GreyGho s t Weimaraner s

Newsletter

Fall 2011

Welcome! It’s been a busy year at Greyghost! Zoe had a litter of puppies, dogs retired and other Greyghost puppies started or continued earning titles in various venues not to mention a best friend. Happy Retirement Christie!

An era ended with Christie retiring from active competition this year. At her last agility trial in January, Christie earned her Silver Versatility Award (a total of 100 Masters level qualifying scores in 4 classes), her Expert Silver Steeplechase Award (50 qualifying runs) and her Expert Jumpers Silver Award! All this at 12 yrs old and deaf. Christie still loves to play agility and insists on being the first dog out to train each day. She’ll clear a 22” jump and climb the aframe if left to her own devices! But I limit her to running

through tunnels and doing weave poles. I have to be very careful about footing – if it is at all slippery she doesn’t get to do any agility since her back legs are not as stable as they used to be. She still loves to go hunting. Welcome to the families of the Smok’n Litter! Zoe had her second litter of puppies with Cooper and welcomed 6 puppies – 3 boys, 3 girls – 3 longhairs, 3 shorthairs. Statistically perfect! This time Eva and Lawrence kept a puppy and named her Koko Taylor. Cooper Jr (SH male) went to Edmonton, Kasper (LH male) went to Georgia, Samson (LH male) went to California, Abby (LH female) went to North Carolina and Ember (SH female) went to Clearwater, BC. Greyghost Weims in Competition Keeper (Christie X Cruz) finished her Masters Agility title. Nova (Christie X Cruz) finished her Masters Agility title. Ginny (Sunshine X Enzo) competed at her first AKC agility trial and qualified in Jumpers. Jake (Sunshine X Enzo) completed his Starters Standard and Starters Games titles in agility as well as CKC Rally Obedience Novice and Advanced Titles. He also got a High in Trial running Novice Obedience at a CKC trial! Still 1 more qualifying score to earn before he gets that title. Cooper (Smokycity LH) finished his CARO Rally obedience Novice and Advanced titles.

Porsche (Smokycity LH) got Best Longhair at the Weim Assoc of Canada National Specialty Meredith (Nova X Cooper) finished her CKC conformation Championship including getting a Group

placing. She also got BEST IN SHOW at a United Kennel Club competition in the US. Ozzy (Zoe X Cooper) completed his CKC Rally Obedience Novice Title with a High in Class award. Ozzy gives Brenda a high Five! Jazz (Zoe X Cooper) completed her CKC conformation Championship and CKC Rally Obedience Novice Title in September.

Koko (Zoe X Cooper) earned her first conformation point. Greyghost at the Weimaraner Assoc. of Canada National Specialty This year the specialty was held at the Sporting Dog Spectacular shows in the Vancouver area. Jazz and Porsche competed in the conformation show. Jake competed in obedience earning a Novice qualifying score. Jake, Jazz and Ozzy all competed in Rally obedience all receiving qualifying scores! Rest in Peace Tate

Kim & Lyndsey Good and her family said goodbye to Tate (Greyghost’s Fuzzy Edition) in September 2011 at almost 10 yrs old. Tate became acutely ill after a day on the farm with his dad. The cause was never discovered. Tate had a great life and was most happy being a farm dog riding in the tractor or combine with his dad and shepherding his boys on explorations. He is missed.

Greyghost Gives Back Doug and Denise with a bunch of friends have been involved with Clear Sailing Dog Sports since its beginning. It started as a bunch of us forming a group to put on agility trial with the sole purpose of raising money for purebred dog rescue. We run a big raffle at our annual July trial to boost our fundraising and have been doing it now for 12 years. The past 2 years we’ve put on a couple of extra events and accumulated a bit of funds so this year we decided to disperse those funds in a slightly different way.

• CAAT Canadian Animal Assistance Team – this group of veterinarians and technicians donates their time to not only provide disaster relief but also bring spaying/neutering and vaccinations to remote communities where vet services are limited. Since this keeps dogs from needing rescue we gave a significant amount to them ($5000).

• Smiling Blue Skies Cancer Research fund ($1500) • Rabies Challenge fund ($1500) • Individual purebred dog rescue as needed over the next year.

All of us at Clear Sailing donate stuff to the raffle and a significant amount of our own time to this effort. If you’d like to help us out, our big raffle is held at our July trial in Quesnel BC. We’ll put just about anything in our raffle and it doesn’t have to be just to dog stuff. WEBSITE LINKS http://www.caat-canada.org/ http://www.smilingblueskies.com/ http://www.rabieschallengefund.org/ Tale of a Shattered Toe When Jake was 1.5yrs old he broke his toe – actually shattered his toe. First he ran into Doug and started limping. When the limping didn’t go away over the weekend (vet said it was badly bruised) we went back in and got an xray. Totally shattered outside toe on his right foot. Poor Jake. So, they put a splint on his leg and prescribed rest – come back in 3 weeks for a splint change.

That lasted 3 days. I let him off lead to pee late at night and he went over to the kiddy pool for a drink and stuck his splint in the water. Argg!!! Good thing I watched them put the splint on. I unwrapped it carefully, taking note of the different layers and rebuilt it with dry materials. I took him to a chiropractic vet that was visiting town who suggested massaging the leg when I took the splint off and giving him Comfrey tea to speed the bone healing. Jake wasn’t too thrilled to be on leash all the time – he would have gladly run around with a splint on but he adapted well. Had to get him a GIANT wire crate to accommodate him and his splint. Turns out those splints aren’t made for big dogs – it was like a giant brittle plastic spoon. Jake would jump around and crack/break the tip of the splint despite padding. We adapted it by putting on an overboot during the day made of a metal spoon rest – I love Gorilla tape! Jake broke 5 splints…

I took the splint off every week or so to massage and wash the foot (it got stinky with foot goo) and do nails (of course). Every 3 weeks it was back for (usually) a new splint and an xray to check on the progress of the healing. Poor Jake. To keep him entertained I did a lot of small space, low impact training like tricks and Rally obedience moves. I also started him on formal retrieving and scent discrimination article

training. 12 weeks in a splint. He was so happy to get it off, but his leg was wasted away. I slowly let him exercise more and with the advice of a dog physio person started doing some work with him wearing a “lift boot” on his good leg to make him use his bad leg more. It really helped and today you can’t tell that he was ever hurt. Broken toes are hard to heal properly and don’t heal well in older dogs. Jake was lucky. PS. Bring a camera with you if you’re dog is going to get an xray – take a pic of the xray on the viewer and you can then look closely at if afterwards… - just tell them your breeder wants to see it… 101 things to do with a box

A great winter training game to do in a small space is “101 things to do with a box”. Get a sturdy cardboard box and put it in the middle of the floor. Stay quiet and click for any interaction with the box – like sniffing, pawing etc. Throw your treat away from the box after you click to get the dog away from the box after he does something with it. Once they catch on to the game, they’ll head back to the box and try something else. If they get stuck doing 1 thing, move the box and yourself to another position. Some things that you can get your dog to do include: 1 foot on the box, 2 feet on the box, 2 front feet on the box, 1 back foot on the box, 2 back feet on the box, 4 feet on the box, circle the box – you get the idea.

I used the box game to teach Stay – sit on the box and don’t come off until I tell you. You can also teach this and use it to get the dog onto the bathroom scale to weigh him – it’s just a really small box. For some ideas and observations about playing this game, read this article… http://www.clickersolutions.com/articles/2001/box.htm New Grooming tool.

New to me anyway! I was introduced to a new grooming tool this year – Wahl brand DeShedder. I was looking for something to help pull shedding undercoat out on Christie – she has a thick coat despite being a shorthair. She doesn’t like being brushed so the Zoom Groom rubber brush doesn’t work well on her. This tool works well on her and especially well on the longhairs!! You can’t do a lot at one time but when they’re shedding doing a little bit every day works well. You’d be surprised how much hair it can pull out! Gets rid of the “fluffy” bits on the longhairs.

Training Diary: It seemed like a good idea at the time… Finish means Stop! Sometimes, what seems like a good idea at the time turns out to be a really, really bad idea. Take for example how I corrupted Christie’s Finish (moving from Come, sitting infront around behind you to heel position). I had trained Christie to do a really nice, fast finish for obedience using the command “Around”. One day I was doing some agility training and was doing an exercise where it would be an advantage to have the dog run around behind you to be in a better position to do the next obstacle – you see many agility handlers use this move. I thought Cool! Why don’t I use her Around command – and proceeded to do some repetitions. It worked great! BUT, the next time I went to train obedience and asked her to Finish, she went zooming around and ran out ahead of me – just like in agility. Darn! I couldn’t believe that I had done this! So, I had to go back and re-trained the Finish with a new name – I now call it “Park”. Walls, not Counters… I also may have caused a “little” problem with my last litter of puppies. I kept getting reports back that the little darlings were persistent counter-surfers. Hmmm. Thinking back, one of the things that I had taught the puppies when I was first clicker training them was to put their front feet up onto (what I thought at the time) was walls. This is a good way to train the go-back part of Directed Jumping in Utility and it’s a great stupid pet trick. But, what I used was not really a “wall”. I used a 2 drawer file cabinet and the area under the window sill. The little darlings just might transfer this over to kitchen cabinets, especially if they get something to eat the first time they try it! First tricks first… Speaking of early clicker training… It is said that the first thing that you teach a dog when clicker training is the thing that they will revert to the most. So, its very important to decide what to train as your very first exercise. I didn’t really understand the significance of this when I started to train Christie. One of the things that Christie always liked to do was to bark, talk etc. Since I had also heard that the way to get rid of a behaviour was to put it on cue…when she started barking I clicked. I was also clicking for a bunch of other behaviours at the time and didn’t think much of it. Well, everybody will tell you that Christie barks. She barks when she’s happy, she barks when she thinks that I’m giving her the wrong command in agility, she barks when she’s frustrated. In essence she thinks – Bark First, Ask Questions Later. Sit was the first thing that the next litter of puppies all learned first. It’s not OK… A classic mistake that everybody seems to make, myself included, is using OK as a release word. It seems like such a good word to use. Unfortunately, we use OK alot in everyday life. I remember one time being on a Very Important phone call, and putting all the dogs in a down stay so that they wouldn’t be running around. Of course to them this was a prelude to FUN. When I said OK during the phone conversation they would all jump up and run around. I would get mad and put them all on a down stay again. It took me until the third time that they jumped up to realize that I’d been saying OK on the phone and that’s what they had been responding to. Hmmm, I still use OK as a release word….