The vet

Cedar went to the vet today for her last boosters. She did fantastic, much to my surprise! She was friendly to everyone, kissed the vet and the techs, and was overall just very well behaved. Good girl, Cedar!

Obedience work photos

Here are some photos from working today:

Heelwork, first try

I introduced Cedar to the basics of heelwork today... good news- she definitely knows what the clicker means!!!

We practiced some attention work, too, and she did pretty well under distraction.

She will sit and lay down both in front of me and on the side :)

I've been trying to upload the video, but it's being a pain so far.... grrr...

I'm going to go tracking now so I'll update in a bit!

Bark bark bark!

Cedar's discovered the joys of alarm barking at the workers next door. Lovely. So now my days are punctuated with "SHUT UP CEDAR!" and "CEDAR GET IN HERE!"... sigh. Hopefully it's just a phase. She's teething right now, and going through weird moods. It IS funny to see her toothless mouth; she looks like an old lady :-).

Haven't gotten the chance to go tracking again this week. It gets dark so early, I haven't had the chance to go after school gets out. But I'm going to try and at least go to the park today and work her.

I want to get a big square board and put a tennis ball under it to start simulating the teeter motion for agility. I need to get my jumps back from Laurie so I can *maybe* start working Scully in agility.

I really need to work Cedar in some obedience-type stuff, but I've been holding off because she's teething, and I don't want to stress her. Hopefully that stops soon so I can start getting her ready for rally :). My goal is to get her RN in Portland (January), so we'll see if we can accomplish that goal! Just my luck, she'd go into heat and not be able to show... lol.

Tracking Day 2

Yet again I forgot to bring my camera to take tracking photos...

I went out again this morning to work tracking with Cedar... she did better than yesterday; I think she remembered doing it yesterday.

I did two tracks of about 10 paces each. She put her nose to the ground the second I gave the command "track"-- both times.

However, she went very fast and skipped a lot of the cheese that I put in my footprints. I need to ask Laurie about what to do to make her slow down and recognize the scent.

I was very pleased with how much she was sniffing the track, though. She was actively trying to find the food, she just went fast and sometimes got off the track because of it.

All in all, not too bad for her second time tracking!

Tracking Day 1

This is the first entry in my blog/training log for me and my Border Collie puppy, "Cedar." Cedar, officially known as BonniDune Norwegian Wood, is my future "superstar" conformation and performance dog:



The goal of this blog is to document my training progress with her, as well as share any insights that I may or may not discover throughout her training :)

Today we went tracking for the first time. My goals with Cedar were as follows:

1) Get her to recognize the scent pad
2) Make the connection between the food on the track (laid over my footprints) and sniffing to find it
3) Complete a 10-20 pace straight track laid with food
4) Make tracking a positive experience

Cedar did excellent, after taking awhile to figure out that she was supposed to sniff the ground! We did two tracks; one about 10 paces, and the other 20 paces. The second time around she was starting to figure out that she was supposed to sniff the ground/follow the scent to get to the food. I am very proud of her :)