Sunday, April 20, 2008

Barrels = Scary

Just got back from two days at the Parkersburg Trial, and my dogs really stunk it up. Both seemed really stressy and weird. Kittie was running so slow, and just acting weird. She got off the table and walked past 2/3s of the weave poles in Standard on Friday, dropped a bar (my fault) in JWW She did manage to Q with a slow 4th place in Std on Sat, but dropped a bar that I just can't explain in JWW.

Abby almost Qd in Std on Friday....stupid table! Everything else was clean, but she was slow, which is just *not* like her at all and she was pulling to get back to her crate every chance she had. Dropped the same bar as Kittie in JWW....again because of me, I just don't learn!

When my dogs slow down, my handling gets really strange. I'm jerky because I want to keep moving, but don't want to get too far ahead, I start bending over trying to keep their focus...it's just ugly!

Parkersburg uses these big barrels as wings on a lot of the jumps, Abby seemed afraid of them (who knows what could be inside of them?! Crazy scary clowns could come leaping out of them), she'd be running straight at a jump and stop dead when she saw those barrels. I think that's just baby dog stuff, but still odd, she's not normally afraid of novel/different things. Just to top things off, Abby's been acting funny in hotels the last two weekends. She stays in her crate 99% of the time and Saturday morning she was scratching at the hotel door to leave and she didn't need to go outside.

So, that was Parkersburg. We have two weekends off from trials and for once I'm actually happy to be taking time off. Their next trial is Delmont. They get to sleep at home, it's a nice outdoor trial, with NO barrels as wings. Kittie has always done really well at their trials, so I'm going assume this was just a weird off weekend.

Here's a video of Abby's almost Q in standard.... I can't even look at the stressy videos of Kittie

2 comments:

Margie said...

that was a nice run! Abby didn't look slow at all to me. :-) But I do understand how much it throws you when one of the pugs change their pace. Clancy does that once and a while and I always know it's going to be a bad day... for me! :-)

westoverpugs said...

Thanks Margie, she was defintely running slow for her...I actually had time to think and found myself waiting for her a lot last weekend.