Taking Nora’s picture

I had a blast this afternoon, with one of our young students and her mother. Nora Price is a talented young dog-trainer who brought her little lab mix to learn agility last year. Midway through the year she acquired a pug puppy who has also done some agility.

Nora’s mother, Lori, is taking on the task of coordinating 4H dog projects and activities for our county. She and I spent some time on the phone yesterday, discussing how Bud and I might assist with the growth of the program.

As we were talking about how we can help 4H, and how 4H can help us, I was reminded that I still needed photographs of my Dash (Slydrock’s Dash For Cash CD AX AXJ RA ARCH) demonstrating my “7 Laws of a Rally Dog in Motion” for DogSport magazine.

Lori and Nora came over today and we spent a delightful 75 minutes training dogs, training Nora, and joking about our Directorial and Photographic skills.

My goal was to have Nora perform certain rally obedience sequences, demonstrating how body language affected the dog’s movement. She was to demonstrate first with Dash, a trained and titled dog, then with Blue, an untrained dog.

Both dogs performed beautifully, regardless of their level of training. Most of my time was spent getting young Nora to lighten up on “controlling” the dogs and allow them to move naturally.

That’s probably a skill learned later in life. From the point of view of the 50+ crowd, there’s a sure knowledge that you have control of nothing, also most things need not be controlled (part of “don’t sweat the small stuff”).

Tags: basic dog obedience, Bud Houston, dog agility, dog performance sports, sport obedience