Showed Chloe at Mid-Jersey and she is definitely still rusty but
We had lots of fun anyway, despite NQing both classes, both days.
Thursday in Utility, she blew the signals - started to drop, started to worry and ended up freezing half-way down. Not unexpected as that’s exactly what she did in her first Utility show last Spring when she still wasn’t sure. She also had an issue on the first go-out where she didn’t sit when/where commanded to so ended up in the wrong spot and missed the jump. Then in Open, she started to go down on the DOR, all of a sudden one of her front legs came way up off the ground like something had bitten her and she sat up. I think there was a sharp piece of weed or something.
The problem I have always had with her in back-to-back shows is that the second day she tends to repeat what she did the first day, because since I wasn’t able to correct her for it, she assumes that I must have been ok with it. So I woke up extra early on Friday, got her to the show site and trained, trained, trained Signals for a while. Also worked on the DOR as she was leery about dropping at first.
So on Friday, she did her signals - I was BEYOND happy with her. So happy that when it came time to send her out for the first article, my “Find it” came out in this weird, high pitched squeak completely unlike the way I usually say it and she flinched, hesitated and looked at me like “WHAT did you just say?”. So I had to give her a second command - completely MY fault on that one. Then on gloves, the ring was pretty shady, but there were some dappled lighter patches where the sun came through the trees and of course glove 3 (the one we were doing) was right in one of those patches. Even I found it very hard to see and I knew for a fact there was a glove there. She did a beautiful pivot, but when I gave her the mark to the glove I could tell she didn’t really see it. She then looked at glove 2, but you could see the wheels turning that she knew from the way she was sitting she shouldn’t be going over that direction, so she didn’t go to glove 2 (which I was very happy about). She looked back towards glove 3 but still didn’t clearly see it so I sent her again with a flying send like I use for go-outs. As soon as she got about 3 feet ahead of where we were, you could see her make out the glove and she went right out and got it. Guess I need to practice some blind retrieves with her, LOL, but I was happy she didn’t default to Glove 2. Go-outs, she needed two commands to sit on the first one - the one mistake from Thursday that I hadn’t had the opportunity to work on, so I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed. In Open, she dropped on the DOR, and then lay there looking at me like where’s my cookie for dropping, so I had to use two commands to get her to come up off the drop - guess I practiced too much dropping and not enough full exercise in the limited time I had to work with her Friday morning.
All in all, I was very pleased with her - she’s not all that far off of where she was before having the pups ... signals and the DOR were the hardest things to learn and the first to fall apart and I think it will be relatively easy to get those back now. The problem is there are very few Obedience trial over the next few months - not really until March/April. There’s one in November that I accidentally entered because I misread the premium but I can’t legally show there since my trainer is the judge. And of course I didn’t find that out until AFTER it closed which makes me feel guilty because there is a waitlist. The plan is to go ahead and show her, but have an option for how I can NQ myself without screwing her up so that it won’t matter. Then we’ll probably have her spayed in December so that she won’t have to miss the March/April shows by coming into season.
