Aidan made his Rally obedience debut on March 1.
You may remember, I’d planned to show him for the first time on my birthday, Feb. 21, but that week, we ran into some training issues, and I wanted to work through them before we stepped in the ring to compete.
Let’s just say it can be challenging training a silly male adolescent Toller who loves to make his opinion known when he’d rather be doing something different. And it’s up to me to figure out how best to make what I want to do, something that Aidan wants to do, too.
He doesn’t understand that there are specific rules that have to be followed and that he doesn’t get extra points for being overly clever. (Although he does get a smile and a simultaneous head shake from me.) Liken it to a little kid who thinks he can hit a home run off a major league pitcher when all he’s done so far is hit a ball off a tee.
There is no improvisation class in rally, but if there were, Aidan would excel in it.
Patience, grasshopper.
I’ve had to change both signals and commands for him because some of the things that made sense to Buzz, make no sense to Aidan. He learns very differently. Plus, the exercises that Buzz found hard, Aidan finds easy and vice versa.
That said, it’s one thing to keep those changes in mind when training in the basement, but quite another when in a ring competing. So, it was up to me to get it right for the dog on the end of my leash, not the one I showed previously, and so successfully, for so many years.
There are a lot of things you can train for – such as providing a solid foundation while developing a bond of trust that can help get you through the unexpected in the ring. But this takes time. And, we’re not quite there yet.
Aidan and I are still working daily on deepening those bonds, but you have to start somewhere to see how all the training translates to the show ring.
So, despite my confidence that Aidan could flawlessly perform all the novice exercises (he’s done them hundreds of times in training) other factors at dog shows come into play. Many you can’t control – a new environment, lots of new dogs and people, loud noises, the list goes on.
Aidan thinks all dogs are really fun and wants to play with them and all the new people — they are pretty cool, too. He wants to explore all the fun aspects of life and I can’t fault him for that. But there’s also a proper time and place for that.
And on my end, I knew I had to overcome ring muscle memory from showing Buzz for so many years and remember to change for Aidan, which sounds a lot easier on paper than in practice.
One of the things about Rally that I really enjoy is the split-second decision-making involved while on course when things don’t quite go as planned. And Aidan and I had a few of those instances. And least we forget my now limited vision, which is another new factor I had to take into account. But Aidan trusted me enough to do a very nice job out there.
He did get spooked by something in one section of the ring. I’d watched other dogs sniff and do odd things in that corner, so I knew they were sensing something, but what I didn’t take into account was that Aidan (being the ever overachiever) would react to whatever it was, much sooner than the other dogs. He reacted twice — both going into that corner as well as coming out of it.
And yeah, we lost a few points for that. But he got through it, and that was what was important. He trusted me enough to soldier on and believe I would not let anything bad happen to him.
We ended up scoring a very respectable 97 out of a possible 100 points. We tied with the first place dog with our score but those little bobbles cost us time and we were runners-up by 20 seconds.
But more importantly, I got a taste of what Aidan and I can partner together to accomplish with the right cues and a lot of verbal encouragement from me. After watching a video of our performance, his tail never stopped wagging, even during the tougher parts.
Like a little wind-up toy, Aidan strutted his stuff with boundless and enthusiastic energy.
I’m really proud of my little buddy, and now it’s onto round two. Our next show is a couple weeks away on March 21.
