Water, brooms, rakes and cuddles

So intense...

Is there any wonder my back is buggered!

He is about to hit double figures, a whole 10 months of age! I thought I'd write down some of the quirky things he does that makes up who he is at this stage of his little life.
Sonic loves water. If there is a puddle or pool of water anywhere in the vicinity he has to jump in it. If he gets hot the paws go in the water bucket and he submerges his head under while drinking. Not a day goes by that I don't have to change his water bucket and I'm sure I don't need to mention that chasing water from the hose is very high on the list of fun.
He is still totally obsessed with me sweeping or raking. Should I attempt to do either I have to deal with much puppy screaming and herding of said rake or broom. We have come to a compromise these days in that as long as he lets me sweep or rake as soon as I've finished he is allowed to kill the broom to his hearts desire. The compromise seems to be working fairly successfully at this point. I like to think of it as control training...I don't know if anyone watching would agree.
He is pretty cuddly really which is a bit unexpected. If my partner and I are sitting on the lounge together he is very likely to curl up between us for a cuddle. I remember Kriszty telling me that Sally was a bit like that and loved to curl up on the lounge with you. He has this thing too where he loves to sniff your face. It's quite bizarre to watch but he is totally fascinated by it. Strangely enough I think that Kriszty and Gillian mentioned that Secret and Billy do it too.
Training is good. He's in love with the collapsible tunnel, doesn't fall off the puppy dog walk nearly as much as what he did to begin with and has the bend grid down pat. His two on two off on the dog walk is sometimes good but then he'll drop his bundle and get all flustered about it. I think I just need to do more of it with him and up the reinforcement.
I think he's about Riot's height now but I haven't gotten around to measuring him again. Because he's so slight he doesn't look that big but when he's walking alongside Riot he realise just how tall he is. Just as long as he doesn't go over 54.6cm all will be well!

Nine months

It’s hard to believe that 12 months have passed since the National Agility Trial last year in Adelaide. Winning the Novice Jumping final with Lexi feels like it could have been a million years ago! It was just before the Nationals that Kriszty and I drove out to Narembeen to collect Mick before delivering him to Sam to take down to the farm. That was when the wait began in earnest for Sally to come in season and the mating to take place. Even harder to believe is that young Sonic is now nine months old.

He still hasn’t grown much more in height although I think he has filled out a bit. I’m still confident that he will be a nice 52cm – 53cm at the shoulder come measuring time. Leggy would be a great description for him although he is surprisingly coordinated considering. There is an interesting game that he plays by himself which involves him lying on his back playing with a toy, but unlike my other dogs who would use only front feet to control the toy, he uses his back “thumper” feet as well. I guess if it works, why not. I get the impression that anything that he does will be unique….

Training still involves copious amounts of stay work with the proofing exercises getting harder and harder. He shows great control to be able to sit there like a statue when I throw a toy right next to him, as he loves his toys with a passion! The only time I can get him to break is by doing a “ready, steady” and then running forward without a release cue. Even then he normally only takes one stride before stopping and looking at me with a “oh crap” expression on his face. I can never get him a second time though.

Circle work is improving and he is far less inclined to blast off. It is always safer to build up speed wise though as flat out straight off is normally more than he can handle and he’ll charge off like a banshee. I’ve started incorporating bend work with his straight-line jump bumps. There was a recent article in Clean Run by Susan Salo that recommended doing bend work with pups early, which makes sense. So I dutifully started him on it a couple of weeks ago. First night was crap and he had no idea what to do. All the other exercises I do with him he is getting so good at now and he is so full of confidence that it was funny watching him trying to figure it out. Anyway, last week we tried again and he was great so I think this week I will put the full bend grid out and see how he handles it.

I was looking at him the other day and wondering if I’m not doing enough with him. I have quite a bit of puppy equipment at home so it would be easy for me to set things up in the backyard. But then I look at some of the people that I train with and I see 14 to 18 month old dogs doing masters sequences already. I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with that but I know that I’m not interested in pushing Sonic that fast. I would rather watch him be the total larrikin that he is and enjoy being a puppy for as long as possible. He has got plenty of time to be a serious agility dog and many years of competition in front of him. The two evenings I do train him now is plenty and the rest of the time he can enjoy trips to the beach, out to the bush, terrorising the cat or just running amuck with his buddies.

Furry family

(L-R) Angel, Murphy, Soda, Riot & Sonic

(L-R) Angel, Sonic, Riot, Soda & Murphy

Fun in the sun

Riot & Sonic down the beach

Yes he sleeps...just not very often

At eight and a half months the fun continues. Sonic is around 51cms at the shoulder now and I'm not expecting him to grow too much more at this stage. There is still nothing of him so it will be interesting to see if he does fill out much as he matures. I've had to increase his meals by 100% as I've not had much luck keeping the weight on him. The fact that he rarely stops obviously doesn't help this much.

He is still loving his training and I find his enthusiasm to work from the second I get him out of the car a total joy. He is becoming more and more focused on me when we're at training and I can even let him off lead to work if the distractions are medium level. However if someone came blasting past chasing a ball I'm sure that he wouldn't think twice about joining them so I'm still very careful to manage his environment so that scenario doesn't happen. I'm pretty impressed by his focus for his age.

Training is still based around lots of nose touches, focus work, proofing sit stays, circle work, perch work and jump bumps. Over the last couple of weeks I have been including flexi tunnels and balance work on the middle part of the puppy dog walk which he is really enjoying. I'm really comfortable with allowing him to be totally balanced and confident with his body before trying to run him over any equipment properly.

He is most definately still the apple of my eye. I spoil him rotten and he gets away with murder but he is such a character I can't help myself. Whenever he does something he's not suppose to (and that is fairly regularly) he just looks at me with a totally innocent expression on his face that I find it rather hard to tell him off. I'm more likely to laugh at him and let him go. He is an absolute larrakin and I'm sure that if he was a person he would most definately be the life of the party. He loves attention and if he's not the centre of what's going on he has learnt exactly what he needs to do to make sure that it happens. It's certainly impossible not to know when he's around!

Water baby

Sonic following "puppy vs hose"...

We're drawing to the eight months of age mark and as the one year mark gets closer the prospect of starting real agility training is a very exciting thought. I can't wait to see if my screaming, overzealous puppy loves agility as much as he loves everything else in life.

Training is still progressing slowly but surely. I've begun work on proofing his stays in different locations with new distractions. I have to be a little careful when I practice them at trials as if he does decide to break then he'll be off in the blink of an eye and I don't want him running through an agility ring. Thankfully he is 99% of the time totally focused on the job at hand. I'm also very pleased that I can take him out off lead by himself and feel pretty certain that he'll come back when he's called. If we had another dog come running past chasing a ball it might be a different story, but we're working on it!

Probably our weakest area that we need to work on right now is our circle work. He's great when I'm walking or jogging, but as soon as I try to run fast he tends to go all over the place. So that exercise will take priority for the next few weeks. If he's as fast as I think he'll be, having great circle work will be very important to his training. We're also still doing the jump bump grids every one or two weeks. We generally do a progressive grid one week and a balance grid the next. I'm not going to do the other grids until he is over 12 months and jumping normal height.

I've added the puppy chute tunnel to his training list and he's really enjoying it along with the flexi tunnel. We try and work on the bang game each week as well as lots of two on two off on a perch. I've been neglecting our target work though so one thing I want to focus on over the next few weeks is building his nose touch to the target.

Sonic is a working dog to the bone. When I take all the dogs out for a run and a puddle of water is in the vicinity you can guarantee that young Sonic will give himself a soak. It's strange as none of my other dogs would dream of lying in a puddle of water (might mess up their coats...) so it's a game he's learnt all by himself. Very clever idea I think!

Built for speed?

Sonic is now just shy of the 7 month of age mark. Thankfully no more massive growth spurts have hit although he looks more and more like a racehorse each week. I've had to increase his meal sizes as he was looking a little too light for my liking a couple of weeks ago. I'm really impressed with all the pups structures from this litter. They have a lovely length of neck, not too straight in the shoulders which seems to be a common working border collie problem and they also have a really nice turn of stifle. Although Sonic is slightly bum high at the moment he is still a lovely balanced dog. It goes without saying that he is incredibly athletic and I have watched him become more and more coordinated as the months go by.

About three weeks ago I took Sonic and Riot down to Capel for a day of working sheep. Riot had quite a few goes on the sheep and slowly improved over the day. He hadn't been on sheep since last September so I wasn't surprised that he was way over the top and blowing the sheep up at every opportunity. Thanks to some great advise from some experience three sheep triallers I managed to nip a couple of his bad habits in the bud. Then Sonic had his first go on sheep and was fantastic. I had Jenny Parson come into the round yard with me both times to stay with me and give me advise as he worked. I'd prefer to avoid me wrecking him already!! I doubt I will put him on sheep again for quite a while but it was great to see how natural he was and gives me faith that I may be able to Sporting Register him a bit later on. Not that having him on the SR will make any difference to his agility career but I like the thought of having him registered as Macs SuperSonic so that he is representing Richard and Sam's dogs.

Sonic is now also less a set of testicles. Kriszty organised for him to go up to her VetWest surgery in Clarkson where one of the experienced vets performed the operation. As one of his testicles hadn't come down we were a bit concerned that it may have been right up in his abdomen. Luckily although it was up a little, Tom had no problem locating it and all up the operation took about 40 minutes. Ten days later he is completely recovered and is having his stitches out tonight. It slowed him down the night that he came home from the surgery but he was pretty much back to his normal nutty self by the next day. I must admit that I'm really glad that it's been done and I don't have to worry about it anymore.

On the training front things have been going well. He is mega keen as always and does everything with much gusto. I used him as my demo dog for my Introduction class at ACWA a couple of weeks ago. I had five students and puppies for the evening and Sonic was the picture of a focused and enthusiastic puppy and a great example for my class to see on what type of results you can get from a positively trained dog. I always get my class to sit down on the grass with their puppies and while I was sitting there with Sonic he lay in front of me totally focused on whatever I wanted him to do. It was way beyond his maturity level but then he just loves to work so I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. I haven't got any particular training plans for the next month or so. I'm still focusing on proofing his sit stays, building his recalls and working on shadow handling. The decel game is also going really well and he is learning to dig in hard when I'm cuing a turn. So I shall keep building on those and maybe start working on the bang game a little more. Maybe I'll just start shaping some more stuff on bits of the puppy gear as he picks that up really quickly. I could probably even do a tunnel or something. A bit of variety never hurt anyone!!

Growth spurts

My bean sprout is taller than Soda!!

Displaying those loooong legs...

My puppy grew! Last week he was still 47cm and then I looked at him the other day and I realised that he'd shot up like a bean stalk. I got the measuring tape out and discovered that Sonic is now 50cms. However I still don't believe he'll go over 53cms no matter how many people at agility tease me with "he's gonna be a 600 dog"! He actually looks increadibly athletic and gazelle like. I would imagine that he will be quite a lean, light dog rather than heavier set like his father. Both Gillian and Kriszty reacon that Billy and Secret are hitting growth spurts of their own so it must just be that time!

This week we haven't done anything particularly exciting or new. The weather has been so hot that it makes it hard to do a lot anyway. He is always great fun to train and is enthusiastic about everything we do. When he spotted the table set up at training this week he dragged me over to it in the hope of jumping all over it! I still spend a lot of time working on his reactivity to things. When it's dark and he sees dogs in the distance he is still prone to alarm barking at them. So I've been incorporating the LAT game to work through it. This generally helps him to get over it.

I've probably spent most of my time working on stays. I set up the progressive grid last Wednesday and only actually did it once. While sitting at the start he resisted the urge to race over to another dog that was going past, which he obviously really wanted to. Rather than complete the grid I went back and rewarded him for controlling himself on the start line. It seemed a far greater achievement than running the grid. Plenty of time for the jump grids in any case.

I'm heading down to Capel next Saturday for a sheep working seminar. Sounds like a few agility people will be going also. I'm sure that Riot will be very excited to be on sheep again so it should be a fun day. We just have to hope that it's not stinking hot...