Agility Report

And they did great! Here’s Debbie’s report:

We did have a wonderful weekend-I think the Mo really enjoyed some “mom alone” time. The courses on Friday were fun and fast. The JWW’s was a haul ass and run-Mo reallllly likes those. And the Standard was really fun, came in 9 or ten seconds under course time. Saturday-would have had the jumpers BUT mom failed to give a discrimination maneuver to him and he took the wrong jump. I felt so bad because he checked back with me and I didn’t tell him any different-my mistake-good dog! Then on the Standard he got a case of the WHAHOOS! The nose went down in the weave poles and then he was all over the place. HE did the table again, the teeter and the Aframe-too bad you don’t get extra credit for that!

Sunday’s jumpers he knocked a bar when I was doing a rear cross but I think I had him in the right position but he gathered incorrectly and just nicked it enough to bring it down. Then the Standard course was a little jerky on my part (all I could think of was this would be the last ExecA Standard & his title if we got it). I got to the table and put Mo on a sit and then realized the Judge wasn’t counting and I thought OHCRAPDOWN-told Mo to down left out the OH Crap part. Such a good boy you could hear the wind when he downed. We soooo fixed the table problem we used to have. And I slipped at the next to last jump and my signal went awry but he powered over it and finished clean with a little time under to spare.

The courses on Monday were fun and we just whooped them! Our first time in ExecB in both JWW’s and Standard and our first double queue-it just doesn’t get any better-I was so happy with the Mo.

So on his last two legs in ExecA Stand he took a second each time and we were one of two ExecA dogs to finish the coarse clean. Friday I think there were 25 ExecA 20inch dogs running against us and then down to 20 for his last leg. I got 7 perfect weave poles out of eight and lots of focus and one very happy tired brown dog! Who got lots of treats......

The bottom line: qualified in 5 of 8 runs, placed (second) in 2 runs, got his Excellent A title, and on his very first day as Excellent B in both jumpers and standard…he double Q’d (qualified on both jumpers and standard)!

Debbie is pretty tired, but Mo’i looks like he’s ready to rumble some more. Watch out, border collies — the Mo Man is on your tail!

Note: this was posted over Debbie’s protest — but I thought it was just too good a brag to hide from the public!

Filaree

At right you see the enemy of dog owners in the chaparral. This stuff goes by several common names, including “red-stemmed filaree” and “stork’s beak”. The botanical name is Erodium cicutarium, and it’s a member of the geranium family. It is an invader, not a native plant.

And it is evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. Those *$%&(@#$ seeds screw themselves into our dog’s coats, and then (if we fail to immediately find and remove them) sometimes manage to work their little pointed heads into the dog’s skin. One site describes the seeds this way:

Each “storks bill” actually is five seeds, each with the long tail tapering out to the end of the “bill”. These tails are tightly bound and make the central, elongated “bill”. At maturity, what becomes the corkscrew peels off the long “bill” and starts to curl, remaining attached to the seed. The familiar corkscrews then twist into the soil as they go through day-night cycles of wetting and drying, each time the spiral forces the sharp seed deeper into the soil. Eventually the seed breaks off, leaving hundreds of cork screws in any square meter.

Ouch! Our dogs have webbed feed, and those webs are particularly vulnerable. Debbie is so frustrated by these seeds that she’d be happy to use chemicals, radiation, or even fire to reduce our yard to bare dirt — just to avoid these seeds.

But bare dirt is a really bad idea in the chaparral, as the resulting erosion would create serious problems for us.

I managed to do a bit of research on Erodium cicutarium this weekend, and I think we may be able to help our problem a bit through the miracle of chemistry. I’ve order some MCPA and 2,4-D herbicides (the recommended brews), and we will be doing some experimentation this summer. I’m hopeful that one or the other of these chemicals will take out the Erodium cicutarium, but allow some native in its stead.

The most interesting web sites I found are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — but there were lots more. Obviously we are not the only people who hate this noxious, evil weed…