Pongu Gets His RL3 (AOE)

Well, this one took FOREVER, but after twenty-two tries(!!), Pongu finally FINALLY got his Level 3 Rally title with a third, and final, Award of Excellence. We are now finished with Titling division forevermore... or at least until Pongu qualifies for Veterans, which won't be for many years.

(I know the photographer is self-conscious about that picture being slightly out of focus and having the ring gate there, but I don't care, I love it. Also, it's still better than that other guy's. Just saying.)

This was a small, low-key trial, which I really appreciated because it meant we could just sit back and chat and say hi to friendly acquaintances and not worry too much about anything. No pressure at all, just a pleasant night out with the dogs.

It was almost enough to make me overlook that Pongu did pretty poorly his first few runs -- lots of distractedly wandering off, some anxious whining, a bout of apparent amnesia as to the meaning of the word "Front" -- but eventually he got his head back into the game and his last couple of runs were beautiful, marred only by a lousy retrieve (but at least he STARTED the retrieve, which is a tremendous improvement over our previous attempts) and one mistake on my part when I cued "Down" with the vocal intonation that I typically use for "Stand," so Pongu hesitated for a second and a half and then went up in a Stand because, hey, that was the tone I used, and he chose to resolve the conflict in cues that way. My fault, I'll watch that next time.

Anyway, the really important thing is that he qualified in all six of his entered runs, which he has never done before. In the past, we've always gotten at least one or two NQs on broken Stays or jump issues, but not that night. Pongu took all his jumps -- all of them! The off-set jump and the recall over jump and two send-by jumps! -- without a trace of hesitation, and his Stand-Stays were beautiful, and I had zero broken Sit-Stays, and his moving Downs were all good, and now that we've been doing this for a year, I can see that he's getting so, so much better at this game. I am truly excited to see how far we can go next year.

 

All hail ARCHX TDCH Pongu the Insane, RL1X2, RL2X, RL3 (AOE).

Choices and Comfort Zones

Yesterday I enrolled in a competition obedience class that lies a little outside my comfort zone.

The instructor is extremely skilled and extraordinarily accomplished, and it's clear that she is very effective with her chosen methods -- both personally and as a teacher. For this reason, I'm trying to take the class with an open mind, because even if I opt not to use some of those techniques in my own training (and there are several that I can't imagine I'll ever want to use), there should be a lot for me to learn here.

One of the things I've already learned -- and this is something I'd already suspected but which was thrown into sharp relief by some of the exercises in the class I audited -- was that I place a high value on my dogs choosing to work with me, and I do not want my dogs to be coerced into compliance, even if that coercion is done with a relatively light touch. I value a thinking, eager partner who gives me willing cooperation; if that means my dog occasionally says "no," that's fine.

In the classes I watched, the dogs did not have the option of saying no. They didn't really have many options at all. Everything was taught by physical manipulation: attention heeling was taught with the dog's head pulled up by a taut short lead, a Sit-Stay was taught with two fingers hooked into the dog's collar to hold it in place, moving Fronts were taught by (again) hooking fingers into the dog's collar and pulling it along. Handlers reinforced dumbbell holds by clamping their hands around the dogs' mouths. Rarely were the dogs asked to think or given any choices; mostly they were just passive creatures being pulled into position by their handlers.

While almost all the dogs were on prong collars (which in itself makes me uncomfortable), mostly the force employed in training them was relatively light. Not many of the handlers yanked their dogs to the point of causing obvious pain. Nevertheless, it was very clear that the dogs had no choice about participation, and almost all of them exhibited discomfort at times. At the end of the session, many of them fell asleep while their handlers were talking, which to my eye looked like stress exhaustion (and over the course of pushing Pongu up the competition career hill, I have seen plenty of stress exhaustion).

To my surprise, there didn't seem to be much attention paid to motivating the dogs; they were encouraged to jump up on their handlers (which appeared to be genuinely motivating for some, and more of a frenetic stress-relieving movement for others) and were given verbal praise and occasional treats, but the level of primary reinforcement being used was much lower than what I'm used to seeing.

So, overall, the total picture is of something slightly outside my comfort zone. It is by no means a crank-and-yank class (I'd have no use whatsoever for something like that), but it's far from my preferred position on the R+ end of the training spectrum. Watching these dogs and their handlers, I was struck by the total one-sidedness of the working interactions. During their downtime, many handlers were affectionate with their dogs, but when it came time to practice the exercises, it was all one-way dictation, zero listening to the dogs.

And that's not something I want, personally. What I want is a dog who works joyously in competition because the dog wants to be there -- really wants to be there, not Stockholm Syndrome "wants to be there." My choice is to give them choices.

This class may teach me many other things (and I hope it will), but it's not looking likely that it'll teach me how to make obedience a genuinely fun game for my dogs.

And if that environment of stressy and anxious dogs is not only outside my comfort zone, but badly outside Dog Mob's, then we'll drop out. Because that, too, is a choice they get to make.

Puppy Fever

...boy, have I got it bad.

I've been a little lazy about recording any substantive thoughts on this blog in recent days (well, okay, recent months) because I'm not trying to foist a foster dog off on anyone at the moment, so I don't need to make a journal about that, and Dog Mob is not learning anything particularly unique (they're just practicing/proofing various semi-basic competition things that I'm trying to improve) so there's no point in me writing about that either, as infinitely better instruction on those topics can be found elsewhere.

But anyway, for the past... oh, eight months or so, I've been wrestling with on-and-off bouts of puppy fever.

This is, let me emphasize, a really stupid problem to have. It's stupid because I do not need a puppy in my life right now. Two dogs is a good number to have in our home. I like having two dogs. I can walk them easily around the neighborhood, I can supervise them easily on hikes and at the dog park, I can even take them on errands with me and juggle both leashes in one hand while lugging around a sack of dog food or take-out Chinese food or whatever in the other.

We're in a good place in our lives right now, Dog Mob and me. The mutt monsters are always eager to jump up instantly and play whatever training game I want to do, they will keep going as long as I'm interested in teaching them, and they settle down and go to sleep with no complaints if I need to work on something else for 14 hours a day (which, lately, I do. A lot. Because I'm an idiot who puts book deadlines way too close to each other).

We still have plenty of challenges ahead, plenty of things left to learn and do together, a whole long road of hurdles and obstacles unfurling in front of us since I decided to go ahead and take a shot at CDSP obedience with Pongu (and Crookytail, at least for a CD-C. I'm pretty sure he can get that, albeit probably with ugly scores).

So... why do I keep dreaming about a puppy? I don't need one. There's no logical reason I should want one. My current dogs are happy and eager workers (to the point I've taught them, at least, and any deficiencies in our current level of actual trial performance are 100% up to me to fix), our lives are pretty content, we have a smooth and easy rhythm to our days. Why rock the boat?

I don't know. But I look at friends and acquaintances happily bringing home their new performance puppies, and I stalk their Facebook pages mercilessly for pictures and updates, and I dream and dream of having a Real Performance Dog.

I am such an idiot sometimes.

Nantucket Picture Dump Pt. 7 (The End! At Last!)

This squirrel tormented the dogs through the cottage's glass door for over an hour one afternoon. It would go right up to the other side of the panes and drive them insane, then scurry off to the bird feeder and do slow-motion somersaults off the support beams while the dogs about died of frustration.

Waiting to go out on an adventure:

Caught in a torrential downpour (that same dissipating tropical storm that whipped up the big waves on Tom Nevers as it was coming in):

My camera is not good enough to capture all the detail of the raindrops, but in that picture, the dogs are standing in an ankle-deep river of muddy runoff from a flooding road, and it is raining so hard that neither of them can open their eyes. But they were still perfectly happy to hold Stand-Stays for as long as I wanted to take pictures, because they knew that I'd let them keep running around in the rain if they humored me.

As much as my dogs hate the rain at home, it never seemed to bother them one bit on vacation.

This malevolent seagull, which had been lured close to our table because I kept throwing bread crusts at it, swooped right up onto our picnic table and stole Peter's sandwich. It dumped his sandwich on the ground, ran off with the Saran Wrap, and then threw its head up and screeched at the heavens in frustration when it realized it had grabbed the only part it couldn't eat.

I got a good chortle out of the whole thing.

Later I asked the dogs to pose on a picnic table for no reason beyond that it had been a thing going around my Facebook feed and I wanted to see if Dog Mob would do it.

I really wasn't sure Crooky would get up there, given that he never once figured out how to stand on Pongu's platforms. But they both ran up no problem with very little coaxing and sat patiently while I took my idiot pictures. After doing it once, Pongu started spontaneously jumping up on every picnic table he saw. Fortunately, there aren't too many random picnic tables scattered around Philly, so it hasn't been much of an issue.

Crookytail playing bog hippo:

This is a crappy picture because my camera is no good at distance, but on our last day in Nantucket we came across a group of four big deer, including one six-point buck, lined up on the Serengeti. They're just barely visible as little bitty blurs along the top of the grass line. The fourth deer is behind a bush in this shot.

Naturally Dog Mob sprang off and chased them, and I wish to god I had gotten it on video because Pongu did a BEAUTIFUL recall off all four deer. Turned in a split second, flipped in midair, and raced back to me as fast as he'd been chasing the deer. I'm probably never going to get a chance to tape something like that again.

Crookytail however showed the limits of his recall and did not come back until after he lost the deer. But I can't really blame him. I'd have done the same thing if I were a dog. How often is he going to get a chance to flat-out run after four huge deer across the moors of Nantucket? I think that was just about the happiest moment of his life.

And he did run straight back at top speed as soon as he'd lost them, so hey.

So that was our summer vacation. THE END. I am already dreaming about going back next year.

Nantucket Picture Dump Pt. 6

Gibbs Pond!

This whole day was gray and misty and dreamlike. A thick fog rolled in over the moors and we couldn't see much of anything beyond maybe fifty feet. We saw no other people and hardly any animals for the entirety of this walk -- just a couple of bunnies and two deer, all of which Dog Mob gleefully chased as long as they could.

Candid:

Posed (and one of my favorite pictures from our vacation):

I made the dogs go through about a dozen permutations of Pongu standing/Crooky sitting, Crooky standing/Pongu sitting, etc. before I finally settled on having them both Down for this shot on the shores of Gibbs Pond. Dog Mob was extremely patient and gracious about putting up with my insane finickiness.

Return to Tom Nevers Beach!

We had the beginnings of a dissipating tropical storm coming in on this day's visit, and the waves were powerful enough to be genuinely hazardous. I was glad that Dog Mob has never shown any inclination to go into the water. It would have been a real risk to their safety if they had. The waves knocked me over every time I went in, and I'm a lot taller than they are.

Nantucket Picture Dump Pt. 5

Sanford Farm!

This walk is listed on the Nantucket Dog Walk blog as one of two "doggy social hours" (the other is Tupancy Links), and it lives up to its name. I left Sanford Farm until fairly late in our trip because I wanted to see how Crookytail did on vacation before I risked him in an environment where his occasional dog-bullying issues might get him into trouble.

But he was fine, he played appropriately with the dogs who wanted to play with him and backed off from the ones who didn't.

Pongu, of course, was his usual unfriendly nerd self and mostly ignored the other dogs.

This young Weimaraner tried to tag along with Dog Mob for probably 15-20 minutes, during which his actual people were nowhere to be found. Eventually they managed to call him back, but for a while I was wondering whether I might have accidentally stolen their dog.

Happy dog days.

Some scenery.

Nantucket Picture Dump Pt. 4

Altar Rock/The Middle Moors

My favorite part of Nantucket!

This is where Larsen Road connects to the Middle Moors. It's about a 10- to 15-minute walk just to reach the interior. Once you do, though, miles upon miles of mostly empty moorland stretch out before you. We hardly ever saw other people on this walk, and even fewer other dogs. Mostly it was just us, Dog Mob, and innumerable bunnies waiting to be sprung out of the bushes.

 

The Middle Moors are full of edible plants. Blueberries and tiny low-growing blackberries were in season during this trip, and (to Peter's continual consternation) I ate as many as I wanted. The cranberries were beginning to come in too, and there were unripe hazelnuts and wild grapes promising even more foraging fun in the weeks to come.

 

 Dog Mob wasn't too into the berries, but Pongu was really proud of this dead dried-up snake he found.

Somehow Crooky didn't notice or care about the snake.

 

Altar Rock, the highest point on Nantucket. You can see the whole island from here.

That day we stayed out on the Middle Moors until well after nightfall, and ended up walking home under the hazy moonlight. Pongu tripped over an unseen snake in the dark, freaked out, and spent the next two days being extremely suspicious of every stick, string, and squiggly mark he came across on the trails.