Since it's been requested...

Since Ginger mentioned it, I'll brag a little bit on the Pinhead's performances last weekend at the local ASCA show.

There are three types of agility courses in ASCA agility. Regular (Standard, with the contact equipment such as the aframe and dogwalk) , Jumpers (jumps and tunnels only) and Gamblers which I'll describe another time. I entered Zipper in Regular and Jumpers, which added up to him doing 3 agility runs Saturday and 4 on Sunday. That's a lot of runs for a young, green dog; in contrast, at most AKC trials you have 2 runs per day, one Jumpers and one Standard. AKC does have a new class that's gaining popularity, but not all clubs offer it.

When I started Zipper last fall, I was having a lot of issues with him being distracted. He'd stop, or sniff, or take off around jumps. Once he even left the ring. I think the causes are a combination of stress and uncertainty (sniffing is a classic stress behavior), not being quite sure what I want, and frankly, being an intact male Min Pin who is very visually oriented and sometimes has the attention span of a flea.

So I was especially thrilled with his progress last weekend. He stayed with me. We had some wrong courses, and his Jumpers run Saturday was very distracted. But for the most part he did really well. He ended up earning two titles, his Novice Regular and Novice Jumpers titles. And he got his weave poles in three out of four runs where weaves were present. One of his jumpers runs was especially fast and smooth and I started to get the feel of how we'll be working together as a team long-term. Best of all he managed to retain focus all the way through Sunday afternoon. By 7:00 p.m. Sunday night the little guy was done. I noticed he wasn't in the living room. He'd taken himself to his "big-dog" crate, a dobe sized Varikennel, and put himself to bed. Literally. He'd crawled under the blanket and was out like a light. A big exciting weekend for a very little dog.