Vet practice

We took a break from practicing handling at the vet's office after I brought Terra home. I scheduled another one and had the tech run through a typical exam with him. She checked his eyes, ears, teeth, pulse temperature, lifted his front legs to look at his chest/belly, and palpated his abdomen. Later I had her stretch and feel all four legs. Here and there he gave mildly stressed body language (tail down, yawn, and/or tense face), but he tolerated it. He only tried to avoid her when there was a dog on the other side of the door that he needed to bark at, and when she picked him up (which I should have told her not to do). We had previously also worked toward getting a voluntary blood draw, but we're close to the limit of what we can do without actually drawing blood. Maybe one more session with that to come. Aside from that, I need to do practice a lot more with settling calmly on his side.

Monthly chiro adjustment, rally-free failure

I brought a cheese and salmon Bark Pouch for Cai to lick at during his monthly chiropractic adjustment. He loved it and was so enthused that he didn't growl or even fidget once. Dr Wallace was impressed. As usual, she had to fix up his pelvis and front left shoulder. She noted that his back left leg was also a little off, which was probably from hitting it on the agility tire on Tuesday. No injury to his toes, though.

I asked if she thought it would be okay to raise his jump height back to 12" and she said no reason not to. That means we can finally compete again!! We'll be doing AKC since it's the venue I'm most familiar with and is very common. (I'd love to do more TDAA as well but the one club that hosted events seems to have given up due to low entries and lack of volunteers to help run things.)

I signed up for a Rally-FrEe video event and we went to Sherry's to record. Cai was distractable and imprecise in his tricks. I stopped partway through our first run. We tried again and he was better but then he left the "ring" to follow a scent, which is an automatic disqualification. He's never good for more than two runs so we stopped for the day. We came back a few days later but it was raining so I had to scratch our entry.

I signed up for the world wide video event next month. I'll do more training in the meantime and hopefully we'll do better. I had expected too much from him after a long break without practice.

Foot owie

Chimera has never been good at the tire. He tends to misjudge the take off point. This morning he banged his back left foot against it and came up limping. I examined him, walked him around a bit, and then he was putting weight on it. I ran him over a small sequence but he was still compensating for it, so we went home early. I'm pretty sure it's just a little owie rather than a real injury - he's always been a drama queen.