The time that Laura did the blind cross in agility class.

Doing a blind cross in front on Nancy Gyes is sort of like farting in the presence of the queen. Like if some royalty from another country blows gas during a royalty board meeting, everyone lets the vapor waft across the room unnoticed, like a lavender cloud, and everyone keeps murmuring about corgis and the labour party and drinks their tea.

Perhaps the spider has just barked. Royalty ensues.

If, on the other hand, the blind cross is done by someone like me, poorly, and in a blue state, this is a problem. A red state move best practiced in the privacy of one's own bathroom.

"Was that a blind cross?" Nancy yells across the field.

"Yeah! Right! Cool! Like a party trick? Sort of international?" I yell back. I had just totally screwed up the rest of Otterpop's sequence due to the blind cross actually being a bonehead idea and instead of sending me to the position of my dreams for the rest of the fast running bit, backfired and left me behind in disasterland, resulting in an ending with a massive, insane flickaway. Oops.

My rememberance of blind crossing physics disregarded the part of Daisy's video where she says that if you could just do a front cross, you should just do that. This was that kind of situation. Mostly I just thought it would look rad and what the hell. This is not good decision making or mental management, both important things to work on in dog agility. Not just Euro radness.

Nancy kept standing out there in the dark, shivering in the freezingness of the night, waiting for me to do it again. And again. This time with the front cross.

Afterwards, I asked my friend Jen if I looked like a rad European handler doing my blind cross.

She just looked at me like I had three heads. "Uh, NO?"

The selection of what moves to handle a course with is best derived from your consistent handling system that you have carefully and systematically trained your dog with, as opposed to fancy style points. Dogs do not need bedazzling and bling. But in a class of big, fast border collies, sometimes I think my little dogs need some flair. PIzzaz. Dramatic interpretive expressiveness.

I confessed to learning this from Daisy's internet blind crossing school. "Only with Otterpop. Never, ever with Gustavo." I didn't tell Nancy how I practiced mostly with trees, not dogs.

Nancy said blind crosses are ok if we just do one. Per year.

"Um..."

If Robert Downey Jr. is like Santa and totally KNOWS about stuff like this, then I think I lose my dog agility handling license and thugs from the orphanage come and take away my dogs tomorrow. Does he have a hotline? I might have to flee across the border to Canada. Where Greg Derrett Handling System is also practiced.

Maybe Mexico?

Team Small Dog Awesome Stuff that would make Awesome gifts edition - I love Silvia Trkman.

I love Silvia Trkman. She is my dog training super hero. I wish I could require every single one of my agility students to get her DVD Ready-Steady-Go. It's the best agility foundation video I've ever seen, and it has pretty much nothing to do with agility. It's about running around in the forest and playing with your dog.

You can buy a DVD, or you can download it all the way from Slovenia. I could listen to her talk forever. She also teaches online classes in running dogwalks and cool tricks, but I think the Ready-Steady-Go DVD kind of sums up all of agility and dog training for me.

You have to connect some of the dots yourself. You should definitely like playing with your dogs. You probably should know some of the basics about shaping behaviors and teaching tricks, although I think you could learn a lot of them just by watching her train her dogs in the videos. She has lots of free information about training on her website, too. Most everything I learned about training a running dogwalk I figured out from stuff Silvia already figured out. Bonus beautiful mountains of Corsica footage. You can just sit there and watch it and pretend you're Silvia out there running around in the mountains if you're totally lazy and never even train your dogs.

Or you'll be inspired to get up off your ass and go out there and run around with your own dogs.

December is a good month to work on stuff. I'm going to work on channeling Silvia Trkman every time I go out with my dogs. Maybe you'll want to, too.

Buy a copy of Ready-Steady-Go on her website lolabuland.com or put it on your Santa list. I think you're gonna like it.

Champion Practice with Team Small Dog's champion pals where we learn tips more useful than ones like, rum drinks may have more calories than vodka.

Bright and early Sunday morning we went and set a course at beautiful Forest Agility for our Champion Practice. Hi, Otterpop! Wake up, Ruby!


Gustavo seemed a bit blearly all day. We went out to a Fun Match the afternoon before for a few runs after work. We haven't been doing all that much agility, and I guess we're all out of shape.


Well, maybe not Ashley. Our Champion Practices are clearly working great on him, since he was recently crowned World Champion of Agility at the big dog show in France. And then won the Grand Prix finals at USDAA Nationals the next weekend. Whew. That's Dash in the photo. He's not a World Champion yet, but hopefully our Champion practices are rubbing off on him as well.


Wendy and Zuma are on their way to Championland. Boy is Zuma fast. Like make people's eyes bug out and hold their breaths when they see her run fast. That kind of fastness


This is Mary and Ariel. Mary is held back a bit in her Championness by letting her mental management skills go all kaplooey when she thinks she is totally the worst handler out there while she's heading out the startline and then front crosses turn into rears somewhere along the line because of the mental kaplooey. She doesn't even see her Championness potential. Good thing we are practicing this.


These practices are serious, all day affairs. We work very hard and never laugh or smile or do things like hula hoop or yell at Mary. There may or may not be sugary foods and alcohol. If I said there was, I might be giving away some important secrets to managing mentalness.

So you might not be able to come to our Champion Practices, because we would go insane if we had to figure out around someone else's crazy work schedule and renting a field and who is on vacation and who has to go to AKC that day and who has to go to USDAA and who has to leave by 3pm or can't get there until noon, but you could go to Ashley's upcoming seminar series in San Francisco if you wanted.

There's a lecture with POWERPOINT! on mangaging mentalness next Saturday called "From Backyard Brilliance to Success in Competition" starring National and World Champion Ashley Deacon, then after that is a series of half day weekend handling classes designed to get handlers on a winning track for Reno. I suspect that the value of superfoods that fall into the desert tier of the food pyramid will be discussed. I am not sure what else. Because Ashley has all the good mental ideas, not me.

I would say go to Ashley's seminar, and don't read this blog anymore if you had to pick one thing that would help you be a champion. His good ideas sure have helped him, see if they help you, too!

Also, he knows how to do Powerpoint. He doesn't just scrawl in a notebook with pens. This should probably tip you off. Champions use powerpoint, not pens. I just made that up though. Ashley didn't say it. Faux champion tip disclaimer. You can ask him at the seminar what he thinks about that.

Download all of the info here, and contact Wendy at jumpnk9@live.com to register or ask questions. She provides excellent customer service! Hope you can all make it!

How the Thanksgiving Pilgrims invented government and shopping in the context of dog agility starring your pals Team Small Dog as Everyman's Society.

So right, Thanksgiving marks when the United States of America's Founding Boat Fathers came across the sea to impregnate, infect and decimate the Native Peoples, then invite them over for cocktails and snacks. Then blah blah blah civilized society and more founding fathers and colonies, tea parties, mass destruction and viruses, war, and Voila! Government, then a lot more stuff and Gone With the Wind, Vietnam, Outrageous Consumer Culture, then today! Wow!

In honor of Thanksgiving Day and these great PIlgrim peoples, Team Small Dog takes a stab at explaining government. Because it was raining out and what else you gonna do with your day off?

And what is Team Small Dog thankful for today?

You would probably have to click on this to find out. If you don't want to, I can tell you the answer isn't spiders.

Shouldn't be a quitter because it's all in your head.

Last night in class, we had many time World Champ Karen Hollick as a guest student. I tried to watch and see if she did any special super champ things when she ran, but she seemed just like a regular sheltie lady who wears red, white and blue clothes. No special secret champion voodoo that I could see.

One thing though, when something didn't go quite right, she didn't do what I do. Which was to put my dog away back in the car and get an Otterpop. I was a total quitter.

Most days, when things don't go right with Gustavo, I hang in there and work through it and we are still having fun. Last night, just wasn't fun. His weave poles were weird, he was leaping contacts, and I didn't feel like I was running my dog. Something else from space. Finally, the best thing I could figure out to do was go get Otterpop.

Maybe it was all in my head.

Maybe because he had another weirdo bolting incident at work before I left for class. Out my office door and up the driveway and off the property and down the road at 100mph. For no reason that I could see. Just because he could. When that's still sitting in my head, agility seems different.

Or else something goes on all in his head.

Maybe this is all in my head. And he's just a poorly trained dog that has developed a new love of bolting and running away. And needs to be trained better.

Unless that's all in my head. And it really is what's in his head.

Probably I need to get it all out of my head. This is how it goes with us.

Monday is always team practice day.

The weirdest thing about Gustavo is, as rotten as it is to have days where he escapes through rat holes and jumps off cliffs, or can't look at me or stand still or lay down on a table, he can just as easily be supremely awesomely amazing, and not put a foot wrong, no matter what we do. There is a level of inconsistency at work here, sort of akin to the unpredictable mood swings of the unmedicated bipolar. Or the overmedicated unbipolar. Except that Gustavo doesn't go homicidal or screamy, his special brain voice tells him to flee over a cliff so as to run apeshit through the latticed underworld of a mobile home park. And some days he's a trained dog.

Yesterday's practice was one of the supreme high glitz royale days. They have those days at toddler beauty pagents, too. The Discovery Channel tells me so. The winner gets a sparkly crown and a discount therapy coupon for the day they hit the puberty wall. The beaming mommy feels like the best mommy ever, and promises the toddler a brand new fake teeth that look just like the mommy teeth, except not quite so sharp and pointy. Everyone is bedazzled, then drives home together in a mini van.


Gustavo just wins some string cheese and a game of frisbee. I don't even know why I still wonder why he can be like this on some days, and so out there on others. How these kind of days, not even a moment of unfocused blurry brain wavering. Not a millisecond, not a one. These are days when I win the dog trainer jackpot and all the other blurry unfocused areas of my life sharpen up for a bit. I do have a trained dog who wants nothing more than to do agility with me.

A dog lady's dream come true. We are simple folk, us dog ladies, yet complicated in other ways.

This meant we were able to practice sequences, blistering hard weave entries like the dreaded soft sided 90 degree whammy, and tables. Beautiful, fast, all laying down all the time, tables. I can do a little dance in the grocery store on the way home, a little shimmy shimmy tap dance, because of awesome, kick ass agility.

I know. This is like a broken record. An endless loop. You are bored with hearing it and wish I wrote about exciting things, like Spanish movies or large real estate purchases or Frye boots. Me too.

A very special Team Small Dog movie review of The Skin I Live In, by Pedro Almodovar.

So let's say it's a rainy, no agility day? What better thing to do with your visiting, somewhat "ahem" senior citizen parents, who usually like activities such as Walking Tour of Botanical Rose Garden and Boat Tour of Lovely Autumn Leaves, than to take them to a movie by Pedro Almodovar who makes arty sex movies like the one about tiny guy who lives in a lady's vagina?

"We like subtitles!" Right on, Mom and Dad, of total cinematic braveness!

Gustavo, which may or may not mean William in the Spanish language, will re-enact today's review for your viewing pleasure.

You've seen other movies by Almodovar, right? Lots of tile and fancy furniture and sort of like a less uptight Spanish hipster Woody Allen but weirder?


So Antonia Banderas and his well groomed hair live in the impeccably tiled and remodeled plastic surgery castle known as El Cigarral.

It would be a spoiler to tell you who he lives with.


It would also be a spoiler to tell you who the bad guy is.

Pretty much to tell you anything about this movie is a spoiler. The skin suit? She wears a skin suit. Not a spoiler.


There are absolutely zero vampires, zombies or dogs in this film. Instead there is minimalist furniture, a famous Ingres painting and yoga with sort of a Dexter meets Dr. Frankenstein in a clean and modern facility vibe. Gender and identity politics might be a theme except I wasn't really sure or if those are relevant themes in the era of social media and the 99%.

We all liked this movie very much. If you see it and you think for a moment, I should shut my eyes here, you probably should. Next time you have a day or an evening off of dog agility, maybe you'll go see it too.

Horrendously boring dog training information, so all my non dog friends, don't even keep reading, really, off you go, on to your next stop.

As dog agility teachers go, I'm probably not your first choice of who to go to. There are a lot of REALLY GOOD, TOTALLY AMAZING dog agility instructors and coaches around here. I am super lucky to have Rob Michalski, Nancy Gyes, and Jim Basic patiently tell me over and over where to stand and when to yell every single week. All of them have the patience of saints. Except Jim. I'll just say this. Don't try to walk is course while you're hula hooping when he's still building it. Or actually, do. See what happens. No patience of sainthood then.

Then there's Kathleen with her beautiful Heart Dog Agility, and Dee with her awesome field D-Dog Agility. And I bet even more agility instructors around here. Our area is crawling with them!

Then there's me. I am probably sort of the C-List of Dog Agility teachers. I teach once a week, at Dirt Nite. We have fun, I think my students are awesome, and all of them have come so far with their dogs. They blew me away last night with their amazing weave poles and contacts. And what a wide range of dogs we have! We range from a teensy little 4lb cutest dog in the world who uses a rollover and play dead for her table, to a massive, older English Sheepdog who I never in a million years thought would learn to run across a dogwalk. So many great dogs, and so many dedicated handlers! And they all put up with my yelling and arm waving and telling them they look drunk.

We're on an extended break for Dirt Nite right now for the holidays, so I thought some of you might want to see what they're working on over break. So you can tell me I'm teaching agility all wrong. Or practice along as the case may be. Here's their first homework installment. Nothing fancy, pretty basic Agility 101 stuff.

Here you go:

To get good at agility, you have to practice. And to be a successful practicer, you want to practice right! I totally, completely believe that good practicing should be fun for you, and every "drill" should be disguised as a totally fun game for your dog. Reward, reward, reward, and instead of being irritated with your dog when something doesn't work, back things up. Make it easier, find SUCCESS! And go on from there. You always want to be looking for that little cartoon lightbulb that goes off over your dog's head. Make sure it's always lighting up. No smoke coming out of it! Can I say it again? Agility should always be really, really fun. For both you and your dog.

You don't need lots of equipment to practice. It sure is nice to have, but there is so much you can practice with no equipment, or just a few jumps. Except weave poles. Boy oh boy, does it help to have weave poles. Even 6 stick in the ground fence posts will do though! No yard? Practice with a friend, or take your poles to a park.

Stuff you can practice without any equipment:

Circle work. Maybe I've mentioned this once or twice. Or a million times! Your dog should run with you, walk with you on a circle. On your left, on the outside of the circle, on your left on the inside of a circle. On your right on the outside, on your right on the inside. Make this a fun game, reward a lot. For agility, there is never enough circle work and this is one of the most important foundation skills of all agility! Your dog stays on the side you ask them to, and is always totally focused on YOU in circle work.

Get your dog to chase you. How many games can you find that gets your dog to chase you? You can work on your startline stays by putting your dog on a stay, start with just a little stay, remember to work on your release word, and then after you release them, take off running! You can incorporate circle work into this, too. Great to do with lots of dogs, you can release one at a time and work on impulse control with your other dogs!

These are 2 "drills" I do with my dogs at the beach all the time! It improves focus, keeps us running, and keeps those agility skills tuned up. I don't have any agility equipment at home, but I do love going to the beach and other places to run my dogs. This is how I run them! None of us consider these drills, it's  just how we have fun at the beach! Use this time to experiment with rewards. If you are always using food, maybe you can try to get your dog more interested in playing with you with toys as well!

And of course, don't forget tricks! I love teaching my dogs funny tricks. They don't have to be fancy. I use clicker training for a lot of trick training, and try to shape my dogs' behaviors into things that crack me up. Even my limpy, nearly blind and pretty deaf senior dog Ruby still gets to learn new tricks! I teach my dogs tricks in a group, and to them alone. Group tricks are nice for that impulse control practice. They sky is the limit for teaching tricks. Just break complicated ones down into teensy little pieces. Usually I start out training a trick by pretending we're on a film set and my dog needs to be able to do "THIS" for a movie. And off we go!

Why is teaching tricks good for agility? You are working on your teamwork and sharpening up your communication skills. And, when things to wrong or get stressful out there on the agility field, you have a backup plan to reboot and carry on! I always learn a lot about my timing and reinforcement rate (mainly that it always needs to be better!) when I'm teaching tricks. Plus, major wow factor when you bring your dog to a party and let loose with the trick show! Impress your friends and family this Thanksgiving with a cool new trick!

Stuff you can practice with a teensy bit of equipment:

Contacts. Practice contacts on a board. If you have a big board, and a little board, you can take the little board places with you and practice proofing contacts in new environments! Prop up your big board on something so they run down the board and work on your SPECIFIC CONTACT CRITERIA off the end of the board. Uphold that criteria!

Sending-your GO! We've been working on this in class lately! You can send your dog to anything. If they like to retrieve their toys, send them to their toy. If you have a tunnel, send them to the tunnel. While you're working on building that handler focus over break, why don't you also see if you can work on a super GO where your dog blasts ahead of you to what's in front of them. At the beach? Find a stick and use that! Go just means "Run ahead of me in a straight line!"

Keep me posted with how it's going, and most important, have fun with your dog!

A day in which many of Gustavo's dreams really do come true.

It has been my experience in dog training that the more I train my dogs, the better they get. Ruby went from a feral wild animal into the freaking Mother Teresa of Dogs. Otterpop went from being a reactive, UPS truck chasing, attack dog into letting Roger pet her on the head the other day and becoming chill around other dogs and loud diesel engines.


Gustavo, on the other hand, is my downfall. Figuring him out is like I am plugging up holes in a dam slower than where the water is leaking out and all the time wondering is this dam going to burst or maybe I am just going to grow some new fingers and life isn't so bad, plugging stuff up all the time because I sure do like this dam, a-ok.

So while we were practicing yesterday, we were able to re-create his near suicide attempt of escaping out of the Steeplechase ring onto the freeway! Training opportunities like this are priceless, fabulous things of wonders for dog trainers that make us go all gushy with happy science thoughts. Except this time, the re-creation was way better than the actual incident since he actually did find a way to escape, and instead of a freeway with cars and trains flying by, on the other side of the escape hatch was one of his most favorite things-a cliff to jump off!


Right on creative thinking, little buddy!

AND, to make it even better, his escape attempt wasn't preceded by any stressful event like laying down on a cute little padded table for 5 seconds. Just like in Steeplechase over the weekend! Nope. Just a regular old day practicing, having fun with my well behaved pets and bingo, he spontaneously runs away and is out a tiny little rat sized fence hole in a flash.

I suspect he scoped this hole out last week during the Great Table Meltdown of Last Week. Maybe was afraid to use it that day, or was just saving it for a special occasion. Happy Monday!


So yeah. Out he went, selecting running away from his beloved me and beloved Otterpop and playing super fun time agility for jumping off the nearest cliff! But wait. Don't worry. Because we knew exactly how to handle this situation thanks to the power of TV!

First of all, I was able to use the recall which we practice a million times per day with him. So yeah, it didn't work as I saw him scoot out the hole and run for the cliff, but when I figured out how to get my non rat sized self out through a human sized escape hatch and look for where he had vanished to, it did work! Thanks, Susan Garrett videos of excellent recalling in dangerous situations! And actually Susan Garrett isn't even on tv but I get tv and internet confused and sometime forget which is which, Susan Garrett, Oprah, Susan Garrett, Oprah.

And just the other night, because you all watch the best zombie show ever, The Walking Dead, you know we all learned how to survive not only zombie attack but falling off a cliff AND being impaled on your own crossbow arrow. And how to extract it and and bandage your own wound and even fall off the cliff again and still be able to get back up the cliff with a giant bleeding arrow wound and hallucinations of childhood abuse only to minutes later be shot by one of your friends in the head by mistake. Clearly Gustavo was paying attention both during recall practice and zombie attack lessons because he made his way back up the cliff and to me and I did reward him with a piece of string cheese. I wasn't sure about that dog training wise. But he did come back. Yay. He would have been across the mountains by now if he hadn't.


And then I put him in the car because I was kind of freaked out and also kind of like, my suckiness of dog training is growing suckier by the day and I give up.


Luckily, the amazing Otterpop was nearby and we just went out and worked on really hard gambles. I set up the ones we didn't get at the dog show and of course she got them easy peasy so then I set up some even harder ones to add to her database and thank god for Otterpop. Otterpop used to be the worst dog in the world and now she can do insanely hard gambles in the privacy of her practice field and be a totally good dog that would never even consider squeezing out a rat hole to jump off a cliff, so hell. My dog training chops can't be that bad. I think?

So I got the Goo out of the car a little while later when the steam was no longer pouring out my ear holes and put him on his long line and we just went out to the field to hang out. No agility. Just rewarding for playing with me and looking at me, instead of using his laser hole radar to find new holes or do anything that wasn't hanging out with me. He seemed totally normal. Did some teeter totters even. Which are like best thing ever at the practice field although contraband at dog shows. Just for kicks and grins I went and got his new car crate out of the car. I got him a nicer crate to ride around in the car in recently, and he decided the devil lives there. I brought it out on the field, and wow! No devil crates on the field. Excellent space pod crate game sends and recalls and super fun fun joy times with devil crate. Even near the rat hole!

Just actin' like a normal trained dog again. Go figure.

So we had super fun fun crate love near the car! With it facing backwards in the car! No devils. The devil is apparently still in it facing the normal way in the car. And I am not a gonna try to figure this out. I am just going to keep putting my feet forward one at a time and life goes on. No dogs harmed in cliff jumping or in devil crates or hole escaping today. My job, to try to keep any of the above from actually causing harm and damage to my favorite little fella. Fingers in dam, leash on, peace out.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Team Small Dog but were afraid to ask except actually, only a few things, but those are probably enough.

I was interviewed about having coffee with my dogs. What more can I say?
Find the interview here on Coffee With a Canine.

Turlock USDAA in the November sun.

So the useful thing about having your dog freak out at the third jump in Steeplechase and run away and try to escape out the fence to the conveniently located adjacent freeway is that you don't have to get up early the next day to run in the final round. We woke up to the dawn and enjoyed a leisurely walk around the motel grass patch with the sun creeping up, breathing in the cow shit and listening to the chickens crow. And crow. And crow. Turns out those weren't chickens greeting the new day, they were screaming for their lives from the back of a semi parked out back of the roadside diner where you can get a $5 margarita with your veggie burger and choice of 5 flavors of cream pie for desert.

Gustavo did go on to win both his Masters Jumpers runs after that. And I didn't eat a piece of pie. Because I have impulse control. Not much. But enough to know don't get the pie when you ordered the fries. And margaritas on the rocks. Gustavo made it around a few other runs with no other freeway escape attempt meltdowns. He had some awesome running dogwalks and lots of good listening. A few teeter fly-off bail-offs, some weave pole entries missed. Maybe not amazing agility all the time, but I think he was trying hard, and having a good time doing so.

He didn't do that many runs. When he runs good, he runs great. Those jumpers runs, amazing. He likes to do jumpers, it's his thing. I think not too many runs is a good thing for Gustavo, and that table, on his one attempt, was still a sore spot. When he didn't lie down right away, I pulled him off and asked again. He laid down the second time, waited for the count, then moved on like a normal dog. I'll take that over a crazy ass weirdo meltdown any day.

Why did he meltdown at the third jump in Steeplechase so badly? With a tunnel just up ahead? I have no idea. That's just what he did.

Otterpop won Performance Grand Prix and Standard and picked up some Pairs Q's. She was running great for the most part. Go figure. She ran 2 gamblers classes and didn't get either of them, so much for the Gamble Queen. Her crown is tarnished and shelved until her next binge. And there was some suspicious judge sniper-staring from the top of the a-frame and dogwalk. I didn't run her in many classes, and that seemed to suit her. I think it made her mad that she had to sit out so many turns in her pen. Mad Otterpop wanted to go out there and run. Maybe. Who knows.

I can't figure out my dogs. Not sure what it is they're looking for. For sure they all liked staying in the motel for 2 nights. Me too. We don't get out much. The $42 a night motel is the luxury on a budget way to do agility. No worries about making that o'dark o'clock walk-thru, and Starbucks right around the corner. With carpets so clean bare feet were safe and no visible bedbugs on the pillows. The dogs have turned into good motel dogs, no barking or tearing around the room. Maybe some walking on the nightstands.

This might have been our last trial for a while. Winter is coming and days off and extra monies are sparse this time of year. We will just have to do a lot more practicing and try to get better for next year. Tables and teeters and fast running for all.

In honor of this historic day Eleven Eleven Eleven.

Yesterday, two out of three members of Team Small Dog came down with the violent barfs at work and spent an evening of writhing pain. They're ok today. I suspect the cause may have been when I saw them both dashing by me on the beach with crabs dangling out of their mouths. Day before, Gustavo freak out bolted out of my yard and spent an hour running insano loopazoid around my neighborhood until he settled down, recognized me, not the Lord Jesus, not Nigel Tufnel, not all the helpful people that saw a quick black fox dash around the corner, as his savior and gave up the chase.

In honor of 11/11/11, in honor of taking 2 entire days of work off in a row, today I'm packing up barfers, bolters, good dogs, toothbrushes, jammies, dog medicine and my own bedding to spend a night in a cheap motel and do 2 whole days of agility. OK. Not whole days. Can't afford to enter 2 whole days, and my dogs can't run very many classes anyways, but a couple classes each day at Turlock USDAA. Dunno if our agility goes up to 11. Honestly, I'd settle for 7.

Team Small Dog. Not even the Spinal Tap of the agility world. The limping, barfing, jigging Stonehenge dwarves of the agility world. On the road in true rockstar fashion. See you there!

Gustavo and the Stress.

It's not that Gustavo can't do agility. He does pretty well. Every Tuesday night he runs in a class full of border collies at Power Paws. We run hard sequences, things that have straight tunnels that blast dogs out to a turn into poles where you have to dash into a daring rear cross. Sequences where your timing and position need to be just right to get through. Many opportunities for bad handling induced stress attacks. He does great! Super speedy and accurate. He's learned to deal with the stress there.

He does bark, it's one of the only places he barks. It's a class full of very fast border collies and that gets him wound up. Some dogs are happy barkers, barking is not a good thing for Gustavo. But he hasn't had a meltdown there in a very long time, even if we miss a pole entry, he just stays in gear, whirls around and back in he goes. He is afraid to lay down on a startline near the Hedge sometimes. It's dark and the Hedge is huge, a massive, black, leafy monster on the field. Sometimes with screaming unknown animal noises coming down from the hillside above it. Last night it was freezing cold and windy, and by the end of class he could even lay down next to the hedge and let me lead out quite a ways on to the course.

With Gustavo, when the freakout attacks do come, it's just so very hard to talk him down out of the tree. In terms of keeping my sanity to the point of not quitting agility, I'm glad they rarely occurr in class, but in some ways, if he's going to have one, I wish it was when there was professional help like Nancy there to talk us both down out of the tree. He has ended up in trees before, although I think that was in a forest and not during agility. He can meltdown in the forest as well, which is why he always stays attached to me now.

He goes to class every week, and to trials very rarely. So this weekend is a trial in a place where he has had some really crazy meltdowns. I don't think he's ever run well in Turlock. Boy I wished I could have taken him to Power Paws camp there and had 3 days of seminars to build a reward history. If wishes were fishes, fishes would do the dishes. And make artisan pizzas in the backyard on demand. All trials seem to have this effect on him, though.

Knowing Gustavo likely has brain damage from all the years of constant ammonia induced focal seizures of course is always the tiny elephant in my brain room that makes me wonder. But the fact that he has enough training to remember to always hit his feet in the yellow on his running dogwalk, or that he actually finally learned to do weave poles and serpentines means that he is trainable. He knows tricks! I have no way of knowing would his brain work differently if he had a liver that actually worked. Most of the time I try not to think about it, and make sure he takes his medicines and eats his vegetables.

I just hate it when he has those freakouts though. It can't be good for his already taxed liver. Or his very taxed brain. So not only does seeing him unravel make me feel like my training has failed him, I also want to keep him alive and healthy for a very long time and I worry every time he goes over the top I am shortening his already shortened little life some more. Not cool. No way to know, says the vet, just watch the numbers in his blood work.

Gustavo is 5 years old now. Probably. Maybe. We don't know. I don't even know if he's actually a dog. I just want him to stay healthy enough that he's with us for a very, very long time having a fun and normal life. Maybe laying down on tables on an agility course just isn't normal. And maybe not worth it for keeping him here as long as I can.

Gustavo and the Table.

Gustavo is one of those dogs that has a hard time with tables. Laying down in one place for 5 seconds during an agility trial has always been hard for him, and somehow, no matter how much I worked on it being stress free and fun, in his short trialing career, turned into a major bummer.

I pulled him from running in Standard last spring. I just couldn't watch the train wreck any more that resulted from tables. The best case scenario was actually sometimes he would actually lay down on the table and wag his tail the whole time and look very cute. This was rare. He has exactly 2 Masters Standard Q's to his name. His most common scenario was he just wouldn't lay down and would stand there with a cuckoo insane look on his face and tap his feet around like the table was blazing hot. The worse case scenario was when the table would send him into a weirdo vortex and he'd start a frantic behavior like jumping off and climbing underneath then getting back on and back underneath and on and so on like that until I captured him.

That's just plain weird. Clearly a problem. My table training methods, so reliable with my other dogs, made him insane.

As part of the reprogramming of ammonia free brain program, I started practicing constant rewarding on tables to make tables seem fabulous. Not that we hadn't done this before. I thought I'd done a good job of training his table, but obviously, I was mistaken. So more tables and more rewarding. More, more, more.

I made him think he was king of the world every time he hit that table and just plain old layed down and stayed there while I counted. Gustavo should know how to count to 5 by now. He's heard that count thousands of times by now. And Go.

So what I taught him, was that either during or after counting to 5, he would almost always get a treat. I tried to mix this up, so that he didn't know when, or if, he was getting rewarded. But usually, the act of laying there without moving earned a prize.

I think I weighted this too heavily on the always rewarding. So I started to go 50/50, 40/60, 30/70, using my detailed record keeping system also known as my memory that can't even find my sunglasses, to remember how many tables had been rewarded that week and how many had gone commando.

Lately I've been trying to practice with no treats out there on the course. Nada. The reward is at the end. Sometimes this is fine, and sometimes, it causes a meltdown. He gets a lot of verbal praise, but if there's a stressy obstacle right after a table like the chute or a teeter, meltdown. I can see him on that table, licking his little lips, hoping for his treat. Hoping, waiting, listening for his And Go. And then if we have to go somewhere next like the chute and there was no treat, my god. Can there still, to this day, be a meltdown.

There was today. I wanted to cry. I don't think I'm ever going to get this agility thing right.

He reboots in his crate. We worked it out. There's always an answer I can find.

But.

Team Small Dog Good Manners for Good Dogs-These are important because Why?

Click-n-print so you don't forget

So there's bark collars, hate the idea of that. Those citronella spray collars, hate the idea of those. Or just shove a stick in a yacking gob at all times. But I think that it's pretty clear. Loud barking at inappropriate times is irritating in the present. But in the future, a liability that can have a gruesome, bloody, shredded, screaming ending.

Take home message. Good dog trainers=successful fighters in the zombie apocalypse ahead. Bad dog trainers=we are going down. In an ugly way.

A short poem re. Daylight Savings Time.

Here's where I'd like to have USDAA Nationals.

If I was Mr. Ken, Big Boss of USDAA, I'd put my foot down and have the Nationals at Disneyland. Except not the real Disneyland, a new one, closer to the beach where they also have live ponies instead of animatronic ones. And where cocktails would be served at attractions other than the restaurant inside the Pirates of the Caribbean. Anaheim can be really hot and there are too many freeways. There are probably bug infestations at the nearby hotels. The new one would be near the beach and pitbulls could come, there are already lots of pitbulls near the beach and everybody's used to them. Also there would be free parking. FREE PARKING! AND TACOS!

And I'd actually make sure to have it on a holiday. A National Holiday, in honor of the Nationals. I'd have it on Halloween.

And since it would be on Halloween, the prizes would all involve candy. Not just any candy but See's Candy. And not just suckers. Those are chintzy. Nope, I'd give out little hat shaped boxes with either nuts and chews or soft centers iNCLUDING the fruit flavored ones to all the winners.

I know that's controversial. Some of you hate the fruit ones, and you know what? Tough shit. Because I like the fruit ones and if I like the fruit ones, then you're getting them too. Like 'em or not.

And if people started complaining to me, I'm not sure what I would do. First I might try to use excellent customer service words. I rehearse these words a lot, so that when I need them, I can repeat them without having to roll up my sleeve and see if I wrote them near my elbow in sharpie. "I hear what you're saying. I am listening to your concerns." I would probably try to repeat these words several times, and even if my eyes were looking up at the clouds, so fluffy and light while I was saying them, I would keep murmuring them in a kind voice.

And then pull out photos of the ponies! And the beach! And probably of puppies, too.

I would show them course maps of challenging International Style courses, and tell them, but all the courses, they will look something like this! Fun fun fun!

And then if people kept whining and complaining, like really wouldn't stop complaining, I would just turn off my phone and stop checking the email. And I would sell most everything I owned, and I would buy an airstream trailer, one that has a shower in it, and I would hook it up to my truck and load up all the dogs and some crates of fruit and a couple pounds of See's, and we would all take off across the loneliest highway in the world and spend a lot of time wandering around in the desert looking for shiny rocks. I think we would stay out there a long time. Probably the new Disneyland wouldn't even get built. Which would be ok. That's a lot of what should be staying in a rain forest going in to what, another Tiki Room and Haunted Mansion?

I guess I would just stay out there, floating along, somewhere in the desert. And life would be grand.

All the time I used to write about agility and then I didn't and so I thought today, how about if I do again?

You know we still do agility, right?

We practice, I try to train better. I work on handling, and the dogs work on what they work on. Otterpop loves practicing. Otterpop hates a lot of things. Here are just a few of them: trucks with weird suction tanks on them or car washing brushes for sweeping the street, UPS trucks, motorhomes, most other dogs, most people, human beings touching her skin, mailmen, squirrels, the mailman who looks like a squirrel but who is really a robot and lives on our block, and trick or treaters.

Otterpop loves doing agility though. I know that something is going more wrong with her wonky leg, but I still let her run. Because it's one of the only things that makes her happy. Even happier than running courses is the learning things. She loves to have do-overs and do-overs and do-overs again. I set up very hard things to do and do-over with Otterpop when we practice and I have to get better at showing her how to do it and she gets to do it over again and again and AGAIN!

Pretty much right now that's weird bits from international courses we do running as fast as we can. With blind crosses. And gambles. Oh, the gambles I make her. We get into many gamble pickles, me and her, but then we get out.

I've entered her in a trial in a couple weeks. A rare 2 days. I'm afraid to run her in more than a couple classes each day, and I have no idea if she'll even run in a trial anymore. But that's what we're going to do. And sleep in a motel, too.


Practicing with Gustavo is so very, very different. Couldn't be more different. Like opposite-land down under across the equatorial divide bi polar ying yang different strokes kriss kross backwards pants from how me and Otterpop practice and how Otterpop and Ruby learn. He's entered in a couple of classes each day at the next trial, and I have no prediction on how he'll run. None at all.

His performance in trials is like everything else with him. Very unpredictable. He has been awesome practicing for the last few weeks, focusing and recalling and finding very difficult pole entries. But you never know when he won't be. Any time this can happen. That's how it goes with him, and is why I know his runs in the trial could be a bust. But we're trying anyways, because, tenaciousness and tenacity get you at least somewhere. Somewhere like a night in the Travelodge. An upgrade from Motel 6!

But just so you know. We are still out there in the field, trying very hard. Yes indeed. There is a fabulous, fantastic, far out irony that Otterpop's body is giving out while her brain wants to do agility, and Gustavo's brain is barely holding on while his body wants to do agility, and I am just out there, frisbee in hand, hopping up and down and yelling, "YAY HOORAY!" a lot.