Sunday, March 18, 2012

MACH Amber

Amber got that one last double Q yesterday. So very exciting! That's my dad commenting from the stands while my husband filmed. I am so proud of my dog.
Now what are we going to do? I think we'll try a little Rally-O in May and I think I'll still run her in agility but probably start over in Novice Preferred at the 20" height since she's an old lady dog at 8 years old.

In other news, my vet decided to run a test on her urine last week. It's a bladder tumor antigen test that specifically tests for Transitional Cell Carcinoma, the most common cancer of the urinary tract and the one he was worried it could be. All we did was send in a urine sample to the lab. We got the call yesterday from the lab that it was NEGATIVE!!!! I think my vet was pretty sure it would come back positive. So there's still a small chance that it is some other kind of cancer but highly unlikely according to my vet. That made my entire day, week, month, year! So he says we don't have to worry about doing a biopsy right away, which is good since the tool is still not fixed and we still haven't ordered a new one.

Ahhh, life is good :)
I call this "Champion of my heart".

Saturday, March 3, 2012

bird dog in the snow

We had one beautiful hike in it and now it's mud again and un hike-able. 
There are a lot of quail in these foothills and the dogs love it.






















We don't hunt. We are all a little gun shy around here. I once took them both to a practice held by the german shorthair pointer club where they had live pigeons and live guns. Both dogs very much wanted that pigeon in the beginning. The man holding it plucked some feathers and then tossed it out for each dog to chase, separately. They did. Then another man shot a gun. Both dogs immediately turned around and came back to me, quivering. I don't know what I expected, they were 6 and 9 years old at the time and had never heard gun shot before! The men with the club weren't much interested in helping us through it, they were mainly there for serious hunter folk to practice I think.
That's ok, I don't like guns either! I do find it really interesting watching a gun dog do what it's bred to do though. I wish I had started them out younger so they weren't afraid, maybe I'd have done some hunt tests with them but also, just for their well being when we happen to hear gunfire in the hills which we do occasionally.
Rye will point more often than Amber.
They don't catch them, they just want to find them.