Wednesday, July 11, 2012

And Now for Something Totally Different

I seldom do any venting or soul-baring on my blog, but today I want to come clean and say, "Hi, I'm Rose, and I tend to become obsessed with my hobbies."  Over the years, Belle has enabled me in my agility obsession, but it has caught up with us, and she has been battling a lameness issue since late March or early April.  The lameness has been very fleeting, and so I put off taking her to a vet figuring it was too subtle a problem for a general practitioner to diagnose.  At the last NADAC trial  (recall I only ran Dusty), a couple of friends told me about a Davenport vet who does chiro and acupuncture, and who is in the process of finishing up her courses in canine rehabilitation.

Belle had her first session with Dr. Taylor yesterday.  Luckily, the problems seem to be minor and with a little longer break from jumping and contacts, some stretches, and icing we should be back on track for agility with no holds barred.  However, I will be much more selective in what we work on and how often we work on it.  In the meantime, I decided it's time to tackle a canine sport that I have been interested in since Max was a youngster--canine freestyle.

Belle knows lots of tricks, including some freestyle moves.  However, I've never tried stringing any of them together until today.  I marked off an area in the field and gave it a whirl.  I was humming You're the One that I Want while we played, but next time I'll take the music out with us and play it while we practice.  Please don't laugh, but here is a very heavily edited video of our first practice.  Enjoy.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully, it will appear now.

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  2. That's so great! You should check out Cyber Rally-O, you have the space, the skills and the camera! Even if you don't compete in it, you should check out their courses - they include obedience, rally and free style moves and are a lot of fun for fooling around training. I am doing it with Jazz to give us something to do together that isn't too hard on his old knees. Fun to watch you play with your girl!

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  3. Awesome! Freestyle is so much fun, especially if your dog just sees it as a series of tricks he's doing while you are bee-bopping to some great music :) Have fun with it!

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