Heart Like a Dog

The Good, the Bad, and the Oh My God of living with dogs!

Patience My Sweet….Day Three Hundred, Fifty One

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I always thought I was a pretty patient person, that is until I met Delilah.

Delilah has the type of personality that could make Mother Theresa cuss.  Out loud.  In front of God himself.

Delilah (in a nut shell) has no patience.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.

She wants what she wants when she wants it and woe to those who try to stop her. My dog trainer will tell you she takes after her mother.  Don’t believe everything you hear. 🙂

This particular shall we call it trait  of Delilah’s makes training with her very difficult.  She gives new meaning to the term, stubborn little female lab.

I started working with her on the ‘Heel’ command.  Delilah in front of me, Sampson lying patiently on the floor waiting his turn.

“Delilah heel!” I stick my left hand with a treat in it around my back and coax her to walk behind me and sit at my left side.  We did this four times.

“Sampson heel!”  Delilah jumped in and rushed between him and me and ran around behind my back.

I did this three times, then I gave up.

Where did my patience go?

Delilah is so excited by the mere thought of food, that she can work herself into a frenzy.

I feed them twice a day, at 7:00 am and at 7:00 pm.   Delilah reminds me anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour before meal time.  I can’t feed them a minute sooner, because if I did she would start reminding me even earlier.

As soon as I begin making my way to the kitchen she turns into a whirling dervish.  A spinning, jumping, dancing on your foot dog.  Oh and verbal, very, very verbal.

Breakfast: A task which should take me about a minute or two at the most, takes a minimum of five, because she keeps getting up, I look at her and she sits back down, or I finally think she’s got it and she changes position because somehow she thinks her vantage point is better here instead of there.

I have a saying “It all ends in the kitchen unless your end is on the floor.”  I say this at least twice a day.

I look at her and she barks at me, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, I’m hungry.”

I look at her over my glasses, with one eyebrow arched, hands on hips.  The barking stops, for a moment.

I make a move toward her food dish in hand, and it begins all over again.

Normally we eat dinner a tad bit on the late side, I usually finish eating and immediately get up to get their dinner.   Last night for some reason dinner was ready early, so we finished about 6:35 pm.  Dinner for the dogs was still a long way off.

We sat and watched some TV.  Delilah tried to climb in my lap.  “Off.”

She sat beside the sofa and whined in my ear.  Out of the side of my mouth I said to Hubby, “I’m trying to ignore her so she will stop.”

She didn’t.

Finally she gave up and went into her crate behind the couch, plunked herself down and sighed, “Hmmmmpfh.”

She sighed about three more times before I said to Hubby, “I’m going to feed them now so I CAN HEAR the last ten minutes of this show.”

I think there are lessons to be learned for/from everyone.  I think Delilah and I were brought together so we could each learn patience.

Lessons From A Dog Show….Day Three Hundred, Forty Nine

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You learn a lot of interesting things when you Steward at a dog show.

No Pedigree Required:

The thing that excited me the most is finding out that it doesn’t need to be a pure-bred dog in order to compete and title in Obedience, Rally, Agility or Utility.

I always thought in order to enter a dog into any of the dog shows, the dog needed to be a pure-bred, with papers.  I found out yesterday that is not the case.

During the scoring process at the AKC show yesterday, I had to check the Judge’s book with the Judge’s score sheet to make sure the team and dog were correct.  That’s when I noticed it, one of the teams had listed the dog’s breed as “All American.”

“What the hell is an All American?” I asked.

Yes my darlings, yesterday I found out that a mixed breed like Sampson or a little rescued Chocolate Lab like Delilah that came with no papers can be registered with the AKC and can earn titles, and compete paw to paw with the purebreds.  A mixed breed or a dog without papers is classified as an “All American” or “Canine Companion.”

These All American or Canine Companions need to be registered with the AKC, and then you can enter them in a trial.

I’m thinking this is probably more about the All-Mighty dollar and less about people squawking that their dogs can’t compete but I don’t know for sure.  What I do know is I have two dogs that I need to register so I can title them in Obedience and Rally, and possibly one in Agility. 😉

You cannot use a food treat in the ring:

One competitor gave her dog a little treat just inside the ring.  The Judge had to tell her she was excused.  She could still do the course, she just couldn’t qualify.  A qualifying score is 70 or better out of 100.

No tags on collars:

I don’t know the reason for this, but there cannot be anything hanging off from the collar.  We had a quick shuffling of dogs as one woman frantically tried to remove the tag from her dog’s collar.  *Note to self, bring a pair of pliers with you to the dog show.

Bring paper towels:

Yup, dogs around other dogs sometimes get excited or nervous and accidents happen.  Oops!

Stewards get any food they want….for free:

While there were all kinds of foods for competitors to buy, if you had a Steward badge on they just handed you food or drink.  We even had a lovely lunch consisting of roasted chicken, macaroni salad (which this gluten-free gal could not eat) and tossed salad.

Pay attention to what your dog is doing:

One woman (the same one who treated her dog in the ring) wasn’t paying attention to her dog after she left the ring.  She was so focused on getting to her friends and telling them what happened that she didn’t notice her dog had stopped walking and lay down.  Yeah, she basically dragged the dog from the ring.

Some dog people are nasty:

One lady came up to me near the end of the last trial and asked for her competitor number; I said “I’m not allowed to give those out” as I was scoring at the time and the scorer must really pay attention to what is going on in the ring. 

She snotted back at me “I’ve been stewarding at another ring, let’s not go there.”

My inner bitch said, “Go F*** yourself,” but my mouth said, “This is my first time doing this and I don’t have an experienced Steward on site.”

My inner bitch was tickled when she didn’t place.

Seeing I was pretty busy most of the day, I didn’t have an opportunity to take a lot of pictures, but I did sneak my camera out of my back pocket a couple of times.  Here are some random pictures from the trials.

There were crates everywhere!

 

Judge Lynda Moore giving instructions before the walk-thru.

When her number was announced as first place, there was a moment of silence and then a surprised, "That's me!"

 

Jake the Pointer, what a beautiful dog.

 

I called this "Viszla Row."

 

What do you think?  Have you ever heard of Rally, Utility, Agility or Obedience trials?  Titles? Is it something you would want to try with your dog(s)?

 

AKC Steward….Day Three Hundred, Forty Eight

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I’ve been holding back on you.  Something very exciting happened to me a while back and I wanted to wait to share it, and today was the day!

About a month ago my friend Ann called and said, “Jodi, you are either going to love me or hate me.”

Damn I hate when conversations start out like that.  I took a deep breath, laughed and said, “Why?”

Ann responded with her own laughter and said, “I volunteered you to steward a dog show with me.”

I was so excited, even though I had no idea what she was talking about!  I’ve watched the dog shows on television but never paid any mind to the folks behind the scenes.

The event was being held at my old high school.  It’s funny, I spent four very impressionable years of my life in that school, yet I didn’t even recognize the gymnasium!

We had to be at the event by 8:00 am, once we got there we were given pins that said, ‘Steward’ on them and shown to the ring we were stewarding.  As it happened we drew the Rally Ring.   Rally is a fairly new sport to the AKC, basically it’s a course set out in a ring, there can be anywhere from 10 to 20 stations, with each station having a specific command that must be completed.  The number of stations in the ring is determined by what level you are competing in.

There are two stewards, one scorer and one judge in the Rally Ring.   Before the competition begins the Stewards hand out armbands with team numbers on it, as well as maps of the course. If there is a jump in the course, the Steward will ask, “What is your height?”  That also gets registered on a sheet posted outside the Rally Ring.

The judge sets the course and before the match begins gives the handlers a walk-through.

Once the walk-thru is complete, there are a few minutes to make sure the course is in order and everyone knows what they are doing.  One of the Stewards stands at the entrance to escort teams into the ring.  The dogs must enter the ring on leash but in some of the advanced Rally classes the handling is done off leash.

The Judge will say, “Please hand the Steward your leash.”  Then the judge will ask the handler, “Are you ready?”  If the response is “Yes” the Judge will say “Begin.”  At this point one of the Stewards will begin timing the team, in the event of a tie score the time is used to determine position.  The Judge is watching the team perform the required steps and is scoring the team on a sheet of paper.  Each team has their own sheet, and then the information on the sheet is transferred to a book, which is turned in to the AKC.  Once the dog crosses the finish line, the Steward hits stop and hands the watch to the scorer.  Our Judge had two watches so there was always one in a Steward’s hand and always one on the scoring table.

As long as a team earns a 70 or better, they qualify.  The top four qualifiers receive ribbons.

In order to earn a title, you must qualify three times at one level with two different judges.

It is also the Steward’s job to make sure the jumps are at the correct height for each dog.  At one point early this morning Ann had to go run Obedience with her dog, and until someone came to help I was doing the entire ring alone, I had one little mistake when a Corgi had a 12″ jump instead of an 8″.  Ooops.

After the lunch break, the scorer for our ring had to go and run her dog in Obedience, so that meant I had to do the scoring!  After a couple of teams went, Ann and I had the new rhythm down.

Our Judge and our Scorer both said we did a great job. Our Scorer said if you can steward for Rally, you can steward for anything!  In fact, our Scorer asked if we would be interested in joining their rotation for next year, and said there might be the possibility of Stewarding the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

As we were leaving, the Judge said to one of the event organizers that she would love to have us again because we were the best Stewards she’d ever had.

Tomorrow I will try and post some more pictures that I took today.

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