Author: Susan

An Action Packed Weekend

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The big Beagle race at the Caledonian Thistle Open took place today. We’d been looking forward to it for some time – not least because Beanie stood a good chance of winning! In last week’s time trials she ran a whole second faster (some 15 lengths) than her nearest rival, Murphy.

Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. We’ve had a lot of new dogs joining the club recently and whilst there is some real talent some are still a little unruly. Little Beanie has born the brunt of a few ‘fouls’ in recent weeks. She’s still very young, and also very small compared to the other dogs. So we felt that it wasn’t in her best interests to race again until things settle down.

Beanie and Biggles took the news in their stride – trophies and titles mean nothing to Beagles. They just enjoy the thrill of the chase. But poor mum and dad didn’t take it quite as well. Fortunately we had a great weekend to make up for the disappointment.

On Saturday morning we headed to the park as usual. Within moments of letting Beanie and Biggles off lead the familiar “aaaarf, aaaarf, aaaarf” started up – in stereo. This could only mean one thing – both Beanie and Biggles were hot on the tail of a fast dog. And sure enough when we looked around we saw Beanie disappearing over the horizon, hot on the heels of a lurcher. And bringing up the rear (not that far behind either) was Biggles. The lurcher was really shifting, but Beanie managed to keep her in her sights. After what must have been a mile or two of sprinting around the meadow Beanie finally wore down the lurcher and moved in for the kill (well, a sniff and a play):

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Later in the day we headed off to Allers Farm Hydrotherapy for a swim session with buddies Cullin and Jamie. I’ve never seen Beanie or Biggles swim so well! Beanie was in the pool for a good 40 minutes playing fetch with a sausage loaded tennis ball. I had difficulty getting her out when it was time to go home. Biggles didn’t stay in for as long, but he too is getting very confident – and he’s a cracking little swimmer now!

Today we went to flyball. And as luck would have it our teacher, Sarah, had decided to do time trials. Paul took all of his cameras along and we managed to get excellent footage of the dogs. Here’s our two little hooligans in action:

Beanie managed a very respectable 5.98 seconds and Biggles set a new Lomond Flyball Beagle boy record with a whopping 8.23 seconds!

I’m amazed at how quickly Beanie has learned to do this. She’s only had a few classes.

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Biggles doesn’t yet do flyball properly – he’s too young. Mainly we work on teaching him to retrieve the ball. But he gets a couple of goes at running the course over low jumps in classes. Until now it’s been very slow and puppy-like. But he surprised us today with a couple of glimpses of real athleticism.

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Although most of the time he was busy trying to figure out why daddy (his usual handler) was standing on the other side of a fence with a camera and how he was going to take the ball back to him so he could get his treat.

Here are some more shots – first some of Beanie & Biggles’ classmates:

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And finally a couple of pics of the advanced class in action:

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More Agility – Making it Fun

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Last week’s agility session was a little ambitious and whilst we managed it I think it lessened Beanie’s enthusiasm for the sport a bit. So today we’re going to try and make it more fun for her whilst still working a little on distance control. Here’s the course plan for today:

Four easy straight lines of equipment that she can run over full pelt. The only difficulty is for her to follow an ‘In’ command after she completes the last piece. I’ll initially aim to send her away over just one piece of equipment before calling her back in, but if she’s managing fine we’ll start sending her further and further away. The other important things in this course is that :

  • a) she’s slowed down by the contact on the A frame before approaching the weaves (she still needs this or she gets too excited about the weaves and misses some).
  • b) she’s slowed down by the weaves prior to the ramp – she tends to miss out the ramp if she’s too excited.
  • c) she’s never slowed down prior to a send away. This is important as she won’t go if she’s not in full flight! I guess this is a problem we need to tackle sometime, but one thing at a time!

I’ll post up the results when we get back.

Results

Well, it didn’t go too bad.

Our contrary little Beanie has moved the goal posts again and decided that she gets fed up of waiting for her treat if we make the course too long. A few weeks ago she was only happy if we let her open up on a big course – now after half a dozen bits of apparatus she starts hanging from my leg pleading for a treat!

So, we broke it down into chunks and she got quite enthusiastic about it. We did manage to go round the full course, but not very well. Anyone with eagle eyes will spot a couple of edit points in the video (not least me magically switching from left to right side while Beanie is half-way through the chute tunnel). The key with Beanie is to keep it FUN – and never to let her fail. One mistake and she’s off sniffing the floor – deaf and blind to your attempts to engage her in the game again.

Biggles is turning out to be the little agility star. We don’t do much with him, but we take him along and let him have a play in the tunnels. It’s good practice because he’s learning to follow instructions and pay attention to us. Today we made up a special little course for him and he did very well – first time too! Don’t tell anyone, but it took about 5 takes for his big sister to get the same course right (she kept missing the tyre jump)!!