Monday, February 13, 2012

Peanut's SAR Training and Nubs Update

One day I'll get enough ambition to change the banner image at the top of the page to reflect both Nubs and Peanut. I just haven't had a good photo of Peanut and I have no clue what I want the banner to reflect. So one day I'll change it.

NUBS'S UPDATE
I've been getting a lot of questions regarding how Nubs is doing and I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get an update of him. Nubs knee is MUCH stronger now and the surgery did MUCH better this time around. He rarely limps on the knee except for times when there is a change in weather. A few weeks back we had a major scare that he may have weakened his good knee when he hurt his front paw. One thing they do not ever tell you in the breed description is how accident prone this breed is. They ignore pain better then many other breeds so they end up hurting themselves more then other breeds.

Anyways, It took almost 2 weeks for Nubs to heal and be back to normal after hurting his front paw and since then he's shown no signs of weakness in that good knee. So all-in-all Nubs is doing GREAT! He'll never weight pull again (in fact I sold his harness a few months ago) but maybe agility isn't out of the question. We will see how it goes.

PEANUT'S UPDATE
Search and Rescue training has started again finally and I couldn't be more excited. Well I could if it wasn't 13*F outside with wind chills in the single digits, but that's a whole other topic. We've taken a few months off because of the holidays and family issues so it was a dry run on Sunday to see how the dogs would do. Shockingly they did splendid! I know I shouldn't be shocked but I've tried over the past 2 months to work with Peanut and tracking my scent and she's just not interested, but Sunday she shocked me. She took off after the scent like she has been doing it for ever and followed the track like a pro. The only time she gets confused is when we come to the subject because she always does a full circle around the subject and then goes to him. She did two tracks, both about a quarter mile long. Some of her longest tracks to date.

I decided that with my Tax returns, Peanut needed an actual tracking harness. I did a bit of looking around, and a lot of tracking harnesses I found I felt they didn't give the dog enough room to move, or might cut off the wind pipe as they were searching. So after giving it some thought, I decided on a leather tracking harness that is also known as an agitation harness. Now don't let the name fool you. It's a tracking/Schutzhund harness and I find it to be much more hardy, safer, and works really better then other harnesses I found. Sunday proved to me how nice of a harness it was since Peanut was in full blown CRAZY search mode and the harness allowed me to have more control over her speed and didn't choke her. I love it. If your interested in where I go the harness from let me know and I'll tell you. They currently do not have a website but when they do I will be posting it here!

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And then both of my favorite pups!
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1 comment:

  1. This picture really shows the Pit in Peanut. I never noticed she is getting a little more "jowly" like Mr. Nubster.

    Glad he's on the mend...don't tell Ms. P, but he's still my faorite!

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