Last night Etta and the eight Game On puppies stayed home in the whelping room with Terra, and BlazE and I drove out to the agility field. With a litter of nine-day-olds tucked in for the night, somebody in the house needed to keep their day job — and for BlazE, his day job is to compete.
If you haven't met him yet, BlazE — **CH Vinewood Three Doves Plays With Fire RA BCAT THDX DS DJ CGC TKN FITB** — is the sire of our current Game On litter and a dog whose title string takes up the better part of a sentence. He has a hospital therapy career, a field-hunting career, a dock-diving career, and a litter of eight beautiful puppies on the ground. What he does not have, on paper, is an agility title — *yet*. But he has been training, and it shows. He is a complete delight to run.
The full run, all one minute and forty-eight seconds of it, is here:
In sequence: tunnel, dog walk, jump, A-frame, jumps and table, dog walk and tunnel, jumps and a second tunnel, teeter, tire, weave poles, another jump and teeter, and a clean finish at the tire. A good chunk of obstacles for a minute and forty-eight seconds, and BlazE held focus and drive from start to finish.
A small confession about the edit
What you won't see in the final video are two handler errors I edited out. There are two cuts in there. Both are spots where I — the handler — fumbled a cross-over, the run went sideways, we backed up, re-ran the section cleanly, and the cleaner take ended up in the final cut. BlazE did his part each time. The mistakes were mine. 😉
A cross-over in agility is the moment the handler changes which side of the dog they are working from — front crosses (the handler crosses in front of the dog's path), rear crosses (the handler crosses behind), blind crosses (the handler turns away as they cross). It sounds simple. Done well, a cross-over lets the dog drive forward in a clean line and turn at exactly the right moment for the next obstacle. Done a beat too early, the dog turns before it should and arrives at the next jump at a bad angle. Done a beat too late, the dog commits to a line the handler is no longer giving cues for, and you can almost see the question form in the dog's face: what now?
Both of last night's mess-ups were exactly that — a half-second off, a polite glance back from BlazE, a sigh from me, and a "let's try that again, buddy." We did. He did. We moved on. And then I trimmed the rough takes out of the final cut.
I'm telling you about it for a couple of reasons.
One — when we share video of our adult dogs with prospective families and the broader Springer world, we want them to see what a Three Doves Springer with good training looks like when everything is clicking. The two cleaner cross-overs in the final video are honest representations of BlazE's actual ability. He really did run that course well.
Two — but it's also true that real training is messy. Real handlers (this one in particular) blow cross-over timing all the time. The dog forgives us, we try again, we get a little better the next session. That is the actual story of training a working dog: not perfect runs every time, but a willing, patient partner who keeps showing up while the handler figures it out. That's the dog we are trying to breed.
The Game On puppies — the ones tucked in with Etta and Terra back at the house while BlazE and I were out — will, with luck, end up in homes that look like that partnership. Homes where the handler is willing to keep showing up. Homes where the dog is willing to forgive the mistakes. BlazE last night, with his polite-but-clearly-mildly-perplexed pause at the bad cross-over and his immediate willingness to re-run the section, was a small, lovely demonstration of his half of the bargain.
Etta, for her part, had a quiet evening doing the most important work in the house — keeping eight pound-and-a-half puppies fed and warm. Both jobs matter. We're very lucky to have both of them.
— Albert
