I wish I could report that Gustavo was back to his shining star self, but he had another hard day at the dog show. A run with the weirdo shakies, a run that didn’t happen, 13 obstacles of a brilliant standard that melted down at the electro shock table of death, and then a totally normal, right on snookers run.

Every set of poles he did, lovely. Every dogwalk, lovely. Every teeter, lovely. But the stressed out disasters, just too stressful for us both. Maybe someone with sharper training chops than I could figure out Gustavo, but he just feels so off beat to me when his brain starts short circuiting. Or when he decides to run away off a startline to join his friends and their meaty bones. 

Another day of concerned people asking, “What’s wrong with Gustavo?”

I think Gustavo is telling me this dog show stuff, highly overrated and gives him a headache. He’s entered next weekend, I think we will just stick to jumpers and perhaps a snookers run if it involves a lot of tunnels. We aren’t going to quit agility, but I think his days of competing may be coming to an end.

Otterpop clocked along. She pulled a couple of nice runs out of her butt later on in the day. The rest, sorta blah. She did win her Grand Prix, Standard, and got a SuperQ, but sorta blah. Mostly she wanted to go back to work and hold horses in their stalls. This is her thing. You open the door, she guards them from leaving with her beady little eyes while I feed or blanket. This excites Otterpop. She likes to trot after trucks and help with chores. She did all this stuff after the dog show with way more gusto than any of her runs over the weekend. A perfect day for Otterpop would be agility agility agility just not at a dog show and do hard gambles then go to work and do jobs all day with a stick in her mouth.

Which is what we’ll do tomorrow.

Team Small Dog, maybe dog show days are over is what they are trying to tell me. I did receive many compliments on my trash can emptying! I was loaned a very fun lab to run in jumpers and this was awesome! Loan me your fast, peppy dogs, people with sore legs and backs and I will run them! I made one handling error that cost us a refusal, oops. You are supposed to get Qs and WIN with loaner dogs. Sorry Peggy! 

We are entered next weekend. We’ll be there and run some, not sure what. We will keep practicing, we will keep going to class, we will keep trying to get as good as we can get. But I think the team might be going mutinous on me about our dog show career. Agility is fun for me and for my dogs. But if some of our agility isn’t fun for all of us, Houston we have a problem. Stay tuned for the drama. The last thing I’d like to be is a quitter on my long road to championdom. But what would we all do if Team Small Dog quit dog shows?