March is almost gone, and April soon upon us. Today was my last day to do some training with Scoop as tomorrow I head out for AKC Nationals, sadly just to watch not to compete. Last year I was only able to compete in a couple AKC trials, and did not come close to qualifying. I have already shown more in 2011, than I did in all of 2010!

I have been on the road a lot this past month, and more to come. I will be spending only 12 days sleeping in my own bed in April. Some of those away days I will be competing. Scoop will get to attend a few USDAA shows, and I am looking forward to the experience while still a bit anxious about the outcome. I have not trained Scoop on the higher A-frame, and would really prefer not to, however I doubt USDAA is changing their rules for me this month:) so I will be doing some scrambling to introduce the higher frame to him starting next week.

What I have been thinking about this past week with Scoop is duration in behavior training. As I push Scoop to perform longer without reinforcements, I am seeing some of our weaknesses.  I need him to be able to perform multiple accurate contacts in a row without stepping in to reward each one, and have them not fail. I need him to hold his stays in the face of extreme distractions and for him to stay in those positions longer. It is easy to get Scoop to do a 15 minute down stay while watching agility when I step in every few minutes to reward him. So is that five, three minute down stays, or a 15 minute one with 5 reinforcements? I’d like Scoop to be able to do his accurate and animated heelwork on both my left and right for a minimum of a few minutes without me needing to carry a toy with me, or to reward in the middle of the training.

I don’t expect him to train without rewards, but I also know that asking for longer duration on some behaviors at least once in a while, will help me in the long run by teaching him to be able to focus on a job for longer periods of time, like being able to run a couple standard classes over an hour time period with the confidence to know that his start lines, contacts and weaves won’t deteriorate without the almost ever present toy and treat reinforcements he gets when we train.

Some of Scoop’s behaviors seem extremely durable. I can leave him in an open crate at the opposite end of my field, 150 feet away from where I am teaching a lesson. He is quiet, relaxed and never gets out of the cage. At the same time if I call him out of the crate to me on his release word (break) he will come tearing as fast as he is able to me at any given moment. I love that! I want all his behaviors to be this reliable with as much duration as I have time to teach.

The weather was a huge interference again this week in my training plans. I have been home for a week, but only a few of those days have been without rain, and soggy standing water training fields. We have done lots of indoor games and tricks and have continued to polish up his 2o2o behavior so that he is not trying to reach back and target the board instead of nose touching the ground between his feet. We did some sessions on multiple position changes; sit, down, stand, break, stand on your hind legs, drop your head to the ground, and did them in fast multiples without a break before he got reinforced. I did heelwork for minutes at a time and had a great game at the end. I’d have rather been out in the field but we had fun nonetheless.

Tonight I let Scoop run in a class that I taught.  He was a pretty good boy, no bars, good contacts, great serps, perfect start-lines, a little struggle with a tough weave entry, but so did some of the other talented dogs in this masters level class. Mostly the wheels stayed in place and we had a fun time training.

Since we couldn’t train much over the last week we had some fun time in the fields and in my winter pond which comes with the rain, and goes away with the sunny days soon to come. I hope you enjoy all the wet photos and I hope you enjoyed your week with your  champion in training as much as I did with mine.

NJG

Scoop is wild, maybe feral. He looks a lot like the photos at the top of this page, only bigger! I was only gone 5 days but he went south on me while I was in the east. I got home from teaching seminars at Clean Run yesterday afternoon and immediately took him to the field to play and train. Maybe I was too tired and he just thought he could take advantage of my obvious deficit in brain power. He barked his way through teeter, frame and weave training. He was still crazed today even though I got him and the rest of the dog family out for some vigorous exercise in the fields a few times.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that even with him acting like a feral beast, he still had a good sit stay. ha! I think taking him off the course 10 days ago at the show, as well as lots of really high value rewards last week in training made some lasting impression on him. ( i can dream can’t i?)

The weather is bad, every jump in the field was lying on its side when I went out to train this afternoon. Wind and light rain on and off then clearing for tonight’s classes which was nice. I have a show this weekend and want to train lots in the next two days. On the list: dog walk and teeter targeting and proofing; start line rewards, 20 A-frames and no more, lateral distance on weaves. Rain rain go away.

I wish I had time to do some of the fun drills I did at the seminar. Maybe next week. I put up five of the drills I did on the first morning. They are somewhat elementary as that is how I like to start a seminar, but there are a few threadles thrown in because it was a masters level group and I just couldn’t resist. They are at the end of this post, maybe you’ll have time to run them even if I can’t!

I put up a new page on the epilepsy study which can be accessed on the front page of the blog on the right side. The email of the researcher, Allison Ruhe is on the page, and the form you will need to send a bloodwork sample is there too. Just click and it will open up.

The ETS study is on track. The researchers are setting up a web page for information about how to participate, and there is more cool stuff to tell you about in the coming days. Thanks for reading, thanks for participating, thanks for your patience.

I hope you have a great week training your beast this week, even though mine is wild, he sure is fun and I sure do love him.

NJG

CR 2011 first set1CR 2011 first set2CR 2011 first set3CR 2011 first set4CR 2011 first set5

Before I write about a variety of border collies health issues on my mind I want to announce that Scoop has an OA now, and in a couple weeks we will compete in Excellent for the first time. I got in on one day of AKC competition Monday and we finished his 3^rd leg in Open agility.  We walked into the ring to try to get Scoops’s 3^rd open JWW leg, but we walked out as fast as we went in after Scoop jumped the start line before I could get the release word out of my mouth. I think I was ready for it to happen as he has been pushy on his stays, sometimes moving a foot and I have had to go back to him often to do a restart.

I led out onto the course, looked over my shoulder and started to raise my arm and off he came. I stayed in my spot and he realized his error and just stopped at my leg. He looked totally horrified as I guided him by the collar out of the ring. I hardly said a word but the look on his face as I snapped on his leash was well……PRICELESS! In standard his start was perfect and so we got to do our run and finish the title.

Last night I ran Scoop in one of my classes and focused primarily on the start line. I lined him up, told him to stay, then ran to my leadout position, often 3 jumps out, then ran all the way back to him to get him a HUGE hunk of “lightly roasted wild beast”. Wow, did I have good stays all night. I need some weeks of this kind of reminder for him. He is getting faster and more driven to do this sport every day, I need to make sure my training keeps up with his desire to get out there and run. I reward my line ups, reward the stays, reward the recalls, and of course reward out there on the course while working. ROC on! Reward On Course, not just off.

Besides thinking about training and competing I have been spending hours lately discussing and thinking about border collie health issues. There is a new border collie study on late  onset deafness. This is when a BC who has normal hearing begins to lose it around 2 to 3 years of age. Sadly the owners first think the dog is just being slightly disobedient or inattentive, then the realization hits that the dog’s hearing is impaired. These dogs may have tested for normal hearing as a pup. I was asked to help get border collie saliva samples for the control group of normal hearing dogs. Within a day of hearing about this study and volunteering to sample all my border collie students dogs, and send in the swabs, I was asked to participate in an ongoing study on epilepsy in border collies.

The epilepsy study started  a couple years ago but I believe got sidetracked waiting for funding. It is back in full swing and I am trying to help out by finding 20 border collies that have seizures to get blood or at least saliva samples from.  I unfortunately have a border collie with seizures, my ten year old Panic, Silvertips High Anxiety. (What made me choose that name I will never know.) I have a short list of friends whose BC’s also have epilepsy. We cry on each others shoulders, and try not to think too deeply of the wonderful careers in agility that we are missing out on with our dogs. Panic started having seizures three years ago while doing agility. He has had 7 seizures total, 5 of them doing agility. After the last one I said never again. Panic gets to run into some tunnels once in a while, but I am afraid to do more than that. The terrible tragedy about Panic is that I have never had a dog love “doing” agility equipment more than Panic likes to do the stuff. All my dogs would be happy doing different dog sports, or just playing with me, swimming or doing tricks. Panic was a so- so obedience and tricks kind of dog, and he can’t swim. He likes, but does not live, for toy play like the rest of my dogs. I think he lived for agility. That brings tears to my eyes.

Some of my friends’ dogs that have seizures are able to train and can sometimes return to competition. Geri Hernandez has a wonderful dog named Rake, Hob Nob Superior Attitude, that we always compare to Panic because of his jumping style as well as his enthusiasm for the sport. Rake does not have seizures during agility, he has them at rest, as do most dogs with epilepsy, and after 8 months without a seizure, Geri is able to do some training, and the hope is that he may be able to compete again. For both Geri and I though, we would be happy just to be able to train the sport the dogs love, competition is secondary.

Please write to me if you have a border collie with epilepsy and wish to participate in this important study being funded by the ABCA. Epilepsy is a hereditary disease, meaning that if we can identify the gene we can identify the dogs who could pass it on to their pups. We could also test pups, and maybe eventually this horrendous disease can find its final end in our border collies and eventually all other dog breeds. This is the study that started at UC Davis with Dr. Mark Neff and is being continued by him at another facility. I will post more contact info here soon. For now, post a response to the blog or write me at powerpaws@aol.com for information on giving a blood sample for the study.

When talking with the research assistant about the epilepsy study, she told me that as soon as they get moving on this study they are diving in with both feet into a study of dogs with Early Take Off Syndrome. Unless you have been living in a vacuum you have seen the tragedy of handlers trying to cope with this hereditary vision problem. Way too many of my students dogs are afflicted with ETS, and I have known many dogs over the years, with the problem. My first experience was with a couple students’ Belgian Tervurens about 15 years ago. We tried every kind of jump training with these dogs and could never teach the dogs to jump normally. We knew it was something to do with vision, but hadn’t a clue what it really was.

Then I had my first border collie ETS experience. I rescued three 8 week old border collie pups from the pound and we kept one ourselves. Her name is Fly, and my husband Jim put a MAD title on her before we placed her with her current owner, Laura Manchester Derrett. Like all typical ETS dogs, the problems were not apparent in the beginning.  We thought we could “fix” her funny jumping which actually did not look funny at all until she was about 2 years old. Her siblings had similar jumping issues. This was my first clue 10 years ago that this disease is hereditary and not ever fixable. Siblings with a similar jumping issue means that the dogs were born with the problem, there was nothing we did, and nothing we could do to fix the problem.

Laura had a great but short career with Fly because her jumping deteriorated each year. She is an older retired dog now, living in England, and her vision problems have increased dramatically over the years. As do all ETS dogs. None of them ever get better. Some seem to jump better on certain surfaces, in certain light, or in different situations. Some only show the dramatic head dropping, stutter stepping when presented with a spread jump or tire, others “measure” slightly at each jump. We call it” measuring” when a dog slows a bit before jump and drops his head as if searching for the jump location. If you are not familiar with the symptom it can look like a dog is just struggling to get enough power underneath them before they jump. The dog may look injured but most of these dogs are found to be physically sound and no physical remedy can alter how they jump. I have seen some heavy bodied dogs who are asked to jump beyond than their comfort zone, and may have some physical limitations in their rear, seem to throw themselves over the jump in a way that looks like ETS. It may or may not be.

When you watch carefully you see that these dogs though almost always take off for a jump earlier than they should, putting more of the jump distance before the jump, rather than jumping in an arc that puts the highest part of the jump right over the bar. Most handlers and lots of instructors do not notice these very subtle beginning signs of ETS. Many dogs are checked and found to have normal retinoscopies by Veterinarian Eye Doctors.  There is no vision test for depth perception or lack of it. The perception problems can be minimal or extremely severe, usually starting at a couple years of age. The tragedy of this disease is the progression and for many dogs the total end of their careers.  The dogs cannot actually see exactly where the jump bar is and this leads to them taking off very early and over jumping to compensate for their inability to really know where the jump is. When they guess wrong, they land on the jump. Every time they land on a bar, they lose more of their confidence to jump and so the condition deteriorates.

I have a BC named Wicked that probably has ETS. She had a wonderful starting career.  She won the 26 inch USDAA National Championships at 3 years old. She continued to compete until she was 11 years old, first at  26 then 22, then at 16 inch performance. It became obvious over the years that she just could not jump the higher jumps safely. Wicked took off early for spreads and tires.  She rarely took down bars but she did totally crash into jumps at times when she could not judge the distances. Her jumping looked like she just did a little “pop up”. She had a sibling in England that totally measured all the jumps, and had devastating crashes. Another example of hereditary ETS. Wicked was only minimally affected by ETS, and I did not recognize it as such because she has a variety of other health issues that I blamed the problem on.  She is 14 now, and her vision still continues to deteriorate, pretty normal for an older dog, but it is a lack of depth perception that we see, not just a general old age vision change. As I look back at her videos now I can see the subtle signs, the minimal head drop, the early jump on spreads, the “pop up” rather than nice running jump style on all the jumps.

If you have a dog that takes off early it may or may not be ETS. Your dog could have a detectable vision problem, and believe it or not, some of these dogs can be fitted with contacts to help correct the difference in vision between the eyes. Dogs can have long or short vision just like people. If your dog has a disparity from one eye to the other, a contact could help. Any dog with a jumping problem should have their eyes checked. Recently a dog that was thought to have ETS was found to have a form of vitreol degeneration, a totally different kind of vision issue that of course complicated the dogs’ ability to see where the jump was and the result was taking off early.

If you have a dog that takes off early, please write and let me know. I am going to be helping the researchers get blood or saliva samples of these dogs so that they can begin looking for the DNA marker that will help identify the hereditary nature of this disease. If we all are honest about our dogs’ health problems, we will all benefit from having healthier dogs with longer lives and careers. We put too much into our dogs and into our sport to hide our heads in the sand about these devastating diseases.

We need to help all the great breeders of our wonderful pets to identify which dogs may have the disease, and so make good decisions about which dogs to use in their breeding programs. No breeder ever wants to make a pup that isn’t perfect. We can’t just blame breeders for these diseases. We need to get out there and protect our dogs by being informed buyers, readily discussing problems honestly and publicly without placing blame and also do our best to participate if possible in studies on the health issues that every one of us will deal with sooner or later if we stay involved in dog sports long enough.

I hope you are lucky and have a dog who seems totally healthy like my Scoop, any day those issues can change though and I hope if you have a border collie and can help on the studies that you would be willing to do so.

NJG

Recalls, recalls, recalls. Thousands of recalls! Sit when greeting. That is what we are obsessing on these days.

My friend Ingrid Manzione was here visiting from Hawaii this week. She and lots of her agility friends attended power paws camp last week, and then she came to stay with us for a few days. Scoop loves guests. HE thinks it is an opportunity to have a  party each time they walk through the house. *I* think it is a training opportunity to work on what I want him to do when he meets new people or sees the ones he loves. Ingrid helped by being a post or turning her back on him when he put his feet on her, I came dashing in with cookies when he sat. Since I didn’t want to wait until she wandered through the door, and be caught without rewards or busy on the phone, we set up the scenarios a bunch of times so I could train it when it was convenient for ME. She would talk to him in a high pitched tone of voice or clap her hands and I was right there to shove treats in his mouth when he sat or kept all four on the floor instead of jumped up. I really don’t like it when dog traininig friends say “it’s ok, I don’t mind your dog jumping on me”. Or worse, they see you struggling to keep your dogs brain attached to his body, and they sabotage you by continuing their excited greeting while you try to reel in your excited pup.

If we all helped our friends by behaving properly around their dogs we would certainly look and act like better dog trainers.

Life in the hood

Scoop and his boys get to spend time together in the yard now where our adults hang out when they are outside, and I don’t monitor every single minute of their interactions. That backfired a few weeks ago when Scoop and Ace were obviously having a mouthy mauling session of play. I heard screaming and went running. It looked like Scoop was killing Ace, or vice versa. Jim ran in from the field where he was teaching. the noise was easily heard 200 feet away. Once I got to the dogs I realized that Ace had his mouth wrapped aruond Scoop’s collar, and then Scoop rolled and thorougly tied Ace’s mouth to his collar. I held the dogs while Jim unsnapped the collar, but not until we were all thoroughly scared to death. Ace was only a little worse for the wear.  Scoop settled after a while and stopped acting frightened from the scary situation. Big mistake on my part. The collar Scoop wore was a bit loose, and really he should not have a collar on at all when he is out hanging in the  hood with his mates. Lesson learned, and thank goodness we were close by to get them untangled.

Scoop had his very first run with my border collie pack in the big field yesterday. Riot-14 years, Wicked-13, Panic-9,  Ace- 5 and Scoop. He has been on lots of field runs on his own, or gone along on leash with all of us, but till now I did not totally trust his recall or his self control. The run went fairly well, he came back every time I called. Yahoo, recall training works! However he does not 100% understand that he is never allowed to run into another dog, or duck in for a play bite while they are all exercising. My dogs hate bullies, and I work hard to make sure that the youngsters do not intimidate the adults on an exercise walk/run, or worse, crash into them and cause injury. I had to use a low growly voice with Scoops nickname a few times when he started to cut off the other dogs while they were running. I will work on this every day, if I do not see daily improvement he will go back on leash with us for a while.  I can’t yell at him, my other dogs get worried if they think someone is in trouble. So my quiet verbal  “checks” to Scoop are minimal and he needs to figure out that a one time lowered tone of voice is all the chance he is going to get to behave himself, or he is back on leash.

Scoop, Ace and I are headed off to a trial this weekend. I am looking forward to hanging with my boys in the RV, and training away from home.

I hope you have a great  weekend of training planned for your pup too!

NJG

Today I wanted to take photos of puppy retrieves. Of course, the place we do this best is the kitchen, sitting on the floor. Photog Marcy Mantell said no-go on the indoor photos with flying pup. Speed and no light does not mix. So out to the yard we went where we sometimes have good retrieves and sometimes we have lots of chase- no- come- back- with- toy. Still, the photos were cute and I have a record now of both good and bad retrieving at 9 weeks.  Yeah, I should have spent more time outside, but it was 100 degrees last weekend, and we played inside. Should have trained that more before Iwanted him to retrieve in front of the camera outdoors!

We wasted most of the today’s food alottment working on walking beside me without attacking my feet. I wasn’t going to waste so much time on moving ground work at this early age, but clicking and treating walking beside me is what works to keep him thinking about the position and not thinking about killing my tender toes. I can also carry a dangling toy or leash and get him to tug while walking. The attention is on killing toys not my shoes. It is working. I could not walk 10 feet with him on leash a few days ago without the shoe shark coming in for blood. Another method that works is that I can totally stop moving when he comes in for a nibble, nothing interesting happening when I am standing still, and he will stop. I think this annoying behavior will be gone in a couple more days of lots of treats, patience and toy work.

If I only practiced walking on leash when I really needed to get somewhere it would be totally frustrating. I learned 35 years ago when I strated training horses that you never wait to train something till you need the behavior NOW. Like you don’t wait to teach the stallion colt to wear a halter and load in the trailer until he cuts his leg and you have to load a couple hundred pound monster who is in panic into the trailer NOW. When they hit the ground the halter goes on and you feed them from the back of the trailer until they think it is fun jumping in and out.

This one training detail has always been at the forefront of my training plans. I don’t train walking on leash when I need to get to the field right NOW with the pup, I train it when I have no need to go anywhere other than up and down the yard to teach leash manners. I don’t teach “wait at the door skills’ when I really need to go in or out the door. I train it when I definitely don’t need to pass through the door and when I have the time to put in the effort and energy and reinforce all the skills I need long before I really need them.

In a couple days we head out of town for our first weekend of shows, Ace and the nnp (no name puppy) and me in the new RV. I am looking forward to the adventure and spending lots of play time with a pup I hope has a name before I get back home on Monday.

Here’s a couple more cute shots Marcy took of the angel puppy.
I love training pups!!!

NJG