A Dog for Jordan

This weekend we went North to Grantham for the 50th EMDAC BAA show at the UK Arena.

I was pleased with how Jordan and Rupert were running but they do tend to make mistakes and are still finding feet and paws at primary level and advanced juniors.

I decided to teach Jordan how to use his back and one hand to block as there were a number of tight handling challenges/traps on the courses. He's finding this technique difficult at speed. But they came away with a 7th in TFO agilty and a 10th in clockwork tunnels - not their normal speed due to Jordan's lack of confidence.

I'm still worried about Jordan and Rupert in the advanced Juniors with the Grade 5 courses. I am not one to try and get Jordan the best dog so he can win but I decided to see if someone would lend him a more expereinced dog so he could learn from teh dog and have to think less about the demands of the course and the need to get an inexpereinced dog round it. Gemma Miles kindly agreed to lend Jordan Focas. We hoped that Focus would run on body language alone and some noise. We learnt a lot from this!!

Jordan is definitely at the stage where he can handle a large, fast collie as they made a fast flowing start over some tight handling. However they came to grief when Jordan made his noise to get Focas' attention to stop him going in a tunnel. Jordan's oo!!! was translated as go and Focas shot in the tunnel and came out and got really confused to see Jordan's body language saying "back- left". They had another go and poor Focas got really confused - here was a handler whose body language said stop and voice said go. It ended in disaster.

The disaster continued. Jordan then tried to run Rupert like a big fast collie. He put him miles back from the start in a down, so he could do remote handling from the 4th fence. Instead of close to the first jump at an angle with a line of vision and handle via hand signals. Rupert interpreted being put a long way from the first fence as the need for a Calvary charge along a straight line of jumps. An inevitable "e" followed.

I was pleased with the learning from this:

Jordan can never handle a dog he doesn't train with.

The dog needs to be trained to run with Jordan so it runs on body language and his distorted sounds.

We are going to have to get Jordan training with Magic sooner rather than later and get Magic up to the standard for Grade 5 junior courses as soon as we can.

We cannot do what most juniors do and borrow dogs to run so Jordan will have to just run Rupert this year until Magic is ready.

Would a Deaf dog be the best bet for Jordan?


I can't afford it at the moment but with this in mind we are going to have to increase our pack to 4 dogs long term. Another cocker and possibly a Deaf collie that has the potential to go all the way to the top with a Deaf handler. I don't know would a hearing collie or kelpie learn to run with Jordan?

Later that day Jordan was playing at the top of a great mud mountain. Rupert ran up the mountain to play and watch over Jordan. He played with Jordan for an hour. Magic took one look and decided it looked dangerous and I was a better bet with his wubba kong. There is defiantely a unique relationship with Jordan and Rupert and it'll be interesting to see if we can get a partnership with Magic on that level.