Silver Goes Home, Pongu Finishes His MX2

Last Friday, Silver went home with a couple of awesome adopters.

It's been the better part of a week and they haven't called yet to say that they're sending her back, so I guess it's safe to say at this point that she has officially been Adopted! and is, hopefully, off to a happily-ever-after.

All the best to you, little dog. Have a great life.

On Saturday, Pongu and I drove up to Andover NJ to finish up his ARCHMX2 championship (and his RL1X7, because eh, why not).

I don't have a whole lot to say about that one. It was an unspectacular performance; Pongu barely scraped out a triple Q in his first set of runs. He's frequently stressy at that venue, it was an extremely cold morning, we had Crooky in the car because Peter was out of town that weekend, and I hadn't slept at all the night before. All in all, neither Pongu nor I was in great form at that trial.

His fronts and finishes were quick and straight, and his heeling was actually pretty good (lots of head drops, but his position was better and more consistent than I've ever gotten at a trial before), but Pongu was too anxious to pay attention to my cues, so he kept guessing what I wanted and often he'd guess wrong. I got a couple of missed fronts where he went straight to a finish instead, a couple of reluctant Downs where he only went partway down and then popped back up into a Sit, a finish instead of a backup on the Level 3 bonus exercise, and... just a bunch of stuff like that. No broken Stays or blown jumps, so no NQs, but our scores were pretty sad.

But Pongu did finish his MX2 in the first set of runs, even if he did cut it close.

I scratched the second set because I had to get back to work and also, with zero sleep, I was legitimately concerned about being a road hazard on the way back if we stayed the whole time. It was shaping up to be a long trial, and I didn't think I could handle another four to six hours of being awake before trying to drive home in the dark. Probably Pongu would have done better on his second set of runs after having had a few more hours to acclimatize, but oh well, didn't happen.

We have a couple more Rally trials in December, but nothing else big on the horizon. Pongu's MX2 is the only major title he had left to finish this year. I aaalmost wish he hadn't gotten it so that we could have finished it at our home club on December 7, but then I would have had to stress about "what if he misses it? what if we don't get a triple Q?" and so it's probably better to just have that worry off the table.

Pongu is the 13th mixed-breed dog in the history of the world to finish the ARCHMX2 title, the 60th dog overall, and the 10th dog in all breeds to get it this year. (Those last two achievements might need asterisks, though, as there were two other dogs who also won their MX2s that same weekend, and I have no idea which of them actually was first in time.)

Hoo-ray. I guess I should finally think about putting up another ribbon board in my office.

WCRL Trial 10/25, TU Post on OTCh-ery

This past Saturday, Pongu had his one and only Rally trial for October.

It was mostly not spectacular. We hadn't been to a trial in over a month, and we've been working almost exclusively on agility stuff rather than Rally exercises this fall, so we were both a little rusty. Plus I was getting over a cold, and Pongu was a little squeaky and worried (not nearly the worst he's ever been, but not the best, either), so we weren't on our A-game going in.

The Oakes trials are some of the biggest ones all year and draw a tough crowd of competitors, and this year's fall trial was no exception. Huge class entries (with lots of new teams, always good to see!), some of the top teams around, very tough competition (but in a good, fun way -- it's always awesome to see your friends do well, and there's never any nastiness in WCRL!).

Accordingly Pongu did not place in the ribbons once during his first five runs. He did poorly a couple of times and kinda-sorta okay-ish a couple of times, but "okay" doesn't get you very far in that crowd. Which is fine; I thought the judging was very fair and we got the scores that we deserved.

And then somehow Pongu calmed down and got his head in the game and just destroyed the last Level 3 run, which was a fairly challenging course (including the Stand With Distraction bonus exercise, historically his worst and weakest one). Perfect score of 210, first place on time (against Edith!! Edith the Ultra-Awesome Border Collie!! That is a rare and precious victory to savor), one of the best runs Pongu's ever done. I sorely wish I'd gotten that one on tape.

Of course if someone had been taping it, he would have totally bombed out, but still.

So that was it for us in WCRL this month. We have a couple of trials in November, in which Pongu might or might not finish his MX2, and a couple in December, and then we're probably finished with Rally until Pongu can start competing in Veterans and/or we fail out of agility so spectacularly that I go crying back to our old familiar stomping grounds.

Also I had another post go up on Team Unruly recently on The Problem of the Force-Free OTCh, which is a piece that I am proud of because our Revered Instructors said they liked it, and yay! sparkles and rainbows!, it is pretty spiffy when people that you admire say that you got something right.

Disappointment

...seems to be the theme of our summer.

We had two more not-very-successful Rally trials in the past week. Saturday we went to Let's Speak Dog in Nazareth; Wednesday we went to Bella Vista outside Harrisburg. Only the second trial was actually bad, but neither of them left me feeling good afterwards.

We struggle with stress, with anxiety, with disengagement. We struggle with difficult environmental conditions, but we also struggle when the environment is -- or should be -- fine.

I wonder if we've hit a wall, if this is as far as we can go, if I've finally reached the limit of what my fearful dog can do. Is this it?

I can see some small improvements. Unless something pretty dramatic happens, Pongu doesn't break Stays anymore. He doesn't refuse jumps. At Saturday's trial, he knocked a bar and NQ'ed a Level 3 run, but the next two runs when he encountered the same jump, he took it without flinching. A year ago, that knocked bar would have frightened him for weeks (which I know because a knocked bar in class cost us several Qs on jump refusals and runouts in trials days later). This degree of resilience is something he wouldn't have been able to summon then.

But I also see much that isn't improving. I do not have a happy dog in the ring on most runs. Pongu is still worried, still stressed, seldom relaxed. Our scores aren't getting higher. (Actually, when I went back and scrolled through the trial listings, our scores apparently have never gotten higher after, like, last March. What's that about?)

I don't know whether my disappointment is a factor of my increased expectations or whether we really are stalled out. Am I just shifting the goalposts too quickly, or too much? Have we just had a fluke run of bad trials? Or are we genuinely not making any progress here?

I've got no idea. I feel like we're floundering. I hope we're floundering in a generally forward-ish direction, but I have not the foggiest notion whether that is actually true.

World Cynosport Rally at KCA, 6/8/14

Last Sunday we drove up to northern New Jersey for a World Cynosport Rally trial at Kellars Canine Academy.

It went... okay. Not great, not terrible. Pongu was a little out of practice (we hadn't trialed in about a month and we have not been doing a ton of Rally practice at home lately) and seemed a little stressy, so it was not one of our more glorious showings.

I tried crating him inside the trial venue for much of the time, since it was a hot day (86 degrees!) and the parking lot had no shade. With the windows rolled down and a reflector shield in the rear window, the car was tolerable, but I thought Pongu would do better indoors.

That might have been a misjudgment, I don't know. It was hard to tell.

Our scores were pretty meh. 206/207/203, 210/206/193(!! our worst qualifying score in WCRL ever! yesssss). I had some handling errors on both of the Level 3 runs -- I really need to figure out a better way of getting Pongu back into Heel position after the send-over jumps -- but almost all of our deductions were on repeat cues, with a couple of stray 1-point hits for crooked Sits and lags in heeling. The courses had a bunch of moving Downs, and those continue to be a weak point for us when Pongu gets stressy.

He also broke a Stay during the Recall Over Jump by standing up on the last run of the day, which is a mistake we haven't had in a while, and which I view as an indicator that he'd had enough by that point.

So it kinda sucked. Pongu placed in every run except our first Level 1 (a 206 does not get you into the ribbons in Level 1!), but never higher than third. In fact, our average placement for the day was exactly #4, so that is the ribbon I kept (plus the white rosettes are the ones I like best anyhow).

Good things:

-- I mostly got better Heeling off the start line than I have in the past. We had some stretches of quite nice Heeling, in fact. Never consistently for the entire run, or even half of a run, but good enough to make me feel optimistic that we're improving, particularly since Pongu was not on his A game during that trial.

-- it's kind of nice (I guess?) to be in a position where I can look at a 203 in Level 3 and go "JESUS CHRIST THAT IS TERRIBLE WHAT IS GOING ON HERE." This time last year, we were struggling mightily just to scrape together three Qs for our Level 3 title.

Bad things:

-- basically everything else

-- Pongu really, really sucks at working when he's hot.

Overall, not a super fantastic day for us, although it was nice to see friends and the KCA crew is always great. We'll try again next weekend, and then we have one more WCRL trial in June before Pongu goes on hiatus until August.

Two Rally Sundays (WCRL 5/11 and AKC 5/18)

After last Saturday's trial of disaster, I almost scratched from the World Cynosport trial that we had entered on May 11. It was a single set of runs, the drive was almost two hours each way, and since Pongu got his MX, I've felt little to no urgency about competing in WCRL.

Besides, after Saturday's trial, all I really wanted to do was stay home and feel sorry for myself and reflect on how my fearful pound dog was never going to do obedience and wasn't even all that good at Rally and what was even the point of trying when we were so clearly never ever going to get anywhere. I wanted to curl up in a pity cocoon and even drop out of our online classes because we were just taking up a slot that should probably go to a team with some prayer of not embarrassing our school someday.

But I also wanted something to take away the bitter taste of failure, and a low-stakes WCRL trial was a pretty perfect option on that front. Also, this was the one and only Rally trial that this particular club was ever going to offer -- due to a change in their lease, the club was losing their space and being forced to disband at the end of May -- so it was a golden opportunity to expose Pongu to another novel environment, this time with more support (treats and praise!), a longer exposure time, and no worries about me mucking up unfamiliar exercises.

So I packed our show bag and set my alarm and trundled out to New Jersey on a bright and sunny Mother's Day morning.

Our first run was... not good. Not awful, either, but I had Squeaky Stress Dog on the start line and he was very distracted and we had a fair number of bobbles. We were probably working on a score somewhere around the 203 to 205 mark when I got us NQ'ed by missing an entire section of the course (three signs! my personal best! truly, it was brilliant).

Oops. Anyway, the other two runs were better, as Pongu started settling in and became a little more comfortable with the environment. We pulled a 207 in Level 2 (repeat cue), finishing just out of the ribbons on time, and a 209 in Level 3 (heeling fault) for first place in that class.

More importantly, by the end of the day, we felt like a team again. I had my happy partner dog back. We were not flawless, but we were certainly better, and I felt good and happy about that.

Fast-forward a week!

Yesterday we had another AKC Rally trial, this time at the Leesport 4-H Center with the Berks County Dog Training Club. We had entered a trial on Saturday, too, but that one was outdoors so after much waffling I scratched our entry, since I had no reason to think it would be any better than our previous outdoor trial and I just wasn't up for a repeat performance of Disconnected Dog Is Disconnected.

So this trial was pretty low-stakes, overall. We had no chance of finishing our title -- at best we'd get our second leg -- and since we were the only team entered in Excellent A, we were guaranteed a spiffy blue first-place rosette as long as we qualified, regardless of score.

It was a good thing, too, because getting there was a major pile of stress. The trial was scheduled to begin at 2:30, with the walkthrough at 2:15. We left Philly at noon for what should have been an hour-and-fifteen-minute drive. On a Sunday afternoon, heading west instead of east (now that Shore traffic is beginning to pick up and making eastbound 76 a disaster on weekends), I figured that would give us plenty of time to arrive early, get Pongu acclimated to the trial site, and put in a nice run.

Only... not so much. Traffic was a disaster, the car was almost out of gas (and since the first westbound service plaza on 76 has been closed for eternity, there was nowhere to buy gas on route), we ended up making a frantic detour to a WaWa somewhere in Reading that then caused the GPS to pick an alternate back-roads route to the trial grounds, and all in all it was a spectacular ride of wonderment that resulted in us arriving midway through the walkthrough.

Upshot was that while Pongu did not exactly have to do a cold run in a new venue, it wasn't too far from that, either, and our performance was accordingly pretty wobbly (although a million times better than it would have been a year or 18 months ago, so that's nice).

Also the course setup was pretty tight and unforgiving for bigger dogs. There was maybe 12 feet after a jump to go into a 270 left turn, which is not enough space for Pongu (who is a clumsy jumper) to land, come back into Heel position, and be in a good place to do a turn. Another jump on the course had the dogs landing about 15 feet from the ring entrance and directly facing it, which was not a problem for Pongu (because the one good thing about my fearful dog is that he will not run away from me in a stressful environment, ever, no matter what), but caused about half the dogs I watched in the Excellent B class to either NQ or lose major points because they saw that ring entrance right in front of them and just kept on running to the exit until the steward blocked them in.

So in that respect it was kind of a rough course for us, especially since we're not used to the smaller AKC ring dimensions. We also lost a bunch of points on Pongu's Moving Stand-Walkaround, because he took a couple of steps forward, ended up crooked, and I gave him a second cue to stop (possibly unnecessary, but it costs nothing for a repeat command in AKC, so whatever). I think that was just a stress issue, as we do not normally have trouble with that exercise; anyway, it cost us probably a good 3 points or so on that run.

We finished with a very fair final score of 94. It wasn't a great performance by any measure. But it was good enough for first place, because we had zero competition. WOO.

This was supposed to be an outtake but I kept it because Pongu's expression makes me laugh (and all that gray on his chin makes me sad). There were a bunch of flies coming up from a little bitty creek behind those rocks, and they kept buzzing around his head. He held his Stays but couldn't help staring at the flies.

It's probably going to be a few months before we finish Pongu's RE, since there are no good opportunities for us to trial in AKC for a while. The one trial I was considering in June is almost certainly full by now (I emailed the trial secretary to ask, but no reply yet) and we're going to be away on vacation during the July trials, so that means our next opportunity to knock off this title will be in mid-August.

Which is fine with me, really. Maybe by then we'll be in a better position to actually earn a ribbon in an AKC ring.

5/10/14: AKC Rally Excellent A at Ludwig's Corner

Subtitled: Pongu's Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Run of Sadness

This morning saw us up bright and early at the crack of dawn (after three hours' sleep because I am an idiot and also Queenie kept banging around in her crate super loudly all night) to head out to Chester County for an AKC Rally trial at the Ludwig's Corner fairgrounds.

The venue was really nice. I can see why people like it. The parking staff and event organizers were very professional, the fields were gorgeous green grass dappled with buttercups and dandelions, the obedience and Rally rings were set off from the conformation area so that the performance dogs didn't have to be disturbed by all that primping and preening going on elsewhere.

Unfortunately all the nice things about the day were overshadowed by how badly Pongu crashed and burned in the ring.

This is, of course, my fault. I did not adequately prepare him for outdoor trialing. (I also did not adequately prepare him for some of the AKC Excellent exercises, but none of those ones were on today's course so that ended up not mattering.)

So we got there and Pongu wanted to run around the fields and roll in the horse poop and eat the grass and otherwise act like he always acts when he has any opportunity to run wild outdoors, and he did not want to work. Still, while our warm-up period was wobbly, I got enough promising signs that I thought we might be okay in the ring.

haha no

no, not at all

We went in there and it was like I did not have a dog. Although Excellent ran first thing in the morning, and it wasn't that hot (we were in there around 9:30 a.m.), it was directly in the sun, and Pongu, being a black dog, overheated very quickly.

So he was uncomfortable and he wanted to eat the grass and the result was immense frustration and embarrassment on my end, and apparently giddy tomfoolery on his. He wasn't scared, which I guess would be a silver lining if I were inclined to look for silver linings right now, but frankly I'm still pretty annoyed with how crappy our run was and I am not the slightest bit interested in silver linings at this particular moment in time.

I will be later, I'm sure. But not right now.

We finished with a score of 83, having lost 10 points on a jump runout/retry (Pongu broke the plane of the jump running past it, which would have been an NQ in WCRL, but apparently is just 10 points off in AKC) and 7 points on crooked Sits, crappy heeling, slow/non-responses, and I don't even know what else, take your pick, if you can imagine an error we had it at some point in there. We probably should have NQ'ed; the fact that we did not is entirely attributable to the judge taking pity on a team that was indeed pitiful.

Good enough for second place, if only because there were a whole two dogs in the class. Yay.

Filed under "Good Stuff, I Guess":

-- Pongu had no trouble heeling up to the stewards' table and keeping his eyes on me; this has been an issue for us in the past
-- I got more attention heeling than I expected under the circumstances
-- at least he actually took all his jumps (albeit with a runout the first time, possibly because it was a high jump, possibly because my handling sucked, possibly because he was distracted from woohoo!, we're outside!!) and held his (brief, short-distance) Stays
-- he did not appear to be worried or anxious during this run, although we would probably have done better if he were, because then he'd have been paying attention to me instead of trying to eat grass.

It still sucked a whole bunch and I am not happy and why did I ever think I could do obedience with this dog. Or at all. Ever.

I watched some of the Utility runs (both A and B) and my dog is never going to do that. Never. Not ever. Who am I even trying to kid here.

aaaaaarrrrrggghhh

So anyway today was terrible and it sucked and I'm going to take a nap now.

4/18/14 - Pongu Gets His RA

Friday afternoon saw us back in New Jersey, this time at the Lower Bucks Dog Training Club's evening Rally trial in hopes of finishing off Pongu's AKC Rally Advanced title.

I cajoled the Spousal Unit into driving because twice now I've gotten pulled over and ticketed for expired registration, inspection, and/or emissions stickers on our car. (Well, last time I got a ticket. The time before that was when our car got towed because the City of Philadelphia does not joke around about expired registrations.) It is not my responsibility to do those things, but somehow Peter never gets pulled over for the expired stickers. I am the only one who gets ticketed for those things and they're the only things I ever get ticketed for.

So, given that this was a short trial and should hopefully be the last time I have to drive anywhere before the emissions and inspections stuff gets updated, I bugged him to drive. And, of course, we got no tickets.

To my mild surprise (because I expected traffic to be worse on a Friday evening leading into a holiday weekend), we got there on time. The training facility was slightly hard to find; our GPS system was off by about half a mile when we finally got to the correct road, and the training center is located in a residential neighborhood where it's not visible from the street. But after a couple of missed passes, we found the place.

It was a nice, low-key, well-run trial in a matted indoor facility that was comparable in size and layout to most of the single-ring WCRL venues we've visited. The Rally trials were split off from the obedience trials (which were being hosted on Saturday morning/afternoon) and the entry numbers were about comparable to a medium-small WCRL trial in our area. The Excellent and Advanced B classes each had about 20 entries and the A classes had 7 or 8 entries apiece. Both Novice A and Novice B were around 10 each.

The venue was not too crowded or noisy and there weren't any weird environmental quirks that I could see, so I didn't think it would pose any huge challenges to Pongu other than being a new place he had never seen before. He seemed pretty okay when I brought him in to look around (as much as scaredybutt dog ever is), so I wasn't too worried about a major meltdown.

And then there was a curveball, because there's always a curveball.

We were the last team to go into the ring in Advanced A. While we were "on deck" in the designated waiting area, the working dog suddenly ran out of the ring and charged straight at Pongu. Nothing serious happened -- they exchanged some snarks and snarls, and Pongu tried to snap at the other dog but missed because I was grabbing him -- but it was a little disconcerting.

I've been to a pretty good number of trials and I've never seen a dog break out of the ring to charge at another dog. I've seen plenty of zoomies (in fact, one of the dogs at today's trial got NQ'ed for zoomies), and I've seen dogs check out of the ring to wander around aimlessly because they were too bored or stressed to continue, but I've never seen a working dog leave the ring to go at another dog.

My luck, the first time it happens, it happens to us when we're waiting to begin our run. And since we were the last team in the class, there was no opportunity to let someone else go ahead of us and give my dog some time to calm down. There wasn't anybody left to go. So we got called to the start line as soon as the other dog had been leashed up and led out of the ring.

Miraculously, Pongu was completely unflustered. A flapping plastic bag will destroy him for an entire day, but it took him maybe 30 seconds or so to get over the other dog running out of the ring at him. After that he was just back to his normal level of stressy insanity.

One thing I'll say about Pongupants: after years of training with newly arrived foster dogs in the house, and other people's random pet dogs at the dog park, he is really good at ignoring dogs who interrupt him while he's working. He just yells at them to quit bothering him and goes straight back to whatever he was doing. I have seen him yell at other dogs without breaking his Sit-Stay, and then turn right back to me with a big proud smile at how he is a Good Dog (and, of course, clearly so much better than that other dog, because being better than other dogs is one of Pongu's primary concerns).

So we did our run and we lost three points on a crooked Sit and a couple of heeling errors and we finished with a score of 97 (because this time I did not forget to pause at the end of that goddamn Sit-Stand-Walkaround, haHAAA!!), which was good enough for first place and capped off Pongu's RA.

Three trials, three Qs, bam, done. If not for my 20-point disasteration on Pongu's first run, he would have gotten 97s in every one of his attempts at Rally Advanced A. Given the circumstances of this run, I'm especially proud of Pongu for doing so well on this one.

(The contrast with our long, slow, painful slog to the RL2, incidentally, is striking. Either AKC really is that much easier than WCRL, or we're actually getting better at this stuff. Ha!)

So that finishes our quest for the RA. I entered an insurance trial on the 27th, but we'll probably scratch that one since I don't need an extra RA leg anymore and it's an outdoor trial. I don't have a ton of confidence in Pongu's ability to work outdoors at this point.

We'll start working on our Rally Excellent in May, which ought to give me time to train the handful of new exercises that we might face.

And then I can start scouring premiums in search of trials that offer nice title rosettes.

4/13/14 - New Game Plus: Challenge Mode!

Apparently, beating the game with Pongu's ARCHMX unlocked an exciting new chapter for us. New Game Plus: Challenge Mode!

Sunday saw us at iQ Agility in Bloomsbury, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from the Pennsylvania state line. I had entered a second day's worth of Rally trials just in case we didn't finish off Pongu's MX on Saturday, and once we did, I wasn't too sure about waking up at 4 am to venture out on a second marathon day of dog competitions. Two days back-to-back is a lot for both of us.

But I decided to go (even though I slept in until 5:30) because a fair number of our friends were going to be there (peer pressure ftw!) and it was my absolute number-one most favoritest judge, and also I was really curious about the new venue. It was not one that I'd ever seen listed on a trial premium before.

We rolled in pretty late, because (a) I slept in until 5:30 (only in the insane world of dog sports does sleeping in until 5:30 on a Sunday morning screw you for the day, but there you have it); and (b) I got in a fight with my GPS, which kept insisting that the fastest way to get there was to take Broad Street/Rt. 611 for 47 miles through the entirety of Philadelphia and up through many, many miles of suburban strip malls and big box developments and stoplights.

Broad Street is never the fastest way to go anywhere except crazy, so I steadfastly ignored the GPS's squawking until we were well up on I-95, and then I forgot what the rest of the route was supposed to be according to Google Maps so I had no choice but to let the GPS take over. At that point our progress slowed down dramatically and I got to take a long, scenic detour through rural Pennsylvania until we got back onto 611/Easton Road and it was just boring big box developments and stoplights again.

But EVENTUALLY we got there.

And it turned out that the venue was in an old horse barn that still smelled strongly of horses. The crating area was in some of the old straw-littered stalls. The barn had a metal roof, upon which rain drummed as we entered, and an artificial turf floor upon which another dog had peed during one of the early runs before we arrived. One wall abutted a chicken coop, where a rooster crowed all day long and hens squawked as they laid their eggs, and another wall was next to an open, fenced area where chickens pecked and guinea fowl clucked and geese honked and clacked incessantly.

There was a sheep, too. A very big, very smelly, very vocal sheep. All the dogs were super excited about that, but the herdy dogs had their minds particularly blown.

So... that was a Challenge Mode trial and no mistake. Everybody got to do some heavy-duty proofing and distraction work. Dogs who normally run perfectly wandered off and snuffled at the chicken coop door and got distracted by the enticing chorus of sheep-and-geese noises coming from the other wall.

Pongu, predictably, regarded all the noises as Harbingers of Certain Doom and was a complete wreck. In a perverse way I found it pretty encouraging, though, because where "complete wreck" used to mean that I had absolutely no dog in the ring, or that he'd dodge the jumps or break his Stays or otherwise totally crash and burn, now a "complete wreck" performance for Pongu means that he needs some repeat cues and does crooked Sits because he's trying to hide behind me and lags during heeling.

It means we get ugly runs with ugly scores. But -- at least on that day, in that venue, which was in some respects the most difficult one we've ever visited -- Pongu earned a Q on every run. More than that, he mostly scored in the low to mid-200s. Not great, by any measure, but a much better definition of "disaster" than we've ever been privileged to have before.

His last run of the day would, in fact, have been a perfect 210 if his dumdum of a handler hadn't forgotten that the Stand-Stay recall is to Heel position and not to Front. I goofed up and had to re-do it, knocking our score down to 207 and ruining what would have been the only perfect score for any dog that whole day.

Alas.

So overall Pongu did not-great but also, at the same time, GREAT!! Sometimes I really need to step back and remember that yeah okay his heeling is not spectacular today... but a year ago I would have wept for joy to have the problems that make me gnash my teeth today.

I am mostly planning not to keep our ribbons now that we've gotten our MX. Pongu has so many Q ribbons and even so many placement ribbons that I'm just out of space to hang them all. At this trial, he placed in five out of his six runs, but I only kept one of his blues, and that mostly so that I could take the pictures in this blog post. I was so proud of my little crazypants muttbutt for performing so nicely in a tough venue that I wanted to get a shot of him wearing blue at that site.

So I kept a ribbon for that. I think it's an especially nice one.

4/12/14 - Pongu Earns His ARCHMX

On Saturday, Pongu and I went out to Washington, NJ, to enter a double trial. It was the day before his (fake) birthday, and for a while now my goal has been to finish his ARCHMX before Pongu turned 4, so I was really hoping to get it that day.

I'd had to scratch him from another trial a couple of weeks earlier because he chewed a hole in his foot, which was one of those glass-half-full scenarios because it meant we had to wait a little longer to finish his MX, but also meant we'd have the chance to do it at a trial where a lot of our longtime Rally friends were also competing. And I really wanted to be able to share the moment with them, so I was secretly kind of glad about the way the timing worked out.

Somewhat anticlimactically, though, it ended up being one of our crappier performances. That venue was difficult for a lot of dogs because one side of the ring was comprised of large floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto a strip mall, with passersby gawking at the dogs and other dogs pottying on a grassy area outside. Sometimes those windows are covered, but they weren't on this particular day.

Also, it was extremely quiet inside the venue but quite loud outside, so many dogs (including Pongu) got distracted by the contrast in noise levels. ALSO also, I was super tense, which kind of surprised me because I'm generally not that anxious about WCRL anymore, but I really REALLY wanted to get Pongu's MX that day and so it was like woah, flashback to ring nerves!

But Pongu got the job done. He picked up two sets of triple Qs, finishing his MX with an extra QQQ to spare for the day (because WCRL fixed a mistake in our score tally from last year, so we were credited with another QQQ that we earned but weren't given in 2013).

Here is our sucky terrible lag-tastic final run:

You can see that Pongu's pretty nervous throughout that run (stress jumping on the start line, lots of stopping and staring while heeling, freezing up before the send on his retrieve and lifting his paw on the return, etc.) and we got dinged a bunch for crappy heeling, a crooked Sit, forward creeping on the Stand-Down-Sit-Recall, and two repeated cues. (On the plus side, his Fronts are getting better, and my instructor clued me in last week as to what I was doing wrong on our left turns, so those are on the road to improvement as well.)

So yeah that wasn't pretty and I am not proud of our score and I sure do wish we'd gotten a nicer finale for our championship quest... but it was good enough, and I guess "good enough" is pretty appropriate for us after all.

(As a passing thought, this is one thing I'll say about the AKC OTCH: nobody ever, ever gets a crappy run as their final victory for that one. That is possibly the only good thing I'll ever say about the structure of that championship: you'll never get a bad final win on video there!)

And so it is done. Pongu is the 25th mixed-breed dog ever in the history of the world, and the 168th dog overall, to earn the ARCHMX championship.

Pongu's second set of runs was better, because after we got the MX I was back to being totally relaxed and he was more acclimatized to the environment. But those were just insurance runs -- the real work of the day was already done.

This is not the end of Pongu's trialing career. He has only just turned 4. We still have lots of adventures ahead, lots of new sports to try, lots of new challenges to face. He is still a scaredy dog and we will always have to battle with the bogeyman of his fear and anxiety. The radioactive spider ghosts in his brain will never completely go away.

But it's the end of a chapter. My fearful little crazypants pound puppy made it to the top of his sport, and became one of a small handful of mixed-breed dogs to achieve the highest championship in World Cynosport Rally. Whatever we do or don't accomplish in the days ahead, Pongu has already done more than I once believed possible.

HOORAY. Mission accomplished.

AKC Rally Trial at Total Turf, 3/23/14

This morning we drove out to New Jersey for an AKC Rally double trial being hosted by the Lower Camden County Dog Training Club. This was Pongu's first shot at Rally Advanced, and I was a little nervous about going in, because it meant the leash would come off! in an AKC venue! and that might lead to stress and disaster.

Well, it kinda did, although not exactly in the way I was expecting.

This was our first time at the Total Turf venue. It turned out to be quite nice: clean, well-maintained artifical turf in a large field that allowed for fairly spacious rings (by AKC standards), plenty of crating space, and convenient benches for spectators. There was a nifty little cafe turning out better-than-average dog show food (which you might think is faint praise... until it's 5 pm and 38 degrees out and you haven't had a hot meal since your pre-dawn coffee at 6 am) and loads of free parking. Judging by the turnout -- 176 obedience teams and over 80 Rally entries per trial -- lots of other people liked it too.

Alas, Pongu was not one of them. Gone was the happy dog I had at our last two shows. In his place was the stressy, shaky, bug-eyed maniac I know so well from all our other trials. Sigh.

AKC shows, or at least the AKC shows we've been doing, are a lot bigger than World Cynosport Rally trials. If it were just the Rally part split off from the main event, they'd be roughly equivalent (actually, in that case, the WCRL trials would almost always be bigger), but of course that is not how it works in AKC. So the venues are very big and very crowded and scaredybutt dog gets very scared.

We didn't have much connection on our first run. On our second run, there wasn't much in the beginning, but about halfway through Pongu perked up and smiled at me and things got a bit better.

Despite that lack of connection, and despite the lack of cookies or leash or anything else, Pongu did pretty well. Both of our Rally runs had high jumps; going in, that had been the jump I most feared encountering, since Pongu had only seen high jumps twice before (once at an obedience run-through before our first CDSP trial last October, and once last week when the snow finally melted enough for us to prep for this trial), and both of those times he initially refused the jump before taking it on a later attempt.

At this trial, however, Pongu did those jumps beautifully. No hesitation. Nailed his jumps and came right back to Heel position on the other side. I was so proud of him.

Scores weren't bad, weren't great. Pongu scored 97 in both runs. All his deductions were on heeling errors (lagging or going wide) or slow Sits.

And then I lost us 20 points in our first run by doing two exercises incorrectly. I failed to pause after the end of each exercise, because I was still in a WCRL mindset where you never pause, unless it's for a cookie, because you want to shave that extra half second off your final time.

In AKC, that is a no-no. That is, in fact, 20 points' worth of no-nos. So we got hit for two IP penalties and our final score was a 77. Last place out of 14 dogs. BRUTAL.

I went back to the car and cried after that class was pinned, because I was so upset that I had knocked Pongu out of the ribbons to LAST. FREAKING. PLACE.

And then I read some dog books on my Kindle and sat with my dog in the backseat of the car and had some nice hugs, and Pongu licked the whiny tears off my face and I thought: this is so stupid, that I'm upset about a number on a scoresheet when it doesn't matter for anything. A Q is a Q. AKC doesn't tally points or placements for rankings in Rally. There isn't an Award of Excellence to be won with high scores in the A classes. So we didn't get a rosette, big deal. I'm already contemplating refusing any more rosettes in the future anyhow, why should I feel bad about not getting one today?

The important thing I learned today is that even when Pongu is stressy, even in a venue he doesn't like, even with no cookies or leash, he will work with me. And he will do it well enough to come in near the top of a competitive field, even when he's not in good form. That's important. That is huge. That is something that, a year ago, I would have sworn was impossible and would happily have sacrificed any number of small animals to obtain.

That afternoon, we went back in. Our connection was still staticky. Pongu still lost 3 points on lagging and wide turns and slow Sits. It wasn't a great run.

But I stayed out of his way, and our final score was the 97 that my dog really deserved, and that time he landed in the ribbons. Fourth place out of 13 dogs (lost third on time, but that's fine with me; I have always preferred the white rosettes to the yellow ones anyhow).

And even though I didn't really think it mattered, I won't lie: I was still happy that we got a rosette.

The walls of the cafe at Total Turf are painted with inspirational sports sayings. One of them -- the one that happened to catch my eye, by pure chance, when I went to the restroom after blowing that 20-point run -- was this:

"Winning will make you happy, but losing will make you wise."

And oh yes, that is true. Losing will make you wise. About why you're really in the ring, what your dog's performance really means...

...and, above all, how you will never ever (*&(#&$#$ ever fail to pause on a Sit-Stand-Walkaround again.

Beyond Ribbons

On Saturday, Pongu and I went to the Oakes K9 Rally trial at K9Jym in Colmar, PA.

His scores were mostly pretty good, if not quite as stellar as last weekend's. Our heeling needs a lot of work, particularly in a trial environment, and the Figure 8 With Distractions is somehow a lot more distracting at a trial than it ever seems to be in training. Scores: 208/209/209, 207 (repeated cue)/204 (two food bowl sniffs!)/205 (partial credit on retrieve bonus exercise). Placed in exactly half his runs, because it was a big field with some highly competitive teams -- not quite to the point of needing a 210 to place, but close! -- and gave me cause to reflect on how wonderfully absurd it is that I can be disappointed, however slightly, when Pongu "only" places in half of his B-class runs and "only" nets third to fifth place. There was a day, not that long ago, when I was ecstatic if he placed in any Championship-level run.

We got two more QQQs knocked out, bringing our total to eight; it is now theoretically possible (but unlikely, because it's not a great venue for him) that we could finish Pongu's MX at his next trial on March 30th.

More important to me than any ribbon or placement, however, was Pongu's attitude at this trial. The venue wasn't new for him; we've trialed at K9Jym several times before. But the facility had recently been renovated, and the new setup threw off several other dogs who, like Pongu, had only seen its earlier incarnation.

It didn't seem to bother him too much, though. Pongu wasn't that stressy for his first couple of runs. He wasn't on the top of his game either, but we did decently well.

During the lunch break we went back to sit in the car and I reread Suzanne Clothier's Bones Would Rain... and thought about how lucky I was to have these moments with my dog, relaxing together in the early spring sunshine, playing a game of cooperation that challenged both of us and our shared skills as a team. I thought about how lucky we were to have come into dog sports during a time when motivational training was widely accepted and highly developed and available to us both locally and online. Because none of this would ever have been possible for Pongu, or me, if we hadn't had the help of so many patient, knowledgeable teachers showing us the way.

And when we went back in, Pongu was -- again! miraculously! -- smiling, happy, and relaxed. Our scores were actually a little worse on the second go-around, what with his sudden interest in the food bowls and a repeated cue in Level 1, but those were mistakes of enthusiasm rather than stress, and I will take them with joy.

As for our Level 3 run, I had forgotten our dumbbell at home and the bonus exercise on the second Level 3 run was the retrieve. I didn't have a retrieve object. What I did have was a fuzzy squeaky toy that Pongu had earned for placing in a previous run.

So I threw that out there, and he grabbed it and brought it back to me for a few steps, then tossed it aside and came in empty for a clean Front and nice finish. We got 5 of the 10 possible points and finished the run with a 205. And I was thrilled with that, because just a few months ago, there is absolutely no way that Pongu would have touched, let alone nearly done a proper retrieve with, a strange new squeaky toy he'd just gotten a couple of hours ago.

Pongu's enthusiasm for being in the ring is still fragile and fleeting. He's still not a stable or particularly confident dog. It's easy for him to get overwhelmed and shut down. But I've never seen him as happy as he was the last two trials, and it seemed to me that his relaxed state lasted longer at this trial than it did the previous one.

That's a victory that goes far beyond ribbons.

WCRL Trial at Let's Speak Dog, 3/8/14

Yesterday we emerged from our monthlong break with a WCRL trial in Nazareth PA. I meant to spend our time off working on various issues that plague us in Rally competition, but instead I mostly ended up working on Utility scent articles because of... absolutely no good reason, since we're nowhere near trialing in Utility in any venue. And when we weren't doing that, we were working on the broad jump (which doesn't exist in WCRL) or breaking down aspects of the drop on recall (which does exist, but only shows up occasionally in Level 3).

So I wasn't really sure what to expect from Pongu in the Rally ring when we went back. This hasn't been his favorite venue in the past (although I like it a bunch, because it's next to a dollar store where I frequently find awesome training props and across from a supermarket that has the best guilty-pleasure donut case on Earth), which doubled my trepidation.

But he did fine. In fact, he did better than fine.

Pongu started the day stressy and squeaky and dandruffy, as usual, and it was a long day (single ring double trial = we got up at 5 am and didn't finish our last run until a little after 5 pm), so by the end he was running out of steam.

But in between, he was miraculously, totally relaxed for a couple of those runs, and he stayed relaxed for the entire run. Pongu was happy and smiley and eager to work in a trial environment. I have never been able to get that from him before, and it made me indescribably happy to actually be working with 100% of my dog. That NEVER happens. Never! But it happened that afternoon, and he pulled perfect scores on those three runs.

Final tally: 207 (repeated cue)/210/NQ (difficult off-set jump on a Level 3 course; I would have been really impressed if Pongu had managed to hit that one, since it involved veering out and then back in at really sharp angles and was tricky for a dog to differentiate from a straight recall with a booby trap jump) on the first set. 210/210/206 on the second set (repeated cue, crooked Sit). Picked up one more QQQ, so we now have four to go for ARCHMX.

We took High Scoring Rescue Dog in both trials and landed in the ribbons on every run where we qualified, which made me happy because there were some great teams at this trial. Both of our second places were to Edith the border collie, who is a rockstar and extremely difficult to beat (when she doesn't beat you on score, she'll beat you on time), and our third place was to two dogs being run by a multi-OTCH/MACH handler, so it's hard for me to feel too disappointed about that one either.

But the most important thing is that for much of that day, my fearful dog wasn't fearful. He was just happy to play this game with me in the ring.

And while the magic of that moment quickly faded, and crazypants dog went back to being crazy, the memory of it is still with me.

We did it once, we can do it again.

Ceilings and Dreams

What's the ceiling on your dreams?

For all of us, there is a ceiling somewhere. I will never win a Nobel Prize or become President. I'm never going to revolutionize quantum physics or write a song that endures through the ages. If these achievements were ever possible for me (and I doubt they were), they aren't anymore; my life has taken other directions, and those roads are now closed behind me.

I don't think about those dreams anymore. They just aren't part of my world. They certainly aren't among my goals. And so the fact that I will never achieve those things causes me no worry whatsoever, because failing to accomplish an aspiration you don't have is not a failure at all.

Failing to achieve something you do want, on the other hand, can carry a considerable sting. And if that failure comes in the context of a team sport, then... well, then things get very complicated very quickly. Particularly in dog sports.

Which is, of course, why I'm writing this post: because once again I'm recalibrating my aspirations for Pongu, and once again I'm wondering what it is reasonable to dream for this dog.

He is still fearful. He will always be fearful. I know this. My dog -- my crazy little nerdpuppy, my dog that I love more than anything in the world -- has some hard limits on his physical and psychological durability. He can't do what other dogs can, and I don't want to burden him with a freight of disappointments if he can't meet my aspirations.

And yet.

And yet he's come so far, and has achieved so much that I never thought would be possible.

Back in the beginning, when I was just struggling to find ways of helping my fearful puppy cope with the world, I thought Pongu would never set foot in the competition ring. I thought he'd never earn a Rally Q. I thought he'd never earn a Rally title. I thought he'd never do a Novice Stand For Exam, and I thought he'd never do AKC anything.

I was wrong about all those things. So badly wrong, in fact, that I fully anticipate we'll finish Pongu's ARCHMX, and beat the game in World Cynosport, before his fourth birthday. That's in about two months. And after those two months?

Well, we can do AKC Rally for a while. I'll enter trials whenever they're reasonably close and don't conflict with other activities, and I figure we'll get through Pongu's RE this year. Depending on how it goes and how much fun we have in that venue (and on whether I see value in proofing him in the noisier AKC environment), we may start on the RAE.

We can do CDSP obedience, too. Training the Open and Utility exercises will take a while -- probably the rest of this year -- but once we're ready, I don't see any reason Pongu can't succeed in that venue. It's as relaxed and welcoming as competition obedience gets, and since praise is permitted in the ring, I believe my dog can succeed there.

That leaves the great white whale: AKC obedience. The most difficult, the most strictly scored, the most notoriously unwelcoming in certain quarters. The venue where all your scores get posted in perpetuity for other people to Look Upon and Judge. Where at the high levels, you cannot win unless someone else loses. Where there is no praise, and no cookies, and not always that much by way of supportive sport culture for the people, either.

I think of throwing my little dog into that environment and I flinch. And yet. I wonder: is it reasonable to hope for that? Someday? Is it reasonable to dream? Or is that expecting a Nobel Prize out of a little dog who has already given all he's got?

With what I've seen of Pongu's progress in the last year and a half, and what I imagine might be possible with the help of FDSA's instructors, I'm finding myself tempted by those old hopes and wishes again. And I wonder if that's fair to my dog.

I'll have a clearer picture after we've done a few more runs in CDSP, I suspect. Until then... it's all just a dream. And a ceiling untested.

Stepping Back to Rebuild

Friday night we went out to BVTC for another small, relaxed Friday night trial. Traffic was awful on the way over -- I'd budgeted 45 minutes for standstill traffic on 76, but it turned out that I'd needed an hour and a half -- so we got there 45 minutes late and had to jump in at the last second, just as the Level 1 and 3 rings were breaking down.

Considering that Pongu basically had to do his Level 3 run straight out of the car, it wasn't that bad. His other runs were mostly okay to good -- some minor bobbles but nothing too huge, other than a broken Stay on a Level 2 run that gave us an NQ. If I'd had any doubts, that trial confirmed it: we really need to work on our Stays!

And then we went home, having picked up one more QQQ (bringing our official tally -- now that I've gotten my records to match up with World Cynosport's -- to five). Pongu and I will take a month off competition to try and work out some of our more persistent problems, and hopefully we'll see some improvement when we get back to the ring.

Pongu and I currently enrolled in two online courses over at the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, which I hope will help us develop our skills, fluencies, and confidence in the ring. I've taken FDSA classes before, but always while so busy with other projects that I wasn't able to devote as much attention to the courses as I should have. Hopefully this time will be different, and we'll be able to take full advantage of the material.

I'm reasonably confident that I could puzzle out solutions to our remaining Rally problems on my own. But if we ever want to venture into the obedience ring -- and, yes, that dream is starting to return -- then we need to get a lot better than where we are now, and that's something I don't know how to do without help.

So we'll work on our platform drills and we'll practice our pocket hand and maybe, someday, we'll take a trip to the obedience ring... depending on how far we get in the Rally ring first.

Groundhog Day Trial - Feb. 2 at DTCCC

In which I post pictures that have only slight variations from Danielle's versions, because I am Super Original like that (also, because absolutely everybody in the building with a camera and/or phone took a picture of that awesome groundhog cake. How could you not?!).

Groundhog Day, a/k/a Super Bowl Sunday, found us at the Dog Training Club of Chester County in Exton, where we nominally train (when I can get away from work in time, i.e., not very often these days) and where Pongu, historically, has consistently underperformed in what should be a fairly comfortable environment for him.

On this particular day, however, he did all right. I won't say flawless. We had our mistakes. But they were mostly the same mistakes I see when practicing -- which means they were the result of under-training, not trial stress -- and that meant I was getting more of my dog in the ring than I've ever been able to get before. He held his Stays! He took his jumps! He did his Downs and didn't need that many repeat cues!

Next to that, our actual scores were secondary, although they were pretty good too. 209/206/203 in the first round (we had some bobbles in Level 3, although I no longer recall exactly what they were, other than some creeping forward on the Stand/Down/Sit/Recall), NQ (missed sign, SIGH)/209/209 in the second round. One more triple Q toward ARCHMX, would have been two if not for Total Handler Fail. Oh well.

Between runs I took Pongu out to run off-leash around the empty office park, because it's lonely enough on Sundays that I feel pretty safe letting him cut loose in the parking lots. It seems to help him blow off stress and keep his spirits up over the course of a long day, especially when there's snow on the ground.

After the trial ended, we went back and took pictures with Molly and Ein for Team Unruly's Wordless Wednesday, since I am now Officially a member of the crew there (hoho!!) and still get a pretty good glow of satisfaction out of that.

And that was our day. Pongu managed to place in every run that he Q'ed, which is something we have never done in the B divisions before. Ah, if only I hadn't screwed up that Level 1 run...

Between this trial and our last AKC Rally Novice run, I am feeling good about where we stand today. There is a lot I'd like to improve and many weaknesses we have that need fixing... but Pongu worked hard for me this weekend, and he worked well, and I'm proud of him.

Farewell to (Rally) Novice A

Today Pongu finished his AKC Rally Novice title with a first-place finish in a class of 9 dogs and a perfect score of 100 at the Sand & Sea Kennel Club's trial in Wildwood NJ.



Going in, I was not overly optimistic about this trial, because it was part of a big multi-day conformation cluster in a convention center and I was all "hoo boy, scaredydog is not gonna like that one." But it was our last chance to finish Pongu's RN before spring, and I really didn't want to wait that long because I just don't have that much patience in my life.

And indeed Pongu did not like the convention center. He didn't like the conformation dogs' big noisy RVs, he didn't like their hair dryers, he didn't like the vacuums that their staff used to clean up loose hair from under their grooming tables, he basically did not like anything about the entire scenario at all. It was a shaky drooly sheddy dandruff wonderland of disaster and for a minute I seriously thought about scratching him and just going shopping instead.

But I figured I'd at least take him into the trial room and see how he did in there first. And once we got into the obedience room (which was in one of the convention center ballrooms and somewhat sheltered from the main event), where it was considerably quieter, he calmed down enough that I was like "COOL WE'RE GOING IN" and so we went in.

I actually practiced the AKC signs before the trial this time. It helped. We got three of the only-in-AKC signs on this run, but HAHA this time Pongu knew how to do them and they did not trip us up.



Sadly this trial didn't offer title ribbons, so we finished the day with just two little flats. Oh well.

If I hadn't screwed Pongu up on his first run, he would have completed his RN with a string of three consecutive first-place finishes. Oh well x 2. I'll add that to my list of deathbed regrets.

Afterwards Pongu ran around the beaches (which allow dogs in winter) and steadfastly refused to play with Ariella the pittie mix, who is Crookytail's friend but not Pongu's friend because Pongu is a giant nerdlinger and has no friends.



 Pongu is much more into digging giant holes in the sand than socializing with other dogs.

He will begrudgingly sit next to them for photos but that is it.

Anyhow, that concludes our run in AKC Rally Novice A. I will never ever get to have another Rally Novice A dog again for the rest of my life. That's it. You only get one. After this, every dog has to start in Novice B.

Your Novice A dog is special. I'm glad I got to share this moment with Pongu, and that he gets to be formally recognized as my Novice A dog in Rally. Because he is and will always be the one with whom It All Began. <3



p.s. And just for the record, the shopping was pretty sweet. I got a nice braided kangaroo leather slip lead for Crookytail's hypothetical future agility career, a bag of dried duck hearts, another bag of dried buffalo tripe, two beef tracheas (both since demolished by Dog Mob), and a squeaky toy to celebrate Ariella's CGC and CGCA, which were the product of many months of very hard work and dedication with her person.

World Cynosport Rally Trial, Andover NJ 1/26/14

Not one of our better days, alas.

We drove up to Andover on Sunday to catch the second half of the Products4Pets/Golden Rule weekend trial. It was a very cold day -- I overheard one of the other competitors saying it was somewhere between 7 and 10 degrees, and that sounded about right to me -- and although I ran the car between every run to warm it back up again, it got chilly again almost as soon as I turned off the engine.

Because Pongu has to be "crated" in the car (he really just sits in the backseat, but whatever), that meant the poor little guy spent a fair amount of time shivering when he wasn't working. And once he got inside the facility, it was a big scary scarefest of heaters and ceiling vents. There was one particular fan or vent that blew hot air directly onto the spot where the next dog in line was supposed to wait to enter the ring, and Pongu did not like that.

He tried. I cannot fault him for trying. Little scaredy dog did his level best to work through his fear and distraction, but at several points, his phobias got the better of him and he'd wander away from heeling to check out a particularly suspicious decoration or stare at a person at ringside.

And I made a bunch of mistakes of my own: starting one of the 270s in the wrong direction, letting the leash get tangled around Pongu's legs during one of our L1 runs, generally doofing up the place right and left.

Soooo... we both have a lot of things to work on.

Initially I was feeling pretty discouraged about that run -- a lot of thoughts along the lines of "have we made no progress these last few months?!" -- but the next afternoon, I got a wonderful surprise: unbeknownst to me, one of the other competitors had been practicing with her camera exposure during one of our runs, and after she got home and was going through her pictures, she realized that she knew us from a dog forum.

So she inboxed me the pictures and wow! I was just so delighted to see Pongu's attentiveness and effort in these shots.

Sadly the rest of our runs didn't really look like that. We did pick up one QQQ toward ARCHMX, but only one (lost the other on a broken Stay in Level 3 -- it was the longest-distance Stay I've ever seen, with the dog positioned in one corner of the venue and the recall sign clear across the room in the opposite corner -- which I knew was too far for Pongu to hold, and indeed so it was).

But I'm happy to have those moments in time so wonderfully, and unexpectedly, preserved. I often tell people who are just starting out with their dogs that if you can get focus for 3 seconds, you can eventually get it for 30 seconds, and then for 3 minutes.

Right now we're somewhere between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. But we can get there. Eventually. Someday.

AKC Rally Trial - Essex County Obedience Training Club, Verona NJ

We return Triumphant! from our second AKC Rally trial. This one was hosted by the Obedience Training Club of Essex County, NJ, and was held in a high school that had been (I guess?) rented for the purpose and thoroughly Saran Wrapped so that dogs could be crated along the lockers without fear of getting dog hair in the students' gym clothes. Or something. I don't know.

It was almost as big as Saturday's trial -- over 200 teams entered between obedience and Rally -- but because it was being held at a high school rather than a college's sports hall, the six rings were split up into two different gymnasiums. Each gymnasium held three dog rings, and much of the crating space had been moved to the hallways outside, so the level of sheer deafening pandemonium was much lower. Still extremely high, though, so I wasn't sure what to expect from Pongu. I thought maybe he'd be tired from Saturday and not up to full strength on Sunday, and it was a new scary environment again, so I was worried about that too.

But he did okay. Not great, but okay. There were a lot of distracted moments and some disconnects and one repeat cue on a Sit-Down-Walkaround (but AKC doesn't penalize you for repeated cues), but he stayed with me well enough to pick up a score of 98/100, and that was good enough for a first-place finish in the class of 11 dogs*.

(* -- once again, almost all of these were "fake" Novice A dogs, and almost all the same ones who were in the class on Saturday. By way of illustrating how non-Novice A these "Novice A" dogs were, the lowest qualifying score in the class was a 94.)

I was happy. My crazypants fearful dog managed to work out another Q in a Super Scary Overwhelming Venue -- and sure, it wasn't our prettiest run in the history of the world, but it was so much better than I had any right to expect, and I am just bursting with so much pride for him.

It didn't matter that there were no cookies in the ring. It didn't matter one bit. What mattered to Pongu is that we were doing his Important Job and he knew how to do it and he was proud to do his work, even though it was hard and scary for him to do that. I could see him working through his fear -- and he did it!

Up against the pedigreed performance dogs, he held his own. Not perfectly, but respectably. It was enough to renew my optimism and determination about my panicky little mutt's career.

I am inordinately proud to have a blue ribbon that says "AKC" on it. I really am. As much ambivalence as I feel about that organization in many respects, I am still so proud to have that win. It means a lot to me to have my crazy ol' Pongupants win a competitive class against Seriously Serious purebreds. I didn't think it would, but it does.

I just get such an absurd glow of satisfaction out of that.

ANYWAY.

In other news, Shakespeare met with his first set of prospective adopters this evening. He was a sad and shivery little dog for most of the meeting, because he stepped in some poop this afternoon so I had to wash his legs and tummy, and he wasn't entirely dry when I took him out to meet the adoptive family. And he's still in full-on shutdown mode outside the house, mostly, especially since I haven't worked with him much this weekend between Pongu's Rally competitions and the miserable weather.

But I think the meeting went as well as it could have. The prospective adopters seem like a lovely family and Shakespeare seemed to take to them, albeit very tentatively. On the way home, he was actually feeling confident enough to walk on his own feet for two blocks, which he has never done before.

We'll keep on keepin' on with his rehab exercises and see how far he gets by the end of the week. He's making progress at a good clip, really. Shakespeare is supposed to meet with his second group of prospective adopters on Wednesday and then I'm hoping to be able to send him home pretty soon after that, because I'd really like to clear out this foster space by Sunday if I can.

One minor setback though is that he's come down with kennel cough. It doesn't sound too serious and just about every foster dog has broken with kennel cough after the shelter/boarding/transport sequence, but it's another minor thing to deal with temporarily.

2014 - Full Speed Ahead

Busy busy past few days.

This little guy is still here, although hopefully not for that much longer. He has three serious prospective adopters and was supposed to meet with the first family today, but I think the massive deluge we're getting right now may ruin that plan. Even if the adopters were willing to put up with being soaked, Shakespeare hates getting wet and there's no chance he'd show well in such circumstances.

So, oh well, we're going to try to reschedule for tomorrow. Shakespeare is slated to meet the second group of adopters on Wednesday the 15th and the third group on Monday the 20th. I'm very much hoping he'll be able to go home as soon as possible after that. The rescue is getting a huge influx of dogs on Sunday the 19th (it's the big annual trip where all the available volunteers go down to North Carolina and pull as many dogs as they can) so there's been a call for "all hands on deck," foster-wise, and as a result I'm trying to get Shakespeare placed just about as soon as somebody's willing to take the little guy.

Mostly what I've been working on with him for the past few days is leash walking. It turns out that at least part of his pancaking outside was not due to environmental stress, but due to his extremely negative reaction to being on leash. I'm not sure whether this was a learned bad association (i.e., whether his original owners did something that caused him to have a very negative response to leash walking) or whether it's just so foreign and uncomfortable to him that the mere fact of having a leash attached was all the aversive he needed to shut down completely, but either way, when I first put a leash on him indoors to work on basic manners, Shakespeare pancaked immediately and refused to budge.

So we spent a while just getting him comfortable enough to stand up on leash, then taking a few steps forward in the hallway, then taking a few more steps forward in the hallway, etc.

Day One (this is actually the third session; the first two were so pitiful that you'd think I beat the poor dog to within an inch of his life before turning on the camera. This was the first time he was willing to move at all with the leash attached):

Day Two (this is maybe the fifth session?):

You can see he's getting a little more comfortable, although his body language is still subdued and not entirely relaxed. If the weather weren't so awful today, I would have tried to take him outside. As is, we might experiment with the condo hallway and see if he's willing to walk a little down there.

I've also been continuing to reward Shakespeare for default Sits. It isn't really on cue -- he doesn't have any concept that the word "Sit" is connected to the action of Sitting at this point -- but he offers the behavior whenever I stop walking, look at him, hold up a cookie, or otherwise do anything indicating that some response from him is warranted. It's still the same rolled-over hip Sit but I don't have time to fix that right now and none of his prospective adopters seem to care so welp, I guess this is just gonna be how Shakespeare does his Sit for a while.

IN OTHER NEWS, Crookytail was supposed to start his Agility Foundations class yesterday, but he had to miss the first session because I've been stuck late at work a lot this week. I have a bunch of case deadlines coming up in the next couple of weeks, plus my publisher likes my new story proposal and wants a full outline ASAP, plus I need to do some manuscript revisions for one of my 2014 books, so... there's been a lot on the non-dog-related work front lately, and as usual, Crooky is the one who gets shortchanged the worst.

Pongu also missed his first heelwork class of the year, but at least I made it to his Rally competitions.

On Wednesday we went out to the Bella Vista Training Club for a small weeknight trial. Six runs, six Qs. 210/200/205, 208/206/203. I thought those were going to count as his second and third ARCHMX QQQs, but apparently World Cynosport and I have different ideas about Pongu's current score tally, so I might turn out to be wrong about that.

It doesn't really matter, though. We'll get his ARCHMX when we get it. Hopefully before his fourth birthday, but that should be a fairly easy deadline to hit.

Then today we went to our first-ever AKC competition. Pongu was entered in Rally Novice A, which at first I thought was going to be kind of a joke... until I actually got to the venue.

This doesn't begin to capture what it was actually like.

This was the Princeton Dog Training Club's 57th annual obedience trial and 9th annual Rally trial, and it was a big event. Six rings all going at the same time, lots of the Big Name obedience trainers in our area (so many OTCH dogs! so many soon-to-be OTCH dogs!), lots of famous kennel names out there getting famous-er. Tanbark, High Times, Gaylan, Carousel, Sprite, Isengard. Dozens upon dozens of sporting Golden Retrievers, Labradors, Flatcoats, Border Collies, Mals, Tervs, Aussies -- i.e., all the Seriously Serious obedience breeds.

There were 139 obedience dogs and 72 Rally dogs. Zero of the obedience dogs were mutts. Five of the Rally dogs were mutts. I thought this was sufficiently hilarious that I actually bought the catalog to make sure. (Bonus hilarity: the catalog lists Pongu, correctly, as a mutt in the main listings, but then as a "miniature poodle" in the end-note summary. I have no idea how that happened.)

The other Rally Novice A dogs were, like Pongu, "fake" Novice A dogs who had lots of other titles, just no titles that counted for AKC Rally purposes. One was a Grand Champion in conformation, another had a bunch of advanced agility titles and belonged to a person who's working on an OTCH with her other dog (but had her husband showing this dog in Novice A), one was a TD, another was an MH, and so on and so forth. I don't think there was a single actual first-time-in-the-ring Novice A dog out of the 11 dogs in the group.

I still managed to get completely seized up with ring nerves, though, because I just had no idea how Pongu was going to do in that venue. The stadium was huge and loud, the ring itself was small (meaning he'd have to Heel right up against the ring gating, which always makes him freak out), crazypants dog was super stressy, there weren't any cookies allowed in the ring (which I didn't think was going to make a huge difference, but who knows, it's not like I bothered practicing to make sure), and we drew a course that had a bunch of AKC signs that I also didn't bother practicing because I am a big huge idiot.

So pretty much we went in there and it was super ungraceful and my brain totally stopped working on the Figure 8 so I got lost and had to do a re-try on that one (3 points off), and Pongu got so stressy that he refused to do a Front and we had to do another re-try on that one (3 more points off), and our heeling was a thing of sadness (1 point off on a wide turn, because the judge was kind and did not want to hit a Novice team as hard as we really deserved).

Final score: 93 out of 100, putting us squarely in the middle of the pack. If I hadn't screwed up that Figure 8, we would have had a 96 and first place (and a super nice ribbon -- this trial, befitting its almost 60-year history, seriously went all-out on its ribbons), but you know what, I will take the 93 with no complaints.

Because Pongu held it together in a huge scary loud venue with no cookies. He worked out a Q even though the fire alarm went off the first time he entered the building and continued to blare for a solid three or four minutes. He gave me nice straight Sits and a nice straight Front (even if he did blow it the first two times to veer into unasked-for left finishes...) and his heeling wasn't that bad, mostly, and overall it's just so, so far beyond where he was a year ago.

And now I know he can do this, and that means he can do even more.

Final Rally Trial of 2013 - Let's Speak Dog, 12/21

Yesterday we went up to Nazareth PA for our last Rally trial of 2013. This was originally scheduled for Dec. 14th, but due to a severe ice storm in the area, it was postponed for a week.

I dressed pretty lightly for this trial, because it's been an unseasonably warm weekend in Philly and I figured my usual winter getup would be major overkill. What I forgot (because we had only trialed at this venue once previously) was that Nazareth is both north of Philly and at a considerably higher elevation.

So we got to the venue and it looked like this:



...oops.

Anyhow, the trial itself was pretty uneventful. Pongu was a stressy shaking mess for the first few hours, which is about what I expected since he was a mess the last time we were at this venue, too. It's a perfectly nice facility, but it's on the small side (single ring with the crating area only separated by about 5' to 10' of floor space depending on how crowded it is) and it's relatively unfamiliar, and Pongu doesn't exactly need a lot of prodding to have stress issues.

This trial marked the beginning of our quest for ARCHMX triple Qs. To earn the ARCHMX, which is the final and most difficult championship title in World Cynosport Rally, you must (a) have earned all prior combined championships; and then (b) earn 10 separate QQQs with scores of 195 or better in Levels 1B, 2B, and 3B, all at the same trial.

So it's a lot like the RAE and UDX in that you need to get multiple Qs in separate runs, but it's three Qs and you have to score high in all three, whereas for RAE and UDX you just need to Q, it doesn't matter what your score is. (That said, getting a Q at all in Open and Utility is plenty challenging already!)

Our scores were 207, 200, NQ for the first set (sadface), and 207, 207, 203 for the second set (first ARCHMX leg! yay! nine more to go! less yay!).

The only run I got on tape was our Level 3 NQ in the first trial. For the last few trials, whenever I've asked somebody to tape us, we've gotten a really crappy score and/or NQ. I think it's a sign from above that I should give up my hopes of getting a good run on tape and just accept that we're always gonna look terrible when I try to record things for posterity.

But in the interest of failing massively in public (and demonstrating just how hard it is to get the ARCHMX), here is our crappy NQ run and a breakdown of why it sucked. Even if I hadn't NQ'ed us, we would have gotten a terrible score and no triple Q on this one anyhow.

0:00 -- good attention while waiting for the timer to get started; no stress scratching! yay!
0:27 -- my shoulder tilt pushes Pongu back and out of position (at least 1 point off there if it was just scored as a crooked Sit, or 5 points off if it was scored as a double Sit. Either way, that was my fault for bad handling. Hnnnrrrgggghh)
0:37 - 0:40 -- good backup, I'm happy with this. Liiiittle close to an auto-Sit at the end there. His butt doesn't touch the ground so we're okay, but I need to fix that for later runs, because I don't need to be losing 5 points on a dumb mistake like that
0:47 -- slightly out of position Sit, borderline scoreable; it would depend on the judge whether we got a point off on that or not
0:48 - 0:50 -- good pivot, I'm happy with this
0:53 -- front paw movement on the Sit-Stay, probably not scoreable but I'm not thrilled with it
1:04 - 1:07 -- we were getting a bunch of sloooowww Downs this whole day. Pongu's position is correct and there's only one cue, so it's not scoreable, but the slow time would hurt our placements on a tie and I'm not happy with that
1:14 -- what even IS that way-leaned-back Front position? I think that's a weird stress manifestation. A really tough judge might hit us for a point on that -- most judges wouldn't, because his feet are close even if his body isn't -- but even if it's not scoreable, blegh, that is not something I want to see for multiple reasons

1:20 -- Pongu notices the person filming him, stops to stare. No serious lag in positioning (because I caught him doing it and stopped moving) so not scoreable, but that's another time hit
1:31 -- another spider brain moment. I was actually surprised Pongu gave me a good Front after this (even with me helping him out a little with my hands) because usually he will pull out of position to keep an eye on whatever imaginary threat caused him to stare, but nope, that one's straight and close. Progress or a fluke of luck? Who knows, but I'm happy to see it!
1:34 -- smooth movement into Heel position, I'm happy with this too
1:50 -- I was super nervous about Pongu breaking his Stay on this one because that was a Major Issue for us the last time we trialed. We had been working on this, but it had only been two weeks since our last set of trials and he was clearly nervous in this venue, so I wasn't sure what to expect. But he was good!
1:58 - 2:03 -- distraction from the puppy squealing in the waiting area. Pongu self-corrected for missing his Front, kinda, but that's still massively crooked. 1 to 3 points off there.
2:10 -- this is where we NQ. Sign #17 was an About Turn away from the jump, while Sign #19 was right next to it and was a re-take of the jump. So I did #19 instead of #17 and skipping a sign (let alone two!) is an instant NQ. OOPS. I registered the correct sign and had a "dur" moment at like 2:11, right after I sent him.

2:13 -- from this point on we already NQ'ed and I knew it so whatever, we're doing the rest of this run just for practice.
2:31 -- that's what we were SUPPOSED to do. lol/sigh, oh well
2:36 -- wide on the turn, a persistent issue for us. A little bit of lagging coming off of it. This would probably have been 1 point off, maybe 2.
2:47 -- spider brain moment. Pongu did not hear my first cue to "Down." It wasn't that he heard me and ignored me; he is so stressed that the sound just does not register in his crazed little brain.
2:50 -- so we will make this a Teachable Moment since we already NQ'ed. Pongu does a MUCH faster Down with a finger point to help him along, which was what I had hoped for. Look! You CAN do a Down in the ring at something more closely approximating a reasonable speed! Wowww!! This would have been 3 points off for a re-cue if we were still counting.

2:59 to 3:00 -- I have no idea what is happening here. You can see Pongu start to go into a nice straight Front and then he makes a split-second decision to veer into Heel position instead. Why? Who knows. I'm not giving any mixed signals that I can see. This is a straight-up Crazy Dog Is Crazy moment.
3:02 -- I tried to reset him but he thought it was a sidestep so, welp, I guess we're done here. Pongu was so stressy at this point that he was just not thinking, so that was the end for us.

Because of various point losses, that complete disaster of a bonus exercise, and the re-cued Down, our final score would have been below 195. Therefore this would not have counted toward our ARCHMX triple Q anyway and it doesn't matter that I NQ'ed us. Personally, I'd rather have the NQ than a crappy score.

Then we went back to the car and Pongu took a nap and cleared out some of his brain spiders.



All the gray that's starting to show on his muzzle makes me feel a little sad. I spend a lot of time thinking: He's not even four yet! Why is he starting to look old!

Life is unfair.

Anyway, after that we went back in and our second set of runs was much better, so we did get one triple Q to kick off our Grand Final Championship Quest of 2014.

And that's it for us this year. 55(-ish) NQs! Some slightly larger number of Qs! 1188 Championship points! (...according to my extremely sophisticated "scribbled on the back of a course map" recording method, that is; actual official results may vary.) Three combined championship titles! Some other number of little ones that I'm not counting anymore!

WOOOOOOOOOOO

Onward and upward. I'm hoping we accomplish some good things in 2014.