First, Jenn and I have a new web site.  It’s about 50% complete but we add to it almost every day.  It will include information on our dogs, breeding plans, training information from us and a lot more.  We may try to incorporate this blog into the site some kind of way.  Check it out: http://www.furrariaussies.com.

We had the Crusty Classic (California State disc dog championships) around Halloween.  It’s a 2-day event and the dogs did awesome.  Little muse got to introduce herself to everybody and was a star in her own right!  The dogs got some great placements and recorded some of the highest scores during the weekend.  Here’s Enzo’s round with the bones costume!

Muse also caught her first disc at just 13 weeks old.  We are working mostly on very basic foundation skills including a lot of tug work.  She’s doing really well and most importantly, she’s having fun and Slayte and her are the absolute best of friends!

We got Muse at 11 weeks old from Apropos Aussies and she is a sweetie pie. Although it’s very early on, it appears she has a unique combination of strong food drive, strong toy drive and an off switch. When you pull out a toy, she wants to play, play play. When you put the toy away, she is content to lay in her crate or play with a toy on her own. She is friendly with every person and every dog she comes across. She is having an issue with submissive peeing right now, but we believe that will improve with time. She is the newest member of Team Furrari! Thanks to Marci for the pix!

Enzo and Slayte both qualified for the AWI finals this year. Jenn had plans of going to the USDAA Nationals the same weekend in Denver, but told me we should do AWI. The way she said it, she was hinting that it was because she thought we were going to have a good shot at placing high.

We left Wednesday night and I started feeling a cold come on and on Saturday it was at its worst. I was friggin’ sick. Saturday was the AWI Championship. You have a round of freestyle and a round of toss/fetch. The top 15 combined scores make it to the finals for another round of freestyle. There were 45 teams and they were all awesome. You need a great round of freestyle and a great round of toss/fetch to have any hope at all of making it.

Enzo was virtually flawless. Our first round of freestyle was great and we had a very solid score. I knew it all came down to the toss/fetch round and if he caught all my throws, we’d make it to the finals. For toss/fetch we had another perfect round! He nearly got 5 throws off, which has never happened before. Our score was high. High enough for 7th place going to the finals!

In the final round, Enzo was EVEN BETTER with one of the best rounds we’ve ever had. The final scores came out and as they counted off the top 10, we were in 6th place! I can’t be more happy with the result and love my Enzo beyond belief.

Here are his two freestyle rounds:

Little Slayte was very concerned during his freestyle round. He had a really hard time focusing or putting much effort into it. He still managed to catch 81%, which is really high, even at the championship level. However, his lack of interest resulted in very low scores. His toss/fetch round was significantly better and ended up putting him at 30th out of about 45 teams. I am still proud of how he did, especially coming back strong in toss/fetch.

Sunday was another competition with several games. Toss/fetch, 4-20 freestyle and timed course. For toss/fetch, they took the top 15 to the finals. Enzo, Slayte and Tooney all made it to the finals and had great rounds in the finals, too! They all finished very high with Tooney the highest, then Slayte, then Enzo. Jenn played toss/fetch in the intermediate division and placed 2nd and 3rd with Slayte and Enzo.

4-20 is a freestyle event with 4 discs and 20 seconds. The only rule is you can’t pick discs up off the ground. The dog can give you a disc, though. It’s very fast-paced and exciting. I wasn’t even sure if I should enter the competition, but figured I’d try it. They took a cut for the top 10. Both Slayte and Enzo made the cut! Enzo had an awesome final round and secured the 2nd place trophy! It is the coolest trophy ever!

Timed course is 4 discs and you need to get a catch at 10 yards, 20 yards and a catch in a zone at 20 yards. Fastest time wins. All the dogs did very well both rounds for me, but not high enough to place. In the novice division, Jenn won it with Slayte and got 2nd with Enzo!

Slayte made a remarkable turnaround from his confused state of mind on Saturday to a rabid disc obsessive maniac on Sunday (ie, his normal self). He had 10 rounds of disc play on Sunday and was AWESOME all 10 rounds. We just need to give him more time and we believe the problem could be related to the first day of competition being uncomfortable by his surroundings.

One final note. I feel blessed to have these awesome dogs and a wife that supports and helps us along the way. It’s awesome!

Work has been crazy for me. It’s starting to ease up. We decided to go to Colorado this year for the Colorado Canine Challenge. We haven’t gone there since 2008 I think. In 2008 it was a bad experience for all kinds of reasons. This year I felt we should give it a go. This is one of the biggest disc dog competitions in the world and is very tough. I think they said something like 15 states were represented at the competition!

This is the first time I did freestyle with Tooney since she reinjured her shoulder. She did great and ended up something like 15th place. She is awesome! She also made the cut for the toss and fetch but was too tired for the final round to be able to have a chance at winning that.

Enzo and Slayte both made the cut in freestyle! I was so excited!!!! Enzo ended up taking 2nd overall. Yeah, 2nd! I am so proud of him. Slayte is already getting high freestyle scores and he has not really performed in competition like he does in practice. I think that’s going to change soon and I can’t wait for it. He’s so good, but he usually doesn’t have the energy and mental fortitude to be able to do it on competition day. I think towards the end of this year things are going to start improving for him and I can’t wayt!!!

LG is in Excellent A in both JWW and Standard after just 6 weekends of trials. He is so awesome and so easy right now. Only thing that I don’t like is his startline. I seem to be able to get to where I need to by saying Wait! but he is pretty pushy and always gets up. Actually he always lays down and then stands up and takes a couple steps. Now that we are out of open, I am going to take some pressure off of him on his dogwalk and teeter contacts and see what happens. I’ve been telling him to wait to make sure he stops but seems to be causing a little creepiness so I am going to try to not say anything. His running aframe has been right on the line often but I feel like he should get it eventually. He is not one striding so that is good. He already has two ExA JWW q’s!

Here is his Open Standard run which finished his OA title

Here is his first time in Excellent JWW.

There are more videos on youtube but I am not going to post them all here.

It’s been really hot here too. 90s-100s for the past month. I am ready for cooler weather but I am glad to see that Slayte is ok with working in the heat. When it is this hot my brain doesn’t work that well. Enzo hasn’t gotten a double Q in quite some time so we still need 3 more for nationals.

We’ve been to two trials since my last post. Aug 11-12 weekend was a really solid weekend for Slayte. He Q’d in both FAST runs. The novice sends were not an issue at all. He Q’d in both novice JWW runs and one standard run. The first JWW run was completely clean and smooth and second was good too except that he missed the weave entry. Those two Q’s finished his NAJ! His standard run on Saturday was really good too. Contacts were all really solid. In Sunday’s standard run, I did a front cross before the aframe which shortened up his stride and he ended up missing the aframe contact. He also self released off the dogwalk because the tunnel was calling to him. Qing 5 out of 6 runs was just incredible for the baby dog! Enzo q’d in standard on Sat and just missed a double q by one bar in JWW. Grrr.

Last weekend was just horribly hot. Close to 100 every day and more humid than normal for around here. I don’t function all that well in that kind of heat but the dogs did ok. I ran Enzo 3 days and Slayte two days. Enzo only q’d in one JWW run and one standard for the weeked. We missed a double q by one bar again! On Friday Slayte had a bar and would only do 10 weaves in T2B. In open JWW he did the weaves but got an off course tunnel. Then in standard he had a flying teeter flyoff. The teeter barely tipped before he came off the end. Not sure if he was too excited or thought it was the dogwalk. He did hesitate a bit at the top of the upramp of the dogwalk. I also pulled him off a jump because I overdid it on turning cues. Such a big difference between Enzo the missle and Slayte the gumby dog.

Slayte’s T2B run on sunday was pretty nice so I bought the video even though we didn’t Q. He was about 3 seconds behind the fastest 20″ dog who is a really fast BC. I tried another front cross before the aframe and that shortened his stride up again. But hey he got his weave entrance and he did all 12! Lol. We can’t really practice weave entrances at a lot of speed in our yard. He does fine in class so all that should come with experience. In open jww he did good except for blowing by the weaves and then popping out at 10, twice. Novice standard had another course that teally needed a front before the aframe. I didn’t want to do that and I haven’t practiced severe pushes off the aframe so I just let him come off in front of me and stepped behind him. Also missed the weave entry again and didn’t stay on the table. Good enough for a Q in novice so that finished his NA! Really proud of him running so well in the heat too.
Also bought a video of Enzo’s JWW run from Sunday because it was one of our better runs in a while! He got first place in this run too.

On July 29, I ran LG in AKC Novice standard and JWW and he got his first two Q’s! Hooray for the baby dog! Neither run was perfect but jumpers was clean. All the mistakes were handling induced and lg did his job. It is a little strange for me to go out with my baby dog and actually have him do exactly what I would expect him to do! Enzo was a wreck in standard the first time I ran him. Enzo didn’t want to lay down or sit on the table, refused the chute and I completely forgot to expose him to a panel jump. Probably didn’t perform his contacts correctly either. This time I made sure to prepare lg for the things that we forget to train properly. Enzo ended up moving into Ex JWW very quickly but it was several months later before we could Q in standard.

Lg’s stopped contacts are also way more solid than any other dog I’ve trained. I did two things differently. First I trained the behavior without a nose target. Our puppy class instructor Geri, had us teach the end position on the teeter first. No props just hop on the end into 2on/off. I did have him lay down on the end at first since he didn’t want to shift his weight back before. It was much harder to teach and took longer but I think he understands better. The other thing that I did differently was to fade food rewards early on. I feel like my other dogs would get “ringwise” when they quickly realized they weren’t getting a cookie in the ring. So sometimes Slayte gets rewarded with a toy and sometimes he gets to continue. Time will tell but even in these early stages I can see that the behavior is much stronger.

Here is his JWW run. I over pulled him on that first turn because I was worried about the jump to the left. That is a typical Enzo move. Hard to switch gears for me. The closing line was pretty hard. It was a very slight zig zag. I was hoping to run it as a straight line but that didn’t quite work out. Not suprised. The rest was great and he nailed the weaves. I just need to remember to not rush ahead at the weaves.

Then Standard. I tried to shape his approach to the dogwalk and over did it a bit but it worked out fine. He did a great stop at the end. I probably released him a little too quick but I got excited and said Yes! as soon as his front feet hit. His aframe contact was borderline. He was doing great on the aframe and then he started one striding so when I marked that he started shortening up a little. That started just a couple weeks ago. Last night in class our instructer told me that maybe I need to stay closer and that seemed to help. He drove really nice to the table, didn’t fall off, and stayed when I led out! Awesome! I didn’t really handle the next part well. I ran up too far before rear crossing the chute so he didn’t see it at all. In hindsight, I led out far enough that a front cross before the chute would have been easy. We still got the Q though since you can have faults in novice! Love that. I really want to get out of novice and open quickly so I don’t have to wait all day! The waiting is painful.