Dogs in Motion

Outdoors rules

Last weekend (April Fool’s day) we went to a trial hosted by a GSD club down in Indy. It was a typical “nice” spring day in Indiana - chilly, cloudy, breezy, threatening rain… and the trial was outdoors. Yeah, they actually still do some of those around here.

Of course most people avoid outdoor trials. Either they are top handlers who don’t want to risk a lower score or can’t be bothered for such tiny trials, or they are less skilled trainers who don’t train outside and can’t believe that their dogs can work outdoors. And I guess a lot of people only train indoors.

Well, as it happens, I train outdoors the vast majority of the time. Summer, winter, whenever, most of my training time ends up being outside, usually on my lunch hour at school, since Molly goes to school with me every day anyway.

So you would think we would have an advantage at an outdoor trial. You would think so, and for once that would be right. Molly turned in what was arguably her best ever Utility run and won Utility B with a 192. Of course there was only one other dog entered, so we got no points, but still it was an eye-opener. Now, to look for more outdoor trials.

The AKC “Steals” My Idea…

About a month ago I wrote my Front and Finish article for April. My suggestion then was that moaning about the lack of television coverage for obedience was pointless, since the entertainment industry mainly goes with things that have been proven.

I suggested that we needed to break out our video cameras and tape events and post them on the web as a way to build interest in the sport.

Great minds must think alike, because guess what has just shown up on the AKC’s web site… 22 QuickTime video clips of the international competition at Crufts. And the look like they were taken by an amateur with a personal video camera.

If they would have just waited until F&F was actually published I could have claimed they stole my idea. But as it is, it’s a start. So get yourself over there and start downloading.

Starting on the Judging Road

I am now officially a UKC apprentice judge for all classes of obedience. I started the process in January and took the written test three weeks ago. The first part of the process was a lengthy resume of my life in dogs, which took a while to pull together. After they accepted that they sent me their written test.

The written test is 25 multiple choice and true/false questions and is open book. That sounds easy, but the questions are worded to be tricky and they cover the whole spectrum of the rules fairly well. I spent about two hours on it, working through all the possibilities with the rulebook, and ended up getting all 25 right.

The next step is to apprentice judge three times. An apprentice follows a licensed judge in the ring at a trial, and at the end the apprentice’s score sheets are compared to the judge and the judge decides whether or not the apprentice judged according to the rules.

All of this sounds like a bit of a hassle, but it’s a far easier process than the AKC’s and I think the UKC can use the support.

So if you see me following a judge in the next year or so….

Ratings woes

We got our February issue of Front and Finish freakishly early this month, (last Tuesday, to be exact) and it took Becky only a second to see that the Open A and Utility A ratings published were not quite right.

They were listed as being the 2005 ratings, but she could tell that they didn’t take into account all of 2005, because she and Riker had scores from October that clearly weren’t in the points calculations. More checking of other dogs we knew confirmed this.

I sent an email to Bob Self, Jr and after some checking it turns out that there were two errors involved. First, the ratings were supposed to have been for 2004, not 2005, since the 2004 OA and UA ratings were never published. Apparently the title had gotten changed in later stages of publication.

The second problem the was that the 2005 ratings were used, which were incomplete since F&F hasn’t recieved all of results from the AKC yet.

It boggles belief that the AKC hasn’t yet gotten around to sending 3 lousy Excel files to Bob, particularly since the results for all of 2005 have been on the web site for a month now, but that’s a different issue.

Anyway, look for F&F to be reprinting the 2004 OA and UA ratings in the next month or two.

Update

It  now looks as though the 2004 results will be posted on the F&F website, and the 2005 ratings will be in the March issue. It was starting to be a bit late for 2004 and thanks to some phone calls to the AKC, Bob got the full 2005 results over the weekend.

Injury Update

Ouch….

No, I’m not gonna wear black pants…

The UDX Equation

I just submitted my February article where I talk a little bit about the probabilities of double qualifiers in the pursuit of a UDX. It seems a little counter-intuitive, but if qualifying in the two classes is really unrelated, the odds against double Q’s increase dramatically as the pass rates in those classes decline.

I wonder if anyone will make the argument that the two classes are more closely related. The problem with addressing that argument is that no one has enough info to even guess at how much of correlation there might be. Let us all thank the AKC for not reporting when someone flunks, only when they qualify…

Still, if a lot of people report beating the average, there might be something to it. It only stands to reason that there are occasions where a team is “on” and more likely to qualify in both and other occasions when they are not and so are likely to flunk both.

I guess I almost hope I’m wrong - it’s really sort of depressing if the probabilities are right.

Finally, we do something right

This past weekend Molly and I did Utility at the Lansing, MI shows. We did OK, qualifying in the mid/upper 180’s both days. There were some mistakes, of course, but none of the them were major, and we both stayed on the same page the entire time, which was a big improvement.

We only did Utility (instead of trying for UDX legs) because we had been having some trouble staying connected and focused between exercises. Some trouble? As Kent Delaney put it last spring, “It looks like she doesn’t even know you’re in the ring.” UKC hasn’t been quite so bad, but we’ve been struggling in AKC.

Judie Howard gave me some very useful tips on improving attention and Pat Kelly pointed out what a fine line you have to walk with a dog like Molly. She has high drive and she wants to please, but she also is independent enough that if you are too loose and happy, she’ll do whatever she wants. But if you are too harsh and strict, she’ll opt out of the game.

Just realizing that I had a very small margin for error helped. It means that I have to focus more on my handling and Molly’s attitude, making sure I adjust quickly to keep her working. It also reassured me that my training is not so bad, it’s just managing Molly in the ring that’s tricky. In fact that had been the biggest frustration - brilliant runs in practice, great attention out of the ring, followed by distracted and spaced out performances. Of course not all of our performances were that bad - I sometimes hit a good combination almost by accident.

So this weekend was a test to see if what Judie and Pat were telling me about getting and holding attention would help. It did. We may have made some mistakes and scored low for the class, but Molly was with me and keyed in pretty much the whole time. She even survived a sendout to the wrong corner and a stand for exam with the one thing she really fears, a vacuum cleaner, running at the other end of the hall. Now if we can just keep this trend going next year…

Why do dogs need blogs, anyway?

OK, let’s get the introductory material out of the way. I’m Vern Ceder and I write a column called Sanity Check for Front and Finish. Hey, this month Molly and I even made the cover, for no greater reason than that I write a column and the editors like it. Front and Finish is mostly dedicated to training dogs for AKC and UKC obedience competition, and my column tries to explore some of the things that make dog trainers crazy. Actually, it has been suggested that we’re crazy to begin with, but that’s a different question.

In any case, it struck me that there were several items in my notes that for whatever reason weren’t right for publication in my column, but still might be worth chewing over in a public way. I think that pretty much explains what I’m doing here and why I chose the name.

Of course that still leaves the title question unswered. A quick search indicates that very few dogs (and not many more dog trainers) have actually jumped on this blogging bandwagon. As far as I can tell, Molly, my Australian shepherd, is completely unimpressed by the blogging phenomenon. As to trainers, from what I can tell, email lists seem to be the preferred mode of online interaction - they allow for the sharing of ideas and flames without the real-time constraints of chat.

So here I am to have a shot a filling the gap. While I’m sure I won’t be posting daily, or even all that regularly, I will do my best to avoid being one of the many three post wonders that show up on the blog sites.

Oh, yeah, one last promise - this will be the only time, barring extreme provocation, that the words “dog blog” will appear together at this venue. Really.