IMG_0504.jpgYesterday five people with six mini dogs went to Glenbrae Residential Care to put on a show for the residents there. It was quite a lot of work to get ready and rehearse the show for a couple of weeks so that we wouldn't look completely unprepared.

Some of our dogs in this group called 'Mini Magic' are quite old and have had a lot of experience in shows and others of us are just starting to train our pups to work at shows and tournaments.

I always talk a lot about 'new places' when we train. Whatever the dog does at home, or at it's usual training club, it may decide not to do when it is in a new place. There is a degree of emotional overload that happens and the dog gets stage fright, if you like. It forgets what it should know and bumbles around.

When you want your dog to perform at a new place, you need to get there well before time and let the dog have a good sniff of the place and maybe mark it with a piddle or something even worse. However it is better that it does this before the attempt at performance than during the performance. I also preach a thing called 'control' which is a set of exercises that allow the dog to know that the next thing that happens will be perhaps 'the Agility game'. In other words it is a preceeding piece of action that motivates the dog to continue into the next act comfortably.

So I got there early with Fae, let her sniff, tied her up did some control, probably not enough as I needed to set up the gear. Some dogs get crazy when they are overloaded, but Fae gets very slow and very quiet when she is unsure. So I learnt more about her. She actually did some hurdles and things in the agility, didn't want to do her ballet, wore her costume without complaint, did the flygility portion of the performance to her best ability and loved the race game. I wasn't unhappy with her performance as a 12 month old pup going into a funny new place. Her work with the elderly was exemplary, she put a gentle foot on many knees and reached up so that people could pat her. One old lady, said 'oh you dear little thing'. So I think she made her mark. However she did discover that all the flower pots had slug bait in them and tried desperately to get to it to eat the little blue lollies, so that was a bit disturbing. However, she is still alive and kicking so the little she did get obviously did no harm.

Our oldest dog at the performance was Bridie at nearly 11 years. She suffered from 'new place' quite a lot. She was good with her personal visits to each resident, didn't want to do her agility, did most of the flygility and loved the Racegame. Bridie didn't look as happy as she could have but she tried really hard. Bailey the foxterrier dressed as a clown also did her best. She thought there was probably food to be had somewhere so she checked that out, but she did all the exercises fairly well. Again it was the Agility portion of the show that she didn't like much and really didn't achieve.

Bootz the Shitzu-Poodle is a socially experienced 6 year old. I thought that Bootz was the most assured of the group, he worked as though he meant it. He wasn't distracted and he seriously put his best paw forward. Bootz won the Racegame portion of the entertainment and that was because of his relaxed non stressed demeanour. He was inspirational. The two German Spitz Coco and Zulu are just babies. Coco could have barked more than she did so I thought she handled it quite well. Coco was in the final of the Racegame but wanted to take Bootz out in the other lane, so Bootz, who kept on going was the winner. But Coco was very funny and very entertaining. Zulu is only 5 months old and he is just darling. He had a yap or two when his sister Coco yapped but he was just there to be cuddled by the residents and to show that he was beautiful and he did. I thought that Zulu was the dog that next best handled the pressure.

Anyway as a first gig it was great, it was colourful and it was entertaining. It only took half an hour but we figure that that was almost enough for most of the residents. We could do with two more dogs in the troupe that would fill it out to 45 minutes with the racegame draw. All the dogs did racegame best so we need to grow that, All the dogs enjoyed the Flygility section so we need to work on that a bit more. The trouble is the limited space which makes it hard to get the five meters from flybox to first fly hurdle which somewhat confused the dogs and their return runs were a bit messy, so we need to do some short work to get them going on this, and they all found the small tunnel unfamiliar and difficult so we have to work on that as well. The tricks portion of the entertainment was lacking, so we need to build up our tricks a lot.

We have not set out to be 'the perfect performing dogs' we set out to be colourful, fun, entertaining and use dogs that can be handled and touched by the residents. I think we are close to achieving this and we will have a look at our video and see if we can use it to market our Mini Magic a bit. We made a $20 koha for the club, better than nothing I guess, lets hope some of our other gigs are a little more generous...

:-)