Chaos Crew

Chaos Crew

Friday, July 25, 2008

Rhett (now Rip) and his sister

Brought the camera outside today when taking the dogs out. Here's Rip and his sister Rush together.

Also, I weighed Rip yesterday for a baseline. He is a skinny 35.8 lbs. I havent measured his height yet, but its probably close to 21". Supposedly he is going to be 22" tall - that'd be great by me!

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Rhett is here....

After a long, delayed flight, Rhett arrived at the Denver airport on Monday Night (7/21/08). We didnt get home until almost 3am. Poor guy began his journey from Pennsylvania about 5pm, so almost 12 hours of travel.
He is a Great dog! I am thinking of changing his name to "Rip", short for Riptide - though I am catching grief about changing his name from my wife and daughter.
I took him out to watch some agility classes this week and he really wanted to run out and participate with what those dogs were doing. He's very loving and people oriented, and yet he gets along with all our dogs and every dog he has met so far. The only one who has hassled him is his sister Rush!
Here are some pictures from yesterday when I had him out playing with Skye.





Skye's Weaves

My boy's weaves make me crazy. We can do a trial and have him hit every weave without an issue, and then the next trial, he will miss entries and pop out. Absolutely no consistency from trial to trial. No doubt, I am "feeding" that when we are running and probably contribute to his missing them with worrying about it. I consciously try to not worry about them but who knows.

In training, he has excellent weaves, though even in training he will on occasion miss an entry and though rare, he may come out at pole 10. I haven't really been happy with his entries though because I have to shape them more than I'd like. I am always impressed by some of the very advanced dogs that can seek out and find an entry anywhere. Also, I haven't been pleased with Skye's speed in the weaves - I know he can go much faster, and I recently proved it.

So, I've decided to start making a bigger effort to improve weave performance. First, I am incorporating his favorite game of frisbee with doing weaves in the front yard (not in the more stressful training field). I am also going to follow some of the guidelines by Rachael Sanders and Rhonda Carter on proofing weaves.

Here's a video showing his fast "frisbee" driven weaves and some other weave related clips.