Kira's Twelve

Kira, Clovers adopted sister turns 12 today. Happy birthday! Kira has had her health problems in the past few years, especially with her Megaesophagus. Megaesophagus is an uncommon disease of unknown cause, genetic in young dogs, in which the esophagus loses muscle tone, causing regurgitation. This is why we can only feed her soft food and we have to feed her on a step stool, so gravity can help pull her food down. She then has to sit for 10 minutes after feeding so her food doesn't come back up.

In spite of that and the 5 pills a feeding she gets, she seems to be a very happy dog and is still doing her hospital therapy work at Wake Med. She seems to be very good right now, and often perks up when the weather cools down. On some of those hot Carolina nights she can be pretty miserable.

Last night was competition agility class. I went a couple of hours early and worked on repairing jumps. There were about 8 or so that had a jump cups that came off, so I glued new cups on... All in preperation for the Youngsville Agility trial at Teamworks this week end. I am serving as Chief Course builder, so I want to make sure all the equipment is in good working order. It will be a 1 judge trial but we will be using 2 rings. The jumpers course will be in the sand ring and regular classes in the grass ring.

AKC has changed the rules for a lot of the agility equipment this year. The weave poles changed quite a bit. The poles are now 4 inches taller, the base must be covered in a none slip surface and the base supports can not be on the side that the dog is on during weaving. Michelle purchased a new set and we tried them out in class tonight. The spacing is 22 inches also. In the past Clover and I have always worked with 21 inch spacing. These weave poles are designed to give a lot more. They seem to almost pivot at the base a little bit, so the rock back and forth about a foot when the dog goes through them. They seemed to be designed this way, maybe to provide less stress to the dog.

In compittion class Michelle had a nationals course set up. It was an interesting course because it had a lot of 180 degree turns in it. Looking at the course, it was one that would have a lot of qualifying scores in it, but the times would be all over the map because it would really matter how tight and fast your dog could make turns. We worked mostly on getting the tight turns by using different directional commands and the timing of those commands.

Clover did pretty well with the new weaves. It was almost a 270 Degree turn into the weaves. She missed the first time but I blame myself for not pushing her out far enough to get a straight entry. I focused on the new weaves with Clover. Michelle seemed to think that Clover was much more comfortable with the 22 inch weaves and was able to get a rythum faster. It was harder for me to see that since I was running her. We will see if they make any difference this weekend at the AKC Trial.

Michelle seems convinced that Clover seems more comfortable with them. I