I love seeing Rory run in the field!! Bird dog doing bird dog things!! You said in the tags you had different training and priorities with her vs Mav re: offleash running like that. What kinds of things did you do differently with Rory to be comfortable having her offleash at a distance with reliable recall?
I was writing a whole novel but really it boils down to this chart. Under the cut because it's (vertically) long.
In short, it's just as much about what I didn't do with Maverick as what I did do with Aurora.
(Edited to add: I am extremely fortunate to live in the prairies where the kind of visibility I need is easy to find. Use my experience to inspire your own training if you like, but don't use it as a recipe. I have my own goals and my own priorities and those are likely different than yours.)
Maverick:
🔵 Supremely confident from day 1
🔵 Came home in August (extremely good and exciting time for outdoor adventures)
🔵 Prioritized specific sports behaviours over foundational building blocks like engagement and cooperation
🔵 Learned bad habits from my older dog at the time (prey drive > recall)
🔵 Was indiscriminately prey driven. If it moved, he wanted to kill it.
🔵 I phased out treats too fast and didn't want to use an ecollar or long line
🔵 I focused on "social media dog behaviours" (think like walking extremely close to me on trails) and got frustrated when we couldn't meet these rather than meeting my dog where he was at. This created a lot of frustration in our dog adventures.
🔵 I practiced recalls constantly when I didn't have to, making them a tedious behaviour for him. I would recall him 20-50 times a hike for everything from "you're too far away from me" to "I want to take a photo".
Aurora
🟣 Came to me a little insecure and looked to me for reassurance
🟣 Came home in December (a cold and relatively boring time for outdoor adventures)
🟣 I prioritized engagement, cooperation, and name recognition from day 1
🟣 Practiced good habits by walking offleash in the snow either alone or with Pike (amazing recall)
🟣 Is extremely birdy, but is very very focused. She easily calls off deer or people/dogs in the distance because she mostly cares about birds.
🟣 Literally always gets offered a high value snack for recalling or voluntary check ins (I will never phase this out, I will carry chunks of cheese on offleash walks for the rest of her life)
🟣 I never practice recalls if I don't need them. This one is hard to explain, but once Rory understood that long whistle = come back as fast as you can, I don't whistle unless I really need to. I recall her an average of 0-3 times per hike (*based on visibility or wildlife*) and trust her to make good decisions otherwise. I keep my eyeballs on her 100% of the time and choose areas with good visibility, but I don't recall her just for being far away.
🟣 I limit hikes where I have to nag her often (think, in the woods where I dont have a great line of sight and have to remind her to stay close to me) to a few times a month or less so she doesn't start getting frustrated about it.
🟣 I trust the training I put into her and choose to run her in areas with (relatively) reduced risk if she makes the "wrong" choice. I don't nitpick everything she does and I let her make her own choices, within reason.
🟣 I have an interrupter cue to ask her to stop doing something before I call her back (if she's digging a hole and I want her to move on, I use "Rory, enough! Here!") instead of whistling at her.
🟣 I don't force her attention on check ins. If she runs back to me and doesn't want a snack and wants to run straight back out, I let her run back out.
🟣 I have anticipatory cues for the end of a walk so I don't have to recall her when we get to the end of the field.
I want to say that it's nerve wracking to watch my dog sprint at full speed hundreds of yards away from me. I have to fight the impulse to recall her just because she's far away. It's an exercise in trust because I'm always worried about her going over the horizon, or running into a wildlife, or falling into a hole, but it's an important thing to work on if you have a dog that needs that trust to thrive.
Mav and I were a good team, but I never fully trusted him outdoors. I always had my finger on the ecollar buttons ready for him to do an evil and need to be vibrated. It was exhilarating to watch him in the field, but it wasn't really fun or relaxing.
Rory and I built a much stronger foundation of trust (I personally never would have been able to do this if I had more than one dog). She doesn't know any tricks yet, but I'm super confident in her recall and ability to take direction in the field, even when she's sprinting as fast as possible.
9 books i want to read in 2025, tagged by @hardisonparker !!
i also decided to choose things i own. i feel like i'm finally coming out the other side of a VERY long burnout and i'm excited about it. 💖
tagging @blundergato , @werewulfinn , @tofixtheshadows , @greatrunner , @carolinecrane , and anyone else who wants to do it! tag me, i want to see and be inspired.
A lot about Mav's decline and a little about how it makes me look at Rory.
I didn't talk about it very much here, but Mav was really subtle in his signs of pain when he was declining from his spine injury. Some of the things that tipped me off were changes to his gait, lower tailset, slower movement, reluctance/slowness getting on or off furniture, and needing extra cuddling. These things could easily be brushed off as him being tired or him being disinterested, and it really made me doubt what I was seeing.
I was sure Mav had something really wrong with him, but it was so hard to convince the vet of that. She said things like "are you sure you didn't just train him not to jump on the furniture?" and "sometimes dogs slow down as they age", meaning well but ultimately making things a lot harder for me. This, coupled with Mav's happiness at the vet and overall stoic personality, gaslit me into thinking I was imagining things. I googled things like "munchausen by proxy symptoms" because I needed to know if I was the real problem.
When Mav went for his OFA hips and elbow rads, I had them take spine rads as well, hoping it would answer my question and help find out what was wrong with him. When his rads came back normal, I cried. It was partly in relief that it wasn't something structural, but also partly desperation that I couldn't prove something was wrong.
I pushed my vet to refer Mav for a neuro consult. It took four months to get her to agree and then for the neuro clinic to schedule Mav in. In that time, I started tracking his decline with a special quality of life chart I made specifically for him. It showed a degeneration of his QOL, but I still thought maybe I was dramatizing things and imagining it.
When Mav went for his neuro consult, they took him back for tests for ten minutes, then came back and solemnly told me they were certain his problem was neurological. They then asked me if they could take him back and let their vet students do the (non-invasive) tests on him for practice because he was such a happy dog. Of course I said yes.
They told me he wasn't a good candidate for surgery. I could do an MRI, but it would be expensive and wouldn't add much besides a formal diagnosis. They recommended palliative care.
I sobbed while driving home. Part of it was relief that I finally knew I wasn't imagining things. Most of it was heartbreak.
I scrutinized Mav's final decline because I couldn't let him suffer. I had hard lines ("when he can't run" and "when the painkillers stop working") and he reached those, but he was still so happy. He still had so much joy in his life. I made the call anyway.
The day came. He trotted into the vet's office like he was meeting his best friend at a restaurant. The vet carried him back to get a port and he wagged his tail the whole time. He scarfed down an entire fistful of cookies.
It was still, without a single doubt, the right choice for Maverick. I have thought about it from every angle, torn apart every single decision, and there's nothing I would do differently if I could go back and do it all again.
Now Rory came to me with a weird gait. She came to me with occasional dorsal shivers (the skin thing horses do) and extremely occasionally bunny hops while running. Not enough for me to think there's something seriously wrong with her, but enough for me to send videos to her breeder. I tried to believe it was just a symptom of puppy uglies or that she just needed more time to grow gracefully.
I debated it for two months, but I finally took Rory for an assessment at a sports physio vet here in town. When I filled out the intake form, I made it clear that I could be concerned over nothing, that this could be a waste of $85 and an hour of our time.
She scheduled us in, did her hands on assessment, and found a knot in Rory's thigh. She gave us some stretches and we have a few more rechecks, but Rory should be totally fine and her gait should improved within the week. All the symptoms point towards a longterm overcompensation to reduce weight on her one leg.
I felt so stupid going into the sports vet today. I almost cancelled my appointment twice because I was sure I was imagining things. Even when she was examining Rory, I was preparing my apology for wasting her time.
Rory is going to feel better. She's going to get to grow up without the effects caused from an overcompensation from shifting her weight in a weird way. She probably would've been fine even without the appointment, but she's going to be even better now.
It's a whole lot of text to say something cliché like trust your instincts or don't overthink it, but it is what it is.
Mav was put to rest yesterday. His spine injury was affecting his quality of life and he deserved to go without suffering.
I have a lot of things to say about my beautiful dog. He was funny, he was easygoing, he was versatile, he was charming. But mostly, Mav was beloved. He was loved from his very first breath until his last, and he'll be loved for a long time still. He was loved by everyone he met and by people he'd never get the chance to meet, and he loved the entire world in return.
He was the coolest dog in the world. We could've had a hundred years together and it wouldn't have been enough. But we fit so much love into that little dog, he was full to bursting. And that's something at least.
It's been a month without Mav, here is a jumble of thoughts about it, in no particular order:
Mav was the coolest dog in the world
He was also pretty high-maintenance (in terms of exercise specifically); my exercise has plummeted without him. I have a lot more free time and I'm not really sure what to do with myself.
It was really, really fun to dabble in sports with Mav, but the titles don't really mean anything to me now. I love thinking back at the trial experiences (specifically the mishaps - alerting on cheese, visiting the judges, stealing toys) but I don't really care about the letters or certificates anymore.
In contrast, the Top CKC Rally Brittany brings me a lot of comfort. I like that Mav will be recorded in the brittany spaniel archives. I'll be really sad when we get usurped.
I'm glad I found a good group of people for dog sports. I could have gone so many different directions, and I'm so glad I went with the "be kind to your dog above all else" and I think a huge part of that was the community I found irl.
Mav's breeder is a gem, she has checked in with me so many times and I appreciate that so much.
I wish I had known more about training and handling before I got Mav. I'm sad for the gaps in his foundations and I wish I had known more to set him up better from the beginning.
I'm so happy he got to have so many adventures - big ones and little ones. I could have done more, but I think he got a lot.
I'm pretty sure his last thought was about a cookie, which doesn't really matter, but feels very on brand for him.
I can't remember the last time I smooched his head and that makes me kind of sad. Doubtless it was at the vet's but I can't remember for sure.
I spread his ashes in the area where he most liked hiking, and every time I've gone hiking there since then, I've thought of it as visiting Mav.
I still haven't thrown out his gross kitty cat stuffy, it's still sitting on top of his crate.
I'm really grateful for the people I got to meet through Mav.
I'm really happy I was so consistent about posting on Tumblr, I have such a good archive of his whole life and I love that.
it's so funny i spent sooooo much time being embarrassed about Mav's normal dog behaviours (e.g. worming in the grass, pulling on leash, soliciting pets) and then he would do something objectively hilarious and embarrassing in front of a crowd of people (e.g. heeling away with the judge during an obedience trial) and it was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
