Friday, January 23, 2004

Yesterday Tieka and Zanna started their new season in agility classes.

The first hour and a half I trained with Zanna. She did great, the holidays have been good for her and she is doing her stuff with new enthusiasm. We have the same trainer as last year who gives the class with his partner, a really lovely lady that also loves all dogs. We are very lucky to have 2 trainers for the price of one :-). I like the way they give lessons, they look at the dogs and train from their prospective.

In the mean time Tieka would have had to spend all this time in the car. But she was very lucky as a friend of mine, who is dying to get a Lagotto for her self and is desperately waiting till the right pup comes along, asked if she could lend Tieka. She is going to train with a lundehund from someone els but due to a misunderstanding this little dog wasn?t available yesterday.

It was so funny to watch Karyn and Tieka. Tieka knows all about agility but she was in a beginners class and had to act like a beginner. The first lesson is getting to know all the apparatus but of course Tieka knew them all. They were introduced to the jumps and Tieka had to be held back not to jump. They went to the tunnel and Tieka thought ?great the tunnel? and was ready to rush through. But no, the teacher held Tieka at one end and Karyn had to go to the other and call Tieka through. Tieky rushed through ha ha ha.

I was on the other side of the field with Zanna and every time I looked over at Karyn and Tieka I had to laugh. Tieka could hear me training with Zan so she was sometimes busy looking at where we were and the other times she was just plain happy to be with Karyn and she wagged her little tail off the whole lesson. It was so cute!!

Then it was time for me to train with Tieka. Well she was still full of life and did great too. She is never the fastest dog in our class but she is always very correct and jumps nearly everything without mistake. However she dose sometimes miss the compulsory ?touching bits? when coming off ramps as she expects to be able to run after her tennis ball, which I sometimes use to make her faster, and in her enthusiasm she jumps too soon. Have to train on this.
Tiekas main handicap is that we train in a class with big dogs and she is only a medium size dog. So the jumps are a bit too high for her to be able to race at full speed. We have fun anyway. I can only get one planned day a week off so I have to train with both dogs on the same day, and that means that Tieka has to pretend she is big.

Funny really that Tieka is an unusually good size for a Lagotto so is handicapped by her size. A lot of Lagotti are bigger and then we would be in the right class!!

About the Lundehund, take a look at this site because Lundehund (puffin dogs) are so different from ?normal? dogs. For example they have extra toes so as to clamber easily over cliff faces hunting for puffins. Rather cute little dogs!! http://members.aol.com/puffindog/lundehund.html

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