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Hello!
Aelfraed and I tried out sequence 1 over 2 different sessions. The threadle was a challenge. Also, he seemed to be jumping towards me at the start and then redirecting to the tunnel.
We also tried sequence 2 in a different session. Getting the timing for the blind was a bit tricky.
Great to hear that Ramen is feeling better! Hopefully that continues and you get more answers.
Lennan is actually feeling better already after 3 doses of doxy. I suspected the anti-inflammatory effect as well, especially as his wrist was quite sore and then suddenly wasn’t. He won’t be back to working until the wrist is cleared. I have been practicing walking courses for him in the meantime though!
He actually is intact and we haven’t specifically checked for prostate issues but he did have a urine test to go along with the Lyme testing and that came back with everything perfectly normal.
Everyone told me to watch for decreased appetite with doxy, but so far his appetite is up and it wasn’t down before. It may not be the medication actually causing increased appetite, but it certainly isn’t decreasing it so far. This has happened before when Lennan has been on restricted activity that he starts focusing on food more, which is extra challenging as he really shouldn’t have extra due to the decreased activity! He is normally respectful of the cat food but so far has stolen the cat food twice already!Thanks so much!
Today we did some training in 3 sessions with breaks in between.
First session, reviewed the tight turn out of tunnel and tried moving into it and deceling. This seemed to go well. Also reviewed the sequence with the straight ahead line, especially as the course got re-built in a different spot. I think I did better with positioning for the backside jump? He seemed to have trouble figuring out his striding for the straight jumps at first. I didn’t have a helper but did put the food target farther away at the end.
Second session we worked on the sequence with the wrap at the end. First time he turned pretty wide. I tried to decel sooner the next time but was too early. We eventually got it sorted out with a wrap to the left and also tried 2 ways of wrapping to the right.
Third session I put the bars lower as he had already done a lot of work and I thought the sequence would be trickier for both of us (it was), but I definitely forgot he would be faster with lower bars and was not at all in time for the first serp!
Thanks! I will look at getting a supplement for Lennan.
LOL! Aelfraed says he’s a rule creator, not a rule follower. I’ve told him a few times that shelties are supposed to eat everything. He says he doesn’t care. He is also definitely like someone who doesn’t want different foods touching on the plate!
I hope Ramen will be feeling better soon!
Hello!
Aelfraed and I worked on the driving ahead sequences this week. He was less impressed when I started with the jumps individually but once he was running from the tunnel, he figured it out pretty quickly. There was also croissant at the end.
I realized I really haven’t taught him a tight turn cue out of a tunnel at all and we needed it for sequence 2. I started to teach him the tight turn cue earlier this week and then we tried it with the sequences a couple of days later. He wasn’t able to do the tight turn when running into the tunnel with motion but he could do it if I started just with the tunnel.
Hello!
Thank-you! Yes, there were many great teams running Nationals. Very pleased with 5th!Just got results for Lennan today and he is indeed dealing with Lyme. The Quant C6 test had a result of 428 where 0-30 is considered normal/not affected. He has been prescribed doxycycline for 30 days. Thyroid was all normal. He hasn’t been tested for B12/folate, but I guess we will complete the doxy treatment and see where he’s at. Hopefully he will be feeling better afterwards. Interesting that the timing of the vaccine was so coincidental as it was a Lyme vaccine and not the first time he had received it. Thanks so much for all your suggestions. Glad to have followed through with the bloodwork.
I do normally like to give my dogs maintenance probiotics. Aelfraed unfortunately will no longer accept them. I have tried a few kinds but temporarily gave up as he only has a few types of food he will reliably eat and I don’t want to turn him off his food. I will try again at some point. He does seem to have an excellent tummy though. His poops are always good, just infrequent when traveling. He absolutely loves his other supplements which are salmon oil and 4cyte joint supplement. He has to have these in a separate dish as he is offended if his supplements are contaminated with food and he can’t fully enjoy them. Such a funny little guy.
Thanks for the suggestions for working the one step send. Will try that soon.
Hello!
Well, Lennan did very very well at Nationals and I’m excited about making team. However, despite seeming back to normal before we left (with confirmation from the rehab tech we see for hydrotherapy), he was not himself at Nationals. Some odd bar knocking, more tired, and more stiff between runs than normal. He could have actually had even higher results if not for the odd bar knocking. We were back to the rehab vet on Thursday. She has identified his right carpus as the current problem but he was fully sound everywhere else which was good news as I was concerned maybe he was sore in multiple areas. Everything adds up with that being the spot with the way he was limping initially (most severe at a trot) and the compensatory movements he was exhibiting. Unfortunately he’s off agility again for a bit though and will not run at the Canadian Open. Our rehab vet is very against treating with doxy unless precisely indicated out of concern of overuse and having the doxy not work in the future if actually needed. She does not feel that Lennan’s conditions are TBD related. However, we are repeating the tests to measure the Lyme level to rule that out anyway. She did agree with checking thyroid. So, we are currently awaiting results of all those things. Additionally, it seems likely that Lennan had a vaccine reaction and became injured due to running while not feeling well/strong. He has never had any vaccine reactions so I definitely didn’t consider that the timing of receiving the vaccine would be a problem, but his current injury showed up 2 days after receiving the vaccine and he seemed to have some overall body aches and fatigue that the vet agrees could be from the vaccine. Although I didn’t see it happen, the vet suspects he went over on the wrist at some point as the type of injury usually happens from that. He did receive the vaccine injection in his right shoulder, so totally makes sense if he was feeling particularly tender there.Aelfraed has been very out of sorts all week since returning from Nationals. He was with me at Nationals and was a very good boy, with the only difficulty being that he has recently decided he cannot poop at agility venues until absolutely desperate. He seemed back to normal today, but the previous 4 days, any time we were at home he had been on edge and extremely worried about me leaving him. I wasn’t leaving him but he was panicked about the thought that I might.
He was happy to be back to some agility. Here he is working on some parts of the week 4 handling challenge. Unfortunately he thought that the auntie having the toy was not an approved reward process and after the second attempt he turned off the toy completely for the remainder of that session.
Hello!
Thank-you for the suggestions for Aelfraed. He does know how to do that hand touch line up at the side but so far has never been able to follow through with it in the agility ring. It is very hard to have him be as aroused as he is in the agility ring anywhere else. However, I realized his arousal level is close in the mornings when all the dogs go to the door to go outside, so the last 3 mornings I have been asking him for a couple of hand touches (and rewarding with a toy). I had to start with just a single hand touch, not the line up, and I knew he was aroused as I got the nip if I wasn’t fast enough with the toy. This morning he was able to do a full line up at my side and also did not nip me while doing it.Lining up between my feet he can now do. It took him a while to get comfortable with this position and another while to actually like it. He has just recently started to be able to move into the position quickly and easily without help. Yesterday, I had him do it in the agility ring. I did have food reward for him during the period that I asked him to do it but he was able to do it happily without a lure and get his reward upon completion.
We tried the mid-course sequences. Had a very hard time with the blind in sequence 2. I think the first session I was actually too far ahead of him. It worked better when he went ahead of me to the far jump. I still felt like I should have been earlier but he would look at me a bit between the jumps before going.
Also tried the tunnel discriminations. This seemed to go very well.
Hello!
Thank-you for all the feedback!That’s interesting about thyroid. I do not think Lennan has had this checked. He had bloodwork this spring but it was a basic wellness profile so I doubt it included thyroid.
I don’t know what to think about TBD for Lennan. He did test positive for Lyme 2 years ago. This was on a routine test and he was not symptomatic so there was no way to tell at what point within the previous year he had actually come into contact with the disease. The recommended follow up tests showed that the Lyme was likely not active. He has never had any symptoms specifically associated with Lyme. Each time he has had a lameness, it has been able to be identified as a specific issue and the lameness has been isolated to the area until resolved. Although he has now had issues in many different areas, he has never had a rotating lameness as might be expected from Lyme. I did ask the vet at one point if being exposed to Lyme made his body weaker and more prone to injury and her opinion was it would not make him weaker except if there was an active infection.
Hello!
Wondering if you have suggestions for Aelfraed on lining up to start a sequence. He really struggles with this. He will absolutely do it for a food lure. He might do it without a lure if he knows I have food reinforcement but still not reliably. If I ask him to line up with me and he’s in a struggle moment, he will run around in circles (not spinning, just actually running in circles), bark at me, possibly run at me and bite me and run away, if I’m trying to line up at a jump he’ll probably go and jump over the jump once or twice. Sometimes he will do a hand touch and usually give me a nip as he’s touching which I’ve forgiven for now but he can’t even always do that. He can do hand touches really well in lots of other scenarios, but not in front of agility equipment.So far, I’ve been mostly just using food to line him up. Since he has been willing to train for the toy again though, this has been more challenging. He is not yet ready to switch between food and toy in the agility context, so if I give him food at all, he will not play with the toy in that session. If I carry him to the start and cue him to wait as I’m setting him down, he will do that so I have been using that as a strategy when wanting to use toy reinforcement in the run.
Wondering if I should try a mat/station again to help him have a clear set up spot?
LOL! He was feeling double extra spicy that day! I’m not sure if it was to do with the weather though. It had been a hot day but had become overcast by the time we ran so perhaps slightly cooler. I did also drop his jump height again on these challenges since there were so many other things to think about.
Yesterday, we tried sequences 2 and 3.
In sequence 2, I had planned to reward at 9 as I was fairly confident we could get that far but wasn’t sure if he would commit to finishing the 9 backside. Then, ran it again to see if we could run it all which we did!
Sequence 3, I was certain he did not know how to do the threadles, which was true. I still walked it the way I wanted to run it, we tried part of it and trained part of it.
I had originally been planning to do these challenges with Lennan and not Aelfraed, but it was already set up and Lennan couldn’t run so decided to give it a go and I’m thrilled with how well Aelfraed did do!
Unfortunately, Lennan has been off this week. We were at a trial Sunday and he seemed a little off/slow in his first 2 runs but was otherwise running brilliantly and I couldn’t see anything specifically wrong so wondered if he was just hot (it was a very hot day). His 3rd run, gamble, unfortunately the timer had a huccup and we had to start again where he was definitely tired and actually didn’t make time in the final which is not usual for him. Then after that run he was limping a bit so we did not run our last run. He was still a bit sore the last 2 days. Seems good today but I need him to be strong for Nationals next week so I don’t think he’s going to run agility at all this week, just fitness instead.
Hello!
Thanks so much for the feedback from Lennan’s course running.I tried the first sequence of handling challenge from week 3 with Aelfraed. I have included walkthrough and running in the video. I did run it a second time as I realized I walked the “out” jump with Lennan distance and Aelfraed doesn’t really know that at distance right now so ran into it more on the second try.
Hello!
You are correct that Lennan is most experienced with layering the dogwalk in a parallel way, not with multiple turns.He does not have a switch cue. I normally always use his directional cues, which typically work well for turning away from me, but he didn’t really understand in the layering scenario.
We worked on week 2 agility 2 in two different sessions.
Hello!
We tried sequence 3 again, trying to send farther to jump 3.
Also tried sequence 4 and worked on sequence 5.
Some volume game tricks. Tried with toy reward at home. Also was able to switch between food and toy a bit, which he hasn’t been able to do recently. He will switch to food but not back to the toy. The food in this session was not amazing value, but still a start.
Tricks with toy around many people in the agility ring!
We had a break in the rain today at a convenient time so were able to do some practice. Sorry you can’t see the dogwalk exit from this angle but the bowl definitely helped even when I didn’t reward every time. He did his dogwalk perfectly fine!
I really thought once I could get him to find the 9 jump he would be fine turning to the tunnel, but I was wrong! He did not understand that. He is good with turning away from me and excellent at finding tunnels generally but he did not understand this scenario.
Also tried the ending with the correct side of 14 but the turn on 15 was extremely wide.
