Over the past couple of days I have been talking with some friends about Hana's first full weekend in Master's and how she was a totally different dog than the one I brought out this summer. For lack of a better word, my baby girl Hana has some, what I like to call, "environmental" stress issues. She has challenged me in ways that my other dogs have not.
Holly and Rumor are soft dogs. Holly, being my first aussie had to put up with me being a novice handler and novice handler mistakes. My biggest, slowing that girl down to make up for my inadequate handling. Once I figured out what I had done, I sought of advice from people like Julie Daniels ~ who told me she had to be "obnoxious" on the start line and Elicia Calhoun who told me "I needed to put as much energy into the run as I expected her too" I have never forgotten those two pieces of advice. Holly went from a dog 2 seconds under course time, to 25 seconds under course time or more when she retired.
Willow and Austin were different challenges. Both were high drive and had a ton of "engine". I wasn't ready for a dog like Willow when I got her. I wish she were a young dog now. With them I found out there were much more pieces to this puzzle that I hadn't thought about. I was always very good at teaching my dogs weave poles. Both Willow and Austin had killer weave poles. Everything else.. well.. not so much. Both dogs did not have start line stays, both suffered from major contact issues their whole careers. Willow was a horrible bar knocker and I learned to compensate for my lack of jump training, and ground training by being a reactive handler instead of a proactive handler. There was always a lot of screaming going on as Willow raced off in the opposite direction. Austin, was more biddable, and a better jumper, but was not thoroughly trained on his contacts so we always lost time there, but we became a great team, even with the contact short comings...
Rumor is Holly in a boy suit. Very soft, low drive. I saw that as an 8 week old puppy. So I started from the very beginning with drive training. He has never known anything but running in drive...and it shows, people who see him now can't believe he's actually a low drive dog. But once again, I lacked in my training. I was determined this dog would have start line stay (which he does) and I thought I had trained contacts, but guess what? I hadn't. He too has slow contacts, always asking here, here before he leaves..killer weaves though!
So along comes Hana. Hana gets here, after 3 days of travel from her breeder's in Canada and looks at me and says "who the H*@@ are you and where the H@@@ am I? I had a challenge ahead. Her training began on day two. I knew building a relationship with her was going to take time. So we started training. To make a long story short. Hana and I train every single day. We started doing contacts on a board every single day once she was old enough. For 5 or 10 minutes. I had no idea how much training actually went into to good stopped contacts until I had to work with her to build our relationship! We worked on other things too, tricks, directionals, pole entrances anything I could think of always in short bursts. She's has the best ground skills of any dog I have ever trained. When I brought her out in Aug, she was ready... her skills were ready.. but her brain said something else. I have never had a dog who worried about the environment, the ring crew, other dogs, the judge. She'd get on the line and trot off. Where is that speed I see on sheep??? Worried, I wasn't being sincere, I was cheer-leading.
A friend pointed that out to me ~ thanks Lauren ~ so I changed. I went to confidence, to knowing that she knew what to do and all I had to do was convince her she could do it in new places by running her with confidence. Yes, she has those contacts, yes she has those poles. No she will not worry about the ring crew, or the dogs on line, or the chute. She will be fine, she can do this .. *I* will be there for her 1000% and not let her down.
Guess what? Barking sassy, Hana is here... sassy as all get out, (sometimes a bit too much but that's OK for now) with perfect contacts, perfect weave poles and a perfect start line stay! Will it always be perfect? Or at least perfect in my eyes, absolutely. We will have our challenges, we will need to learn to be a team, we may have some stress issues to deal with, but we can do it, because she is perfect. No matter what.
