Some more news from the weekend - Borrasca made her debut at the dog shows in McHenry, Illinois in the Novice Puppy (baby) class. It was a good opportunity to get a lot of socialization in for her and some acclimation to the ring. She's at a really awkward stage of puppy growth right now, all paws and knobby joints and ears.. 😀
The results for Borrasca Gaditana de la Manada de Tuky:
Judge Stephanie Mueller: Novice Puppy Class 1, Best Novice Puppy Female, Novice Puppy Best of Breed; and
Judge Sandy Shaw: Novice Puppy Class 1, Best Novice Puppy Female, Novice Puppy Best of Breed
At this event the Socialized Pet Obedience Test (SPOT) was also offered and Rōnin aced it becoming the first Czechoslovakian Vlcak to take and pass this exam. The SPOT exam is a basic good-manners/socialization test as its name implies; there are 10 testing stations including good leash skills, doorway manners, distractions, loading and unloading, grooming and so on. The full test details can be found here.
Saturday also marked a milestone in Morrow's tracking training - within 14 weekly sessions, Morrow successfully completed a 470 meter (513 yards) track with 5 turns aged approximately 1 hour. It exceeds the maximum length of 500 yards for the Tracking Dog (TD) test and the mandated 4-5 turns. We are still under the maximum age of a test-level track of 2 hours, but hopefully soon we will also meet that benchmark as well. I've been using an app created specifically for tracking with dogs and it's been really easy to keep track of our progress.
And finally, our Blu had a spa holiday over at our place for the weekend. She's growing up to be a real sweetheart and has improved a lot in her confidence and temperament. As always, we were careful about tightly managing the initial meetings between the girls but everything went smoothly save for a few initial words. 🙂 It was nice to see Blu again doing so well. It was a busy but enjoyable weekend for everybody and congratulations again to our co-owners for all their work with our dogs.
