Canada Day

My American readers will be celebrating their country's day on July 4, but here in Canada we celebrate Canada Day on July 1.

My dog club did it's usual demo at the Canada Day celebrations at Heritage Park in Mission, B.C.  It's about 20 minutes away, across the Fraser River from where we practice in Abbotsford.  We've being doing this demo for years, and every once in a while the question surfaces as to why we aren't doing one in Abbotsford.....and we come up with the same answers....It's a nicer location, there's a huge off leash area and a creek for the dogs, and we get an honorarium for being there.

It seems July 1st is more often than not, a scorcher of a day.  It got to 33 C or 91 F, and was our first hot day of the summer,  but there was a bit of a breeze, and the mosquitoes were pretty well non existent where the demo was.

I often think that the course we run is simplified too much, but this year we changed it up.  A tricky handling course for the masters dogs, and a simpler one for the beginners and advanced.  You will notice two different coloured number cones at the obstacles.

The first obstacle was the tire.  Now Luna used to have issues with the tire, and would run under it at times, especially if it was the first obstacle.  But, I thought she got over that long ago.  Not unusually, I was proved wrong.  All. three. times. She ran under that tire at the start of every demo.  I went out there between demo 2 and 3 and worked her with the ball and she jumped that tire every. single. time.  At the start of demo 3 I showed her the ball, and the little brat gave me the paw and ran under the tire again.  And took the same off course tunnel all three times (obviously I didn't adjust my handling enough to sort that out)  Did you know that in agility almost all errors are the handler's fault?:) 

Pretty well airborne

Pushing those poles out of the way.

But we had fun:) and I managed to prevent a teeter fly off  (That's when the dog launches itself off the end of the teeter before it hits the ground.)  Another one of Luna's favourite tricks, if I don't remember to yell 'EASY' in time.  There has been a time or two she flew off the end of that so fast, the board hadn't even started to tip.  There's a reason we say Luna is short for Lunatic.

And then there is reliable old Jake.

Look, I can fly!

The teeter is NOT Jake's favourite obstacle

I had some really nice runs with Jake, aka Mr. Reliable.  I had some fun runs with Luna aka Lunatic.  I thought was going to die in that heat after two runs almost back to back in the first demo.  The dogs did fine.  We took them in the creek a few times, and we had pools for them to go in.  Jake and Luna were never hot enough that they wanted to lay down in the pools.  They mostly dozed on the cool grass in the shade between runs.  It was a fun day, with lots of good food.  

We all take food to share, mmmmm.

All photos courtesy of friend Marilyn W.  Thank you!