Thursday, March 20, 2014

Happy Spring!

Spring officially arrived at exactly 9:57 this morning. And since it was a cool but sunny day we decided to spend as much of the day as we could outside. This included a nice long walk in the forest and a lot of snooping around in the yard. Well the dogs were snooping, I was working. Getting 4 summer tires out of a shed in over 2 feet of snow can be fun, but today it was easy as everything was froze nice and solid. I think I tired them out.

Don't know why he prefers tile to sleep on. Must trim the hairy feet!

A sleeping hound is a good hound, she has sugar on her from helping me eat a Tim Bit!

Bucky the Mule Deer, he is lucky the canines didn't see him

Davie the glove thief

Emmi and her Timmy's cup

Icy driveway, still over 2 feet of snow

Sunday, March 16, 2014

It's Melting!

I do believe spring may be coming. The snow has dropped at least a foot since last week end. We have had a busy couple of weeks. The first weekend in March Emmi and I did a Level 4 K9 Nosework workshop with Dana Gallagher. It was a lot of fun. We worked with three odours, birch, wintergreen and anise. It was a cold windy weekend so a good one to spend in doors.  Since then we have been working on odour with both Em and Davie. For a guy I used to call "Mr No Nose" Davie is doing great. He just gets a little too excited when we first start but gets down to business pretty quick.
 
The following weekend was the Top Dog Agility Trial. It was a busy weekend for me and a boring one for Davie and Emmi. The trial was indoors at the Agriplex. It is the indoor arena used by the Prince George Horse Society. I did enter Em in Starters Jumpers. And she did exactly like I thought she would, a couple of tunnels then the nose kicked in. Can't blame a hound who hasn't seen dirt on 4 months. So today we went up to another barn to practice. After a case of the zoomies she settled down and did decent work. Once she gets the idea that equipment in a barn/field means agility not sniffing I think we will be on the road.

And Davie got to go herd ducks too last week. He was so good. He didn't even back down when the "Duck with Attitude" was going after him, he stood his ground and Mr Duck changed his mind. I need to make a concentrated effort to find a place to work him on sheep.

Here is the link to a video of Emmi looking for birch on chairs. After she figured out boxes weren't involved she got down to work.


These two pictures show how the snow is slowly dropping.
March 7th

March 15th
Watching for the numerous squirrels that have appeared!