Perfect pass (flyball)

Very few if any people here will appreciate this. These are my dogs last night, running together, and demonstrating a *perfect* pass at the start line, maybe even a hair early but that’s OK for training. You’d think running two “brothers” together would be easy but it’s really not. For one, the dogs are used to body-checking and play-biting each other and have done it during flyball. Poor Pan sometimes gets confused or distracted because I’m handling Nikon and waving toys around that he can’t have. Nikon *cannot* pass into Pan (only the other way around, as seen here) because he will just turn around and chase Pan. Since I have the two largest dogs, sometimes we don’t have dogs at training that are willing to help train my dogs to pass. The dog coming back must learn to give the lane and must automatically move over out of the lane immediately after the last jump. The dog passing in must also be able to “give” a little and not crowd the lane coming into the first jump. Both of my dogs have now had some experience with a very little dog passing in and some of the other easy-going (but not as fast) dogs. Last night we just plain ran out of dogs that hadn’t taken their turns yet so we put my boys in as a Pair and thankfully Donna captured the pass. Nikon yielded the lane, Pan wasn’t hogging, no collisions or snarking, and Nikon controlled the ball past the start line (a common problem is that a green dog will drop the ball early when being passed into, especially when passed close by a large dog).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9qij-nSm4

In other “perfection” news…. at the tournament this past weekend I witnessed a perfect start! Now I personally think that the *handler* should be awarded some sort of title for a perfect start. In this case it was sort of anti-climactic because when we saw 0.000 everyone thought it was some kind of mistake, and then by the time we realized it was a PERFECT start the number was gone and the race had progressed.

I myself had two close starts with Pan on Sunday, a .008 and .005. My best start ever was .002 when Pan earned his best official time ever of 4.009 (which also stands as his best unofficial time including the start).

On the same day we were competing in Middleville, another team in Canada broke the world record twice! A mix height dog, Malinois, and two Border Collies ran a 15.09.