Sunday Salutations and Pet Sports

I am curious what is everyone’s favorite dog sport? Of if you aren’t a dog person, what is your favorite sport where a human and an animal compete in tandem? I mean I know of a few pretty awesome equine and canine sports, but I am drawing a blank for cat, bat, and gnat sports? (Do they have competitive birding with hawks? I know they do cat agility using a fluffy lure. -Tod) I mean Halloween is almost upon us, and I couldn’t help it.

This week was the first week of rally class. Crokell and I just finished competition skills for the third or fourth time. We had a break for a few years and just started training again. We are slow learners, or rather I am. Because it is always the handler’s fault. I have always loved dog and equine sports, although I have still yet to compete in any. There is something unique, chilling, and almost sacred about the connection between two not of the same species working towards a single goal.

Yesterday was the first time we had an official AKC Rally class. I had practiced before with a friend, but never had a real class. So, I have some experience, sort of.

Tod of course recorded our run on the course. It is odd watching myself and trying to go through the items and seeing what I did wrong and what I did right. Tod plays a big part in Crokell being able to the 360 left as he has been practicing it with Crokell on walks. The is the trick on the left side of the course, where is he is turning in place sort of. Tod calls it “dizzy” which I need to remember as a possible command, still we did it pretty well. We removed the audio to save space, but it was his best trick for the whole run. Everyone was impressed. I didn’t notice during the run.

Crokell was lagging behind a little out of heel for almost the whole course, except for slow when he wasn’t paying any attention to me and kept going at the pace he was doing before. Seems that we have a thing or two to work on. New goals for this week train – slow (easy) and fast (keep up).

What is Rally?

Rally sits between obedience (doing a pre-set sequence of tricks) and agility (actually running an obstacle course with the dog). Rally makes me think of low impact or beginner agility, although it was originally meant to introduce people to AKC obedience. It is a very different style, and basically has heeling or trick exercises set up in unique patterns. If you are interested in the official AKC information, go here ( https://www.akc.org/sports/rally/ ).

Writing Updates

We got edits for a short story, which will hopefully lead to a contract (fingers crossed). There was much excitement and squeeing. I need to finish out another short story that I have been slowly working on for the past week. It is a little slower than usual I think because I keep adding random little historical inspired tidbits to this world. Hopefully, it will be worth the wait and keep with our “delightfully weird, occasionally dark” byline. Speaking of which I think we need to update the website, but I think I might schedule that for a holiday overhaul.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend.

~Anna