I’ve been trawling about trying to find something to blog about — everywhere is quiet at the moment! No major controversies about (that I can find!) so I did think about starting one, but that seemed like an awful lot of work. I was going to blog about “Barbie Collies” following Inca’s Reserve Best of Breed win, which is a controversial topic (Barbie Collies, not the RBOB), but is also seriously confusing and seems more American than British. Anyway, I can solve it easily, because I know a dog from pure show lines who is the most work-y collie in existence. I have to admit that she doesn’t herd because she’s a flyball dog, but her owner has been offered a considerable amount of money by farmers and working stock breeders for her, untrained, because they think she has so much potential. Most of them can’t actually believe she’s a proper show dog, but there you go.

So instead, my two new favourite blogs.

Three Woofs & A Woo
Just Another Dog Blog

In the meantime, we are getting bored over here. Kim has already tried to leave home by attempting to go down a badger sett, but she’s a bit bigger than she thinks she is and couldn’t fit. She did get very dirty and needed a bath though. Dylan took a different approach and decided that if he smelt really really bad, we’d have to give him away. He also got very dirty, and had his second bath this week. Third, if you count hydro as a bath. Mollie is happy sleeping on her trampoline and letting her ear hair grow back, but she has already notched up one escape attempt this month.

So, if anyone has any trick suggestions, please let me know! Dylan and Kim can do

• Sit
• Down
• Stay
• Wait
• Stand
• Paw (left and right)
• Beg
• Crawl
• Rollover
• Twist Left/Right
• Back up
• Leg weave (stationary and moving, and it’s really hard not to stand on them)
• Dead
• Sad Face
• Retrieve various articles, including newspapers/”post” left in another room
• Bow

Dylan can also cover himself with a blanket and do “flat”, and Kim can do “kill it” which means she shakes whatever she’s holding madly or (if she has nothing in her mouth), attacks the nearest thing to her. Without actually harming them, she knows to be gentle.

Any suggestions? Indoor games are hard with three dogs, they all get too competitive and noisy, so we have to make do with tricks.

Lovely day for a walk. Dylan thought so too!

The girls kind of always wander off for a while when we start on a walk. Or at least, they do until I produce their most favourite toy ever, Snake!
I gave it Dylan originally, but when you get a Mollie running towards you, the self-preservation instinct kicks in and you throw it and back away quickly.

Kim’s not really allowed the toy so much, especially in the woods, but as she’s smarter and quicker to turn than the collies, sometimes she gets hold of it. And then she gets her snarkface on and bristles angrily when they approach. Dylan no longer tries to approach, he takes the herding option.

Eventually we reach the wide open plains of the golf course, and all the dogs ask “are you going to throw the damn toy or not?!” Some dogs, like Kim, ask it more than once.

You know Dylan and Mollie were totally going to mob me if I didn’t throw it.

As previously mentioned, Kim can break harder and turn tighter than Mollie or Dylan, so she can usually beat them to the toy, apart from when Mollie uses brute force to batter other dogs to the ground. Sometimes, however, she misses.

Dylan can carry the toy by sticking it to his tongue.

• Dylan simply cannot flyball in ankle deep mud. He doesn’t go anywhere and falls over a lot.
• Mollie firmly believes that Jet drops her ball, even though Jet doesn’t.
• Jet cannot understand why Mollie is following her.
• You can’t throw balls past Dylan’s head on the runback and expect him to keep facing forwards.
• Kim remains sparkly white and clean despite flyballing in ankle deep mud.
• Mollie does not.
• Bailey likes to make Emma walk backwards and forward in the mud (possibly in the hope she will fall over) by dancing around everyone when she’s supposed to be in the car.
• When Dylan is facing the wrong way, you cannot let him go and expect a good changeover like you can with Kim.
• Bailey is fairly easy to pin to the floor, but it’s really hard to make her stand back up again.
• The whole of Dylan’s team are useless in ankle deep mud, except for Skye, who runs faster.
• There is a possibility Skye told the rest of her team to make her look good.
• Mollie is adorably fluffy after a bath.
• Our shower is more powerful when spraying cold water only, and changing from warm water to cold whilst Dylan is in the bath will make him leap 4 foot in the air and land on the other side of the bathroom, whipping you with his dirty fur as he passes.
• I must return my postal vote this weekend, because we would all like to see the height dogs catch a break.

MollieBaldEars is back amongst us! She had a lovely time at the vets, she get’s spoilt rotten with cuddles whilst she’s there. Her ears are now all clean and shiny and sadly hairless, so she looks hilariously bad.

Possibly as a result of being laughed at so much, she went missing (presumably escaped and roamed wild around the neighbourhood) for an hour and a half this afternoon, which means I’m now exhausted as I spent almost all that time walking every possible route I could think of that she might have taken.

On to more well-behaved dogs. Kim worked surprisingly well at training! I set a course that was purposefully full of pull-thrus and flick-flacks because that’s where we have our weaknesses, and once I’d finally got into the right place she actually did it nicely.

She seems to have got over her seesaw freak-out too, which is good. She’s never going to be superfast on the seesaw, she’s not brave enough to run right to the end and because she’s so light, it takes a while for the seesaw to drop. I have worked out how to ensure she hits her contact though, which is good to know.

Speaking of seesaws, you would never think Dylan had been so afraid of it at the beginning of this year. He loves it now, can’t get him off the damn thing! We had a few crazy skidding-to-the-end moments but he settled down after that and worked it with slightly more sense (ie. not trying to kill himself) but not much. He also nailed every weave entry, and then he had a run around with Emma right at the end which was adorable. Emma has a very different handling style to me and doesn’t use left/right commands as religiously as I do, so he got a bit confused, but it was obvious he was trying really hard to get it right. He has “good dog” written all over him!

Training was … “interesting” this week.

Dylan was totally over the top, completely overexcited and silly. Broke all his waits, pushing all his contacts, just pushing in general on everything that was asked. It sounds really odd when I try and describe it to people as really, he doesn’t sound like he was doing anything out of the ordinary for a collie. But he was not my normal dog!

Anyway, he ended up nipping my friend’s dog which was awful, I’m so furious with myself for not realising how wound up he was and putting him away until he’d calmed down. Thankfully the other dog is fine, just a bit bruised, but Dylan got a proper telling off and although he was apologetic and calmed down, was still pushy and bolshy when I ran him at the end of the session.

Considering how well he’s been working over the past couple of weeks, it’s frustrating to have something new crop up now. Especially because he nailed all his weave entries, all his contacts (although he was pushing all evening) and worked over the equipment fine.

*insert angry face here*