I woke up to a blizzard and a whole bunch of fresh new snow and got to thinking... "Self, you can really do some good gee and haw work out there today by packing a trail for the dogs to follow in the field" But... I didn't want to do one dog at a time, oh no, lets hook everyone up by their collars and pretend that we are a real team. Its time to figure out who is best where anyway. Those were my famous last words of the sane part of my day
I don't have any lines or harnesses yet so I took our long line used for recall training around here and put a bunch of knots and clips and made it look professional, and if I may, super awesome! (insert pat on back here)
Now there is a brutal north wind today and still a blizzard going on, but that is no excuse to not head out and have some fun right? I just bundled up extra warm and since I couldn't find Elmo's scarf for his ears ( those bully like dogs have NO fur to protect them from winters wrath) I had to improvise.
This was our first improvisation.
Clearly it did not work well, he would just shake and off came the camo hood. So then we tried a bandanna tied around his his head like his scarf but that didn't work either. So we just went out for a brief amount of time for his sake. Its not only his ears that freeze fast, his feet are nekkid, his tail is nekkid, everything is nekkid poor guy.
So, out we go, into the TM's pen and attaching collars and lines and getting everything looking good. And boy did it ever... until we tried to move forward.
We started off with Elmo and Tibby out front and Marv and Karma behind. That was going to be the way I saw the ideal team.
Nope, I was wrong,
Elmo knows his commands well but is far too much of a clown and scatterbrained with no focus what so ever. He got kicked back in the line and then we tried Marv up front with Tibby... this worked for a few minutes. Nothing worthy of blogging about though.
All in all my plan of walking the dogs on a line through a course I had pre packed down failed miserably.
First we hit the oval trail. This way I could work on "gee" only ( or so my plan was) because I read somewhere that they would rather follow a trail than plow through the snow. Who ever said or wrote that clearly was not working with a bully breed. Like I said, Elmo has NO foucs. He heard "gee" and did a 90 degree bolt.... but he took a haw instead.
This is when the line up changed. Tibby and Marv up front got us through the oval trail both in Gee and Haw directions.
So instead of calling it a day there and being satisfied I decided, hey I laid the trail for the figure 8.
Off we go, everything went smoothly! Tibby and Marv responded well to the commands and we were just a briskly walking through the trail. Second time around, Tibby decides,"Eff this, I'm doing something else" and takes us off to the oval again. Now everything became a giant mess, I had lines under bellies, Elmo walking backwards, Tibby trying initiate play with Elmo and Karma standing still among the rukus.
After a few minutes of getting everyone back in order I decide to pull serious Karma from the back and put her up with Marv. I also made an executive decision to back up the bus a bit for them and just walk them down the road so they could understand the "New" formation I want them to walk in, meaning ahead of me and in pairs pre decided upon by me.
This went WELL.
We made up to hill 5 ( a local name of the hill by the house) and turned wonderfully. Marv did a few nice "On by" s when he thought maybe he should go pee on that snow bank over there. I was pleased.
Until... I hit the field again on the way back.
It became nothing more than a jumbled mess and everyone figured it was play time and tangled up again.
We worked on getting back to the house in a line, with some control and ended for this part of the day.
Plans are to head back out with Karma and Marv alone on the line... I want to focus on them learning to stay up front before trying to add in the rest again.
Here are a few pics of the beginning of the first attempt today.
It looks good, but looks are deceiving LOL
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