Jayda’s elephant training has been put on hold for a couple of weeks – she was spayed last week. Hated doing it, but she’s never going to see 16″ or less and even though she only came in season once a year, I already lost a few weeks of shows because of poor timing, soooo …

Her recovery is going well – she’s being quite the little trouper about spending a lot of time crated or on leash, though as we enter week #2 her patience is starting to wear a little thinner. To keep her from messing with the incision, the vet’s office sent her home with a little stockinette garment. I never saw this before but its a great idea! Kept it dry and protected in the nasty weather we had last weekend and no big, uncomfortable cone to deal with – its just like wearing a sweater. Only problem is as she gets more active the thin material stretches hopelessly out of shape which causes all kinds of problems – we already had to get a 2nd one and I’m not sure if that will last through the weekend so she may end up as a “conehead” yet.

Since she HADN’T been looking at the incision area, she had a few hours of freedom yesterday … then she discovered those kewl little string thingies on her tummy – argh! Back into her little outfit she went!

Her stitches come out Wednesday AM – we can’t wait!!

Here’s session #5 of Jayda learning the Elephant trick. She will now go all the way around, although she sometimes gets “stuck” especially when she gets so her back’s to me (though there are a few nice turns in this clip). And she still wants me up close, making it VERY hard to video!

So ALMOST! Next things to work on: fading out the intermittent reinforcers, smoothing it out and getting some distance.

We didn’t do any Elephant Training over the weekend. Saturday, Jayda and I went to a seminar with Leslie McDevitt. It was good although I felt that it would have been better with fewer working teams – she spends a LOT of time with each team so even though watching her work with different dogs’ issues was very informative, it made for a long day! Bryce had to stay home and was NOT a happy boy!

Not wanting to be left behind her trans-atlantic cousins, Jayda has started to learn the Elephant trick. Here’s a little video clip from her 3rd training session. She’s such a quick learner! She’s just doing a few steps at a time here, but by the end of this session she was offering from 1/4 to almost 1/2 turn on her own! (Bad video, and a pretty shabby demo of my training skills too – sorry, I can’t video AND clicker train at the same time!)

Note something not always seen on Jayda in public – a TAIL! And a very active one at that!

Bryce and Jayda ended up a nice season with a CPE trial up in our training building.

We did very well – Bryce Q’d 8 out of 10 runs, finishing his level 3 titles and moving into level 5 in Colors. Jayda Q’d in a very respectable 6 out of 10 runs, including the last run she needed to “graduate” from level 1. She missed 2 other Q’s (and the chance to finish her L2 standard title) by just a step – not qui-i-i-te making it out of the last tunnel in time in Jackpot and just missing the A-frame contact in Standard. That last was odd because she never misses contacts – I was watching her closely the next training session and even when I crossed in front (which I had done on that run) she was well into the yellow. Oh well – one of those things.

Not a bad way to end the season, and I was happy to be able to run my dogs at all, since I was running on a broken toe from about 10 days earlier!

Here’s Bryce with his Level Completion ribbon – its bigger than he is! Jayda got one too but was in no mood for posing – she insisted on sitting with legs in all directions, stuck her ears out to the side and pulled a face at me. Didn’t make for as nice a picture!

Skyline knows how to treat their exhibitors :)! We also know how to feed our workers – our secret is having a club member who’s a caterer. While other clubs survive on coldcuts and pizza, we have gourmet salads, multiple choice of hot dishes like sausage and peppers, eggplant rollantini, turkey tettrazini or chicken marsala, and fresh-baked white chocolate chunk cookies, lemon bars and chocolate cookies with peanut butter filling for dessert. Yum!

We have NO trouble recruiting help at our trials :)!

So now we have a break for the holidays. Jayda is going to get spayed so it won’t be all that pleasant a break for her. Then we start again with a couple of indoor CPE trials next year.