The weekends usually fly by anymore and its sad when i look at how little i accomplish sometimes. This weekend however was not like that. Friday brought some training time and getting the house in order and paperwork set. Raina had her first demo which will be in detail in the next post. Saturday morning Raina and I left the house at 430 am to head to Kingston NY for a search. We spent the weekend looking for a missing man, I in the field and Raina back at the firehouse base socializing and learning how her future years will be spent as a SAR dog. We spent saturday night at a team mates house and raina was great even sleeping in a strange crate in a strange room with new dogs coming in and out of the room all night. The importance of exposing your dogs to these new things are so important especially if you are raising a social working dog!!
Sunday night brought a few quick search problems for Raina in which she did amazing. She is excellent at using her nose and not her eyes despite doing a run away or two first. Her drive is high and right now she works for food and ball play once shes cleaned her plate!
Monday is our in town day, eme and raina both get obedience, socilization, and work some new place in town. This week we did Home depot and Eme we worked her focus and attention to mom. We also built her play drive and then moved inside and worked some obedience around the new machines, all the people and carts ect. Raina we worked on her focus and obedience and did a lot with her socialization. She also got to work 2 problems inside the garden center of the store!
Once finished there i met Kara at the state land up by me and we worked Eme on a few short problems. She did great came right back to me, wouldn’t take the toy, barked, went right back to kara did a second refind to me where i was finally able to reward her at me for the whole sequence!! We did it one more time with kara going a little further away and i got two refind sequences before rewarding her at me. A few more times like this and we will be on the road to a SOLID refind!!! Now just gotta get the bark automatic as soon as she is on her way back to me.
We finished up our weekend by relaxing at home and cuddling on the couch. It was a great weekend and i was not only proud of my dogs but the teamwork that i experienced and the friendships i have developed just over one common love, the canine!