Year: 2012

New titles!

Congratulations to Samie with Zappa and Carol with Kody on your BH’s. Congratulations to Janice with Sirus and Carol with Kody on your TR1’s; Anne with Aahzi and Samie with Dax and Zappa on your IPO1’s, and Warren with Lexi on your IPO3 and Anne with Bekqa on your FH2.

Thanks to Andrea for her excellent company, her astute judging and her friendship. Thanks to Craig Lewis for once again driving all the way over here to be our trial helper and also for his help and friendship. Thanks to Energizer Sue for her FH2 track laying skills, and to Marie for doing an excellent job of trial secretary.

Fire!

You know you are truly blessed when the firefighters tell you it took a miracle to save your home. The fire photos were taken by a photographer with the Madison Co. DES team – we were evacuated. My co-worker’s father was on the Butte volunteer fire department that saved our house and our dogs! Thank you, God, and the forest service fire department and the Boulevard Volunteer Fire Department (Butte)!

Sirius is not too traumatized – he still has a ball in his mouth! The light areas around Sirius are ash. I wish I could tell you the black area in the back of the house is a shadow, but it is not. The fire was very, very close. We have 15 acres of charred forest and one small island of unburned trees around the house. Totally amazing!

We were not home when the fire broke out – I was at work and Peter was in Missoula. The firemen got our dogs out of the house and into a fire truck. They must have known the firemen were there to help as they calmly went from the house into the fire truck even with the fire blazing. From there they were transferred to a police cruiser who transferred them to an ambulance which took them to Whitehall. They were extremely happy when I arrived in Whitehall to claim them!

Janice Bogy

Training weekend with Craig Lewis

We had another great training weekend, this time with Craig Lewis. Where our previous weekends with JJ Belcher really focused on training basics for all the dogs, this weekend enabled those of us thinking of trialing in September to see where we were. Craig is an accomplished training helper, of course, having spent many years working with Les Flores, but Craig really brings the pressure to the dogs in the context of a trial format, and that is what we wanted to show our dogs!

Training with Zappa was a breeze, as usual. He has figured out that Sam is the one who releases him and is showing some nice control along with nice fight on the escape and re-attacks; long sends look pretty good, too.

Lexi was her screaming self, and unlike Zappa would rather do things under her her own volition, but we got some nice practice in and should be able to clean up the obedience with Mike’s help (more on that below).

Dax reacted to the pressure of Craig’s presence by getting angry… not like he didn’t have any anger issues already! So all of us were predicting that as soon as she started working on control, it’d all fall apart, and he did a nice job.

Aahz showed some great control and nice speed on the escape bite, but we have some things to work through if he gets stepped on by the helper combined with the pressure of a good skip drive. But Aahz learns fast and we’ll figure it out.

Last year, Sirius wanted nothing to do with Craig, and had three great sessions this time. All the puppies did great, and Durus was his usual self. Anne and Craig also worked Craig’s new puppy Colt, a real keeper!

We introduced Mike Donaghue to the pleasures of chiropracty-by-canine with Bekqa when JJ was here, and we showed him another kind of extreme with Craig’s dog Riddick this weekend. Mike did several escape bites with Riddick and managed to keep his feet on at least one of them! Riddick is a very extreme dog with very extreme drives that Craig has struggled to title for some time (as yet unsuccessfully) but is always entertaining!

September Trial

Join us for our fall trial with USCA Andrea Duggan on the 15th and 16th of September, 2012. Tracking will be on ploughed dirt, the field is at our club field (with a brand new gazebo for shade) with 6 permanent blinds starting to the left. We are very fortunate to have Craig Lewis as our trial helper, so you know all dogs will be caught safely and tested fairly.

The Trial entry forms are now available in .doc or .pdf