The Spaniel Annals

working and living with performance spaniels

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I’m a retired English instructor, now devoted full-time to training, showing and enjoying my spaniels in many sports.
I’m an English college instructor by trade, a dog trainer by vocation. And lifelong baseball fan.

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    What to do about Rozzie

    The picture below, taken yesterday on my patio, seems to capture the essence of Rozzie, who is Reardon’s sister and Kani’s daughter: an endearing and classic spaniel expression, and a little buzz-saw tail that never stops wagging.

    But for the past few months, I’ve been puzzling over what to do with her.  While she’s very much a part of our pack, sleeping on my bed every night, and bearing novice titles in obedience and agility that attest to the training time I’ve spent with her, I often feel guilty that she receives less training time than the other young dogs in our home.  I kept her originally in  hopes that she would be my brood bitch, as she possesses a wonderfully outcrossed pedigree and the sweetness, energy and willingness to please of the true spaniel.  But the many health problems of her siblings  make me far too uncomfortable to breed her.  As my training with Journey and Reardon intensifies while they continue through the upper obedience classes, I find it unlikely that next year she’ll get any more training than she’s gotten this year.

    So what to do with her?  I’ve even considered placing her in the next year or so, which is something I’ve never done before.  It would certainly have to be the right home, probably with another dog since she’s never been truly alone, not to mention a very adoring family.  Typically I hash over thoughts like these for a few weeks, and then she does something wonderful and adorable that makes me think how much I would miss her.  In truth, she probably receives as much or more activity and companionship with me than what she would receive in a pet home.  She might also have a litter this year; despite my misgivings, her breeder has a “string” on her and still wants to breed her because of her value in his experimental crossings of show and field lines.  So she might have a try at motherhood soon.  After that she can be spayed, and no more heat cycles!

    Sometimes instead of obsessively swinging back and forth between these various thoughts of Rozzie’s future, we just go do something fun.  Friday we went to Bow Wow FunTowne, which is an indoor swimming pool in Lake City.  It might sound ridiculous to take a dog swimming inside in 78 degree weather, but the Bow Wow swimming pool has one important quality: a raised deck so that Rozzie can practice diving off for DockDogs.  She’s finally working up the courage to jump off the side rather than take the ramp, and we have a competition in 2 weeks.  “Competition” is being melodramatic, as Rozzie will not be giving any labradors a run for placements; I’ll just be thrilled if she takes a few jumps off the dock. In this next picture you can see that she’s finally jumping off the side.  Well, okay, witnesses might call this “falling” or “sliding” off the side:

    But once Rozzie’s in the water, she’s a guppy and loves to retrieve her bumper.    She’s actually a fast, powerful swimmer.

    Mission accomplished.  Rozzie figured out the ramp quite quickly.  That’s her springer friend Strider in the foreground.

    So what to do about Rozzie?  Take her swimming, I guess.  Every other Friday I’m up in the Maltby area for an obedience private lesson.  Maybe Rozzie and I will become frequent Bowwower  visitors…

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    Reardon CAN track when no one is watching…

    We came, we saw and we failed the last tracking test of the spring in Sprague, Washington, with Reardon starting beautifully, and then hitting a critter mound.  He never quite recovered after that first glorious drowning in critter scent (mice? bunnies?).  His expression veered back and forth from “Bunnies! Whee!!” to a somewhat confused “oops, we’re supposed to be tracking..” and back again.  In retrospect it was rather comical, but at the time I don’t remember laughing.  I think I was too busy pleading. And he was very busy having fun.   I’m sure the tracking community will breathe a sign of relief that we will be entering no more tests until fall, so we can spend the next several months working on Reardon’s focus.

    In the meantime, I joined my friend Lisa Kaufman for some “easy” tracking this last Sunday, on grounds very familiar to Reardon.  Of course Reardon was close to perfect.   And just to lift my spirits, Lisa caught some magical photos of him.  Here he is on the track, bunny-less and all business:

    Image

    Afterwards Lisa caught him in a lovely headstudy.  I need to get this one blown up and framed, I think.

    Thanks for these beautiful photos of my guy, Lisa!

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    A lovely training morning

    Not many people would consider a rainy, somewhat cold spring day a “lovely” morning, but for my springer/setter pack, it was perfect.  Before an afternoon of grading, I took Reardon, Gael and Kani to some public grounds near North Bend.  This particular field isn’t huge, but it’s large enough for one regulation track and one baby track.

    Reardon’s start flags for his track

    Gael’s baby track consisted of two turns, 225 yards total and aged 20 minutes.  Reardon’s track was about 400 yards with 3 turns, aged over 1/2 hour.  Both dogs ran their tracks beautifully, handling their corners well and never getting lost or distracted.  I am getting used to Gael’s tracking style, which is more energetic, intense, and somewhat stop-and-go as she has to check out the various smells around the track.  This tendency to “hunt” the area might go away with more experience, and when she gets back on track, her indication is very strong.  I was quite happy with both of them.

    Then it was Kani’s turn.  Kani was not here to track.  It was her first day doing some preliminary work for Master Hunter.  A lot of this has more to do with getting her back into shape after a long illness.  We’ll have the summer to work more intensely and specifically on various exercises.

    You see, Kani has had a miraculous recovery.  There’s truly a bit of miracle healing involved, with a lot of detective work.   I hope I can now say she will never be ill again–until old age finally stops her–but for now I’m just grateful for today.

    As she initially began to recover a few months ago, my mind instantly went to getting her back into the obedience ring.  However, as we began to play with the exercises, I sensed some tentativeness with her, a slight leveling of enthusiasm.  After my first excitement about working her again for a UDX and possibly an OTCH, I began to wonder about how much baggage might surround the obedience ring for her–how much stress having to perform when she wasn’t feeling 100%, how many failures that had undermined our confidence.

    So for now, we’re turning to the master hunter work that we had started several years ago, but never completed.  She does have some notion of hupping on the whistle and the flying bumper.  She’s also a great little retriever.  We’ll take this summer to play with it, get her back into shape, and see what the future holds.  We’ll also develop a 2nd level freestyle exercise for  a competition in November (she has her “Beginner Freestyle Dog” title, which is the 1st level).

    Beyond that, who knows? She’s 9 years old, but as we walked out of the vet’s office for her recent recheck, the vet exclaimed, “She’s like a 4-year-old!”  Today we did some quartering and hupping to the whistle, a few doubles at about 50 yards (thanks to my lousy throwing arm) and a few memory retrieves.  She did beautifully and ended the session with her tail wagging madly.  That’s my girl!

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    Happy Birthday, Gael!

    Gael will be 2 years old on the 23rd.  To celebrate, I put together this simple little video.  I have a much more sophisticated movie-making software program in my computer, but the intimidation factor will keep me from finishing the video in time, so here’s the primitive Flipshare version.  By the way, I’ve already decided that the soundtrack song, “Tell  Me What’s On Your Mind” by Information Society, will be her music for her first freestyle routine.  The refrain “Pure Energy” just seems to fit my girl.:-)

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    A sad night

    Tonight I found out about the passing of a great obedience dog in the Gordon Setter world.  I never got to see her work, but heard much about her and her owner, Diane Bartlett, and watched their progress and successes over the years.  Tory earned an AKC UDX, a Canadian OTCH, and won several all-breed and specialty High in Trials.  I know how much her owner loved her and was so proud of her achievements.  The pain of losing a dog that you’ve worked so closely with and lived with for many years is absolutely excruciating.  My heart goes out to Diane tonight.   It was only just last week that, for many reasons, I was grieving over losing my Gordon girl, Vita, who passed in 2009.  In the middle of my grief, I was so grateful to look up and see the lively face of my current Gordon, Gael, happily chewing on a bone and so full of life.

    I’m reminded by a friend that I never updated this blog about Reardon’s first track. I’ll go into more detail (maybe) on another night, but Reardon didn’t pass.  Lots of things came into play: he’d had a relapse of his auto-immune condition a few weeks before and we were having to adjust his prednizone; in the draw he got one of the swampy tracks, a tracking condition that he’s still struggling with; maybe it just wasn’t our day.  There’s an approximately 60% pass rate for the TD, and we landed in that 40%.  He did try very hard, and we actually got to the last corner before he just couldn’t figure out which way to go.  We’ll be trying again soon.  The end of the school quarter means an end to the mountain of papers for a few weeks, so we’ll have more time to practice….

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    First tracking test tomorrow!

    The wonderful news is that Reardon has been certified for entering tracking tests, and our first test is tomorrow up in Bow, WA.  Tracking tests only require one pass to earn a title, so tomorrow could signal a new title and a step forward in our training, or it could mean a long wait for the next test.  There’s another one in Eugene this spring, but I’d have to do some major re-arranging of my spring dog budget to make it happen.  Otherwise we wait until fall.

    The bad news is the state of my nerves.  Forget mental management, forget staying focused the process, I’m NERVOUS.  I can attest to the fact that it’s very difficult to run a track when you’re hyperventilating, but that’s probably what I’ll be doing tomorrow.  I did it with Hank’s TD, and I did it with Reardon’s certification.  As long as I don’t pass out, we’ll be okay.   Tracking is just too new of a sport for me to feel otherwise.  One worry I have is that Reardon is much more tuned into me than Hank was while tracking; it’s worked well to smile at him if he looks back at me (again, a difficult thing to do when hyperventilating)…

    I really just need to view tomorrow as another tracking experience.  I’m planning on continuing to track with Reardon on the TDX level, so we’ll be going on with training anyway.  But it sure would be nice to get that title….(process, Laura, process!)

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    I’m in a tracking state of mind….

    Tracking with Reardon and Gael this winter has caused me to become much more intrigued with this sport. For some years now, I’ve been searching for a second sport for my dogs other than obedience.  I wanted the sport to be good exercise and call upon their natural instincts.  I also wanted it to depend upon a completely different mindset and preparation than obedience, where so much is about precision in human-dictated boundaries. 

    I might have found it with tracking.  Beyond its fit with my requirements above, I’m deeply enjoying the training.  (The tests and certifications still make me nervous as hell, but this too shall pass.)  It has a meditative, almost otherworldly quality about it, where I am encouraging my dog’s instincts in a realm I can only glimpse: the world of scent.  I love this old photo of Hank, my TD dog now passed, who was a driven tracking dog.  You can see the intensity in his movement (I had to wrap the line around my waist and hang back so that he didn’t pull me over).  His eyes are open but sightless; the world is entering his being through his nose.

    Hank earned his TD in Wenatchee in 1998, so he would have been 2 1/2.  We had trained for a year to prepare.  In this award photo, you can see the terrain we tracked in: dirt, brown dead grass and sagebrush.  Up to this point, we had been training in the grassy fields in the first photo; we had no idea the test in Wenatchee would be so different.  Amazingly, it made no difference to Hank.  He finished his 400+ yard track in just about 4 minutes.  As the judges huffed and puffed up to us while I held up the glove, one of the judges exclaimed, “He’s crazy!”  I don’t think she was being entirely complimentary.  Hank ran tracks like the devil was…well, not after him, but certainly encouraging him.

    Hank was my heartbreak kid in many ways, and one way was coming 75 yards away from the glove in the TDX test at the Springer Spaniel National a few years later.  He had tracked magnificently for close to an hour.  (A TDX track is around 800-1000 yards and is aged several hours).   For much of track, I had the soundtrack from the movie Glory playing in my head, which has many rousing marches.  Much of Hank’s effort on that track truly took my breath away.  But on the last corner, he got distracted by a deer track, and after several attempts, he just could not finish that last leg. 

    For reasons I no longer remember, we didn’t try again for the TDX.  I wish now we’d made more effort towards that goal.  I’m beginning to hope Reardon will be the dog to fulfill that dream.  More in Part II of these ruminations….

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    Reardon’s training takes some leaps!

    Sometimes accomplishments (or should I say “attainments”?) in dog training take months and even years to come to fruition.  This is especially true in obedience trialing and another sport we’ve been working, tracking.  In a remarkable synchronicity, Reardon has made some big leaps recently in both sports.

    In his obedience work, our challenge in getting ready for the next level (called Open) has revolved around his confidence working off leash and away from me.  Working off-leash is required throughout this class, and for Reardon, that leash linked to me was like an umblical cord he’s been afraid to let go.  All I could do was give him experience after experience in different locations to show him it wasn’t a big deal.  Sometimes if he lost attention, got out of position, or was otherwise distracted he would get corrected.  Other times, I helped him.  Often he got a little of both.  I had to read the situation and read him to choose what would work best.  And when he did well, we had a Reardon party!

    Over December and early January, we had the opportunity to do a number of fun matches, and over a recent weekend, Reardon performed in two fun matches in two separate locations Saturday and Sunday.  That weekend, all of a sudden his confidence blossomed!  It’s hard to say what turned the corner, but this video shows his tail wagging and his attention on me, even when I asked for additional distractions during the heeling.  We still have some issues to work through–mouthing his dumbbell and slightly inaccurate fronts and finishes–but he’s come a long way in the last few months.  Here’s our video from  that Sunday:

    On another very happy day, Reardon certified in tracking.  This means he can now enter AKC tracking tests.  Certification is issued by an AKC tracking judge.  To pass, Reardon had to successfully track the judge’s path, running 480 yards, with 4 turns, and aged for a little over a half hour.   This is a typical TD (Tracking Dog) track, so it’s very similar to what we’ll experience in a test. 

    We’ve been working on Reardon’s tracking off and on since he was a puppy, and he’s always enjoyed it.  In this sport too, I’m seeing his confidence level rise.  We’re now waiting to hear if our entry has been accepted for the upcoming tracking test in Bow, WA on March 4th.    There are 12 spots, so we should be able to get in, but if there are more than 12 entries, the club holds a “draw” for the teams who get to run the test.    If we don’t get into this test, there are 3 other spring tracking tests, but they’re in eastern Washington and Eugene.  I hope we can stay closer to home!

    Whatever happens with the tests, we have our certification, which is good for a year.  I’m really enjoying the training part of this sport, so I’m beginning to think the test, whenever it is, will simply be a next step in a longer journey.   Way to go, Reardon!

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    Journey’s CDX photo

    Journey’s never gotten a professional win photo with me.  I vaguely remember reasons why; when she got her CD, I was quite ill with thyroid disease (heading into surgery).  We pretty much finished the title and she returned to her breeder.  Then she’s been bounced back and forth since then, although she’s now here to stay with me.  To celebrate that fact, I thought I’d post her first placement/titling photo that we got for her Open title.  It’s not the greatest shot–I wish I didn’t always look like I’d just stuck my fingers in a light socket–but it’s a good one of her.  Journey and I have room for improvement, but I was very pleased with how far we’d come with this last leg (see the earlier video), and she had only been back with me since June after having her litter.  Way to go, my Journey-girl!

  • “When violence begins, training ends”
    Anonymous

    Gael joins the pack!

    When I got Gael as an 8-week-old puppy, I knew I’d need to be a little careful introducing her into a very tight-knit pack of 3 springers: mother, son and daughter.  I expected Kani to use common sense, but she would also be inclined to issue “motherly” corrections.  Rozzie I could trust absolutely.  At the time, Reardon was still struggling with auto-immune issues, and not always reliable.  While I could also trust to the typical setter “get-along” temperament, I knew a puppy wouldn’t always be able to control herself or know “the rules.”

    So I was careful about introduction and monitored their time together.  But I soon realized I had a lot more on my hands: Gael was a driven, willful, full-of-herself puppy.  I wanted that, but it made her integration into the close little springer circle a bit more challenging.  Plus I couldn’t let her just run loose in the house all the time; I soon discovered that an un-monitored Gael meant ripped drapes, holes in couches,  and any other fun and destructive activity she could get into!   

    That finally meant that while Gael was always with us, un-monitored time was time in a crate.  I didn’t feel good about this, but bought the largest wire crate I could find and put it in the living room. She slept with us in the bedroom in a crate too.  Then she had training/play time with me, play time with Rozzie, and carefully monitored time outside with Kani and Reardon.  She did get some corrections from my two “fun police,” but they were very limited and quickly interrupted by me.  Gael has grown up to be a confident, still willful(!) Gordon setter, who thinks springers are her playmates.  She has also learned to be respectful, and is actually calming down for brief periods in the house!  I can now allow her out and free while I’m writing or teaching on the computer, and most times I’ll walk out to the living room to find her quietly hanging out on the couch. 

    It’s only been in the past few months, I’ve gained a sense of her truly being part of the pack.  Reardon plays with her a lot, and she is now allowed in all of the places deemed “sacred” by the springers: up on the bed and couch, and in the kitchen.   The photo below is obviously staged, but it’s still a good marker of changes happening: the springers and Gael hanging out in the living room (Gael’s big crate  is in the background), and wonder of wonders, Gael is maintaining a STAY!  So you see, wild and crazy Gordons really do grow up!