewhat limit what they hoover. Sent her some Doggy Zen guidelines from DragonflyLlama, hopefully she takes them the right way…

Happy Weekend.

Thursday Linktastic-ness

I actually am legitimately surfing the intrawebs today for animal sites, doing media research for an upcoming charity event my work is putting on in May. (I had no idea the LA Times has an “Unleashed blog”.  Lots of good stuff on there…) Found a good one from today;

• One unsavory party unites with another for a common goal(?): “Octomom” Nadya Suleman accepts an offer from PeTA—$5,000 and a month’s supply of vegan hot dogs for her family of 15 in exchange for allowing the animal-rights group to place an ad on her lawn.

Eeegads on so many levels…

In other news, we are heading out to our first training session with the new trainer tonight. She has a much smaller area than we are used to practicing in so it will be interesting to see how that goes. Sequences instead of full courses… I am feeling kinda zoned out today, hopefully I can perk up pre-class. At least its only a 30 minute drive instead of over an hour!

We also got our confirmation for our first trial! We are official. And it looks like there are a million dogs before us, which is good and bad. I will undoubtedly be having horse show flashbacks with the whole hurry-up-and-wait process that will undoubtedly happen. That’s okay, part of the fun, right? ….right???

“Sleeping Is Giving In…”

At least thats how I feel. Between the time change and our action packed weekend I am wiped.

On Saturday we had a Fun Match out in Riverside. We finally got some video compliments of Cat’s husband Frank. He is a trooper. I’ll post the best of the three runs.

My Quick Notes:
Alloted course time 70 sec.
First Run – Missed 2o2o on A Frame (leapt off) so went back for a redo. (Judge said he was in the yellow so I should have kept going–watched the vid. He wasnt even close?!?) Missed weave entry 2x? Bad bobble by me en route to chute but pulled it. Time: 90.8

Second Run – solid, but refusal at table. Good down, put him on my right hand to see if that would help weaves. Still missed them first time, got them on second try. Good other than that. Table DQ’ed us. 60.07 sec.

Third Run – Wanted to get out of there so rushed into the 12″ class. The wheels came off. Good 2o2o, missed tunnel entry. Would not go on table, had to YELL at him as he was sniffing around to get him back. Good down though. Missed weaves at least twice. Also missed chute. Bleh.

On Sunday we went to our first local club practice. Ummm wow. That was a hot mess. Or maybe as I do event planning for a huge part of my profession, I have a short fuse with these types of things. I was worried that it would be a bad combo for Forest—chaos minus fences—so I took it slow. Long walk around the park when we got there, lots of focus work. He was a champ. So good.

We even snuck in a course, which was tough for a novice course (lots of people were complaining). He crushed it. Only hiccup was missing the tunnel entry and powering right on to the table which was nested into the tunnel (and I had been training him heavily on the table earlier as the day before it had been our Detested Obstacle of the Day). That was totally forgivable, and I’m sure I coulda handled it better. He got an A plus.

In between agility stuff we had mad amounts of family time which was all fun and good. Yet exhausting. Leaving for NYC at 8am tomorrow and still not packed. Have agility again tonight, so its going to be a late one…

Two Dogs in the News Links:
Wonder if this diamond will now be on sale?

The hits keep on coming: Another Dog Show Disruption.

Linktastic

I have been spending waaay too much time perusing blogs at work. Here are a few of my recent finds.

edited 3/12 to add another great link on flea and tick meds
* Its that time of year–YUCK.

* Rescuer-turned-hoarder in San Diego County. Icky.

* Dogs Smell Bed Bugs (and I am going to NYC next week, double-icky)!?!?!

* Wifey to the HSUS’s “Humane” Horseman of the Year shows us how to train a distracted horse, the “Natural Way.” Big Fail HSUS. Big, HUGE FAIL.

* Raised by Wolves’ “Top Ten Reasons the AKC’s Registration Revenues are Down the Shitter!”

…I should probably get back to work… Mleh.

Taken Down a Notch + Ambiguous Westminster Snark?

I love how animals always know the most opportune time to knock you down off your ego pedestal. When I was a teenager I taught one of my horses (or rather he tolerated me doing it) to ride without a bridle. I though I was hot shit one day and was riding him out in one of the turnouts. He got wound up and took off, bucked me off. I landed hard on my tailbone. I swear that took a year to heal… definitely took me down a few pegs.

Just last week when I thought I was Controlling Forest Unleashed like a pro, he brought me back to reality.

Had him and Diego out at the soccer field for a quick lunchtime training session. (Error 1–thinking I can manage both dogs at once, outside of the house. I can barely do it at home.) I took them on a quick walk/sniff to burn off some steam pre-training as they had been at home alone for the morning. (Error 2–don’t let them start off paying attention and then let them recess into evermore distraction-land. Sun, grass, bugs, bushes after being cooped up all AM. It was all too much.) I had a decent amount of confidence as last time we went to the field, Forest was great. So I let him off the long lead to do some single jump drills. He was fine to start with, but quickly got bored/distracted as half of my attention was paid to Diego trying to get him to stay on his mat. (Error number 3–not reading the situation quickly.) Needless to say, Forest thought the other world was far more interesting than my half-attention and dumb drills, so he took himself on a walk. I chased him down and got him to stop by throwing a handful of treats at his head from ten feet away. Not my finest dog training moment, but it worked.

We then quickly packed it up and went to the office where I dropped Forest off at Doggie Day Care across the street. Diego sleeps quietly on his bed while we are at work, so he gets to hang out. Forest sits in my office, growling and barking at me working until I can’t stand it any more and give in to his annoyances. And last week, his little routine bought him 3 days in a row of DDC. He was not happy about it. I put him in the Dog Play area. He promptly ran to the corner and jumped out—over the 3+ foot partition. I picked him up, and put him back in figuring I would win this test of the wills. Turns out his will is much stronger than mine. After SIXTEEN jump-overs, I gave up. I had the DDC lady step in so I could leave.

I felt like a failure that day for sure. But as always lessons learned as well… Pay attention, dont assume, and that maybe I am not always the smarter or more resilient one in the partnership.

On a high note, we have been doing some weaves at home in 5 minute sessions and he has been getting really consistent with his entries, even when I angle them somewhat. That is a victory, so I will take it.

And this is what I thought was a nice little piece I found over at Time.com on Westminster. Subtly catty or not? I can’t decide.

Monday Morning Memo

So this weekend was definitely not long enough. I was so exhausted this morning–for no apparent reason–and had to peel myself out of bed. Lots to do at work, so naturally, I am procrastinating.

(I also have both dogs at work with me this morning. They are currently having a silent—and well-natured—battle over the one bone I have in the office. Just caught Diego laying and holding it between his “hands” eyeballing Forest to say “What’re you gonna do punk?” Tried to grab my camera/phone but had to root in the purse so they both jumped up.)

Nothing momentous over the past few days, just lots of tidbits.

- Went to dog beach in Huntington yesterday with a girlfriend. There in the parking lot was a couple with a truck, a crate, a very lactating mom dog, and a handwritten sign that said “FOR SALE: American Bulldogs”. Awesome. It pissed both me and my GF off, so I called Animal Control. You have to have a permit in HB to breed and/or sell dogs. Not that they’ll do anything to these morons, but at very least they said they’d send a cop out. Its asshats like these that are the reason we SHOULD have mandatory spay and neuter laws. I am not against breeding “purebred” dogs. But breeders should be serious; i.e. knowledgeable about their breed(s), willing to test for genetic issues, willing to take the time to place their puppies in appropriate homes, and willing to pay licensing/permit fees to do what they supposedly are doing for the “love of the breed.” If you “can’t afford” it, then you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. I was reading a lot of blogs this weekend and heard someone refer to themselves as a “hobby breeder”. That term makes me want to vomit—those two words should not be allowed in the same breath.

- Speaking of lots of blog reading this weekend, found a few new blogs I very much enjoyed. In my quest to learn more and more and even more about training and behavior, I am enjoying the wide range of opinions and knowledge. I like the theories/ramblings of trainer Sassie Joiris from the East Coast. She has some good recent posts about toy vs. food motivation, and how much we should, or shouldn’t, worry about getting our dogs more toy-drivey. She also runs a Whippet which automatically ups her a few notches in my world. I think I’m becoming a sighthound addict.

- Also, love love love this woman’s commentary/opinions/vast knowledge on dog and animal training in general: Raised by Wolves. She has a few great posts on the Sea World Orca disaster.

- And, thanks Dogster (whose Behavior & Training Forum is driving me nuts. Some people on there are just not very open minded…) for the Most Horrible Dog Invention Yet. Just truly, truly awful in so many ways.

We worked on some short weave sessions this weekend that went well. Definitely finding that our weaknesses are sending him in from the left side, and him learning to decelerate before he hits them so he doesn’t miss that first pole… learning learning. Agility class tonight!!!