Dog sports with Rosie

I'm definitely partial, but Rosie is basically a dog genius. She is ridiculously smart and LOVES to work. It has been so much fun to train her and try all the things with her. 

Agility
Last August, after my husband and I separated, I introduced her to agility at the grand opening of the main training place we go to, and she took to it right away. She LOVES it. It took her a while to go through the tunnel, but apparently this is not unusual, since it's scary and dark. Now she's obsessed. But her biggest obsession is the A-frame. Especially when it's in the middle of the gym. Exhibit A:

Basic and Advanced Obedience
We started in Puppy Obedience and then moved to Basic when she aged out, and then quickly moved on to Advanced Obedience. I love an Obedient dog and a smart dog, who wants to work and is excited to work, is SO much fun to train. So we were practicing at home a lot. Advanced Obedience focuses on a lot of life skills, and a lot of skills needed to pass the CGC test, which we are working towards. We did take it once already and we failed the "walking in a crowd" portion. Walking in a crowd is not actually a problem for Rosie - the challenge was that the "crowd" was made up of her favorite people and I had not anticipated that particular issue being an issue. So, we have been practicing impulse control around people she loves. I was more concerned with the face to face greeting with another dog handler, which she aced!

Practicing our place command at a local bottle shop during trivia night

Rally Obedience
Rally is kind of like obedience and agility merged. It's basically an obstacle course of obedience commands. Rosie LOVES it - way more than a regular obedience class. A week or so ago, we did 3 courses in class off leash and she was the only dog in class that didn't get the zoomies while off leash. She stayed focused on me and did the course nearly flawlessly. Safe to say her mistakes were due to handler error!

Tricks
When it was super cold over the winter, we worked on tricks and practiced obedience. Rosie is quite a performer and really enjoys learning tricks. 

Her trick arsenal includes:

• Paw
• Wave
• Paws up (front paws on something - or someone! - this is needed in agility practice sometimes)
• Back feet (putting her back feet up on something - for back feet awareness)
• Beep beep (back up)
• Speak
• Rollover
• Bow
• Spin left/spin right (turns out, this is needed in Rally sometimes!)
• Center (she comes between my legs and sits)
• Crawl (she army crawls)
• Be a bear (sit pretty, for most people)
• Play dead
• Going left or right on command (handy during walks, on a Rally course, and on complex Agility courses)

Things we are still working on and/or haven't started:

• Shaking off (ie, after a bath)
• Putting her toys away on command
• Crossing her front paws (while lying down and/or standing)

Scentwork

Last fall, I signed up for a 6-week scent workshop. I figured, I have a scent hound, let's see if she likes it. But I had never done anything like it, so didn't know what to expect. Rosie took to it right away and she is SO GOOD at it. We've done 3 workshops/classes now - 2 at our main training place and 1 at a different place. Once she's in the groove, she is unstoppable! I just got her a collar with her name tag built into it that I plan to use exclusively for scent stuff. I am hoping that that helps her get into the zone faster and faster once she puts it together. And I have absolutely NO doubts that she will put 2 and 2 together.

Happy Ratters

This past Saturday, Rosie and I did a Happy Ratters trial. It was a lot of fun! I was a little worried that she'd be nervous about the boxes and trash bags used to simulate an "urban" environment in the first 2 events - because she's not super thrilled with those things at home - but she didn't even care! We did 6 events total. She got points in all of them, and placed in 3 of them - including 1st in her second event ever! In the first event, she was kind of like, what the heck are we doing, mom? But she's so smart that when she found the rat tube and alerted, she got rewarded for it, so when we immediately went to the next area to do the second event, she was like, "ok, I understand the assignment - RAT!" By the 3rd event, when the signal to go in went off, she dragged me to the door, and when I opened it - she dragged me to the ring like a sled dog pulling a sled. She was SO ready to go! Safe to say, she had fun! She was completely wiped out by the last event and was barely alerting. I had to have her go back and show me again to make sure I was reading her right - I was - but that cost us some time! I think next time we'll skip doing the short morning walk and just chance that she is going to be a little hot at the beginning.

Post-Happy Ratters exhaustion

Barnhunt

We haven't tried this yet, but based on how she took to Happy Ratters, I think we'll probably give it a shot in the fall!