A Dog - Back-Story Part 1

Shadow is from Michigan.  I found her after an extensive 7 state search for a healthy ESS through the ESS Field Trial Association Breeders Group.  She was almost 4 months old and adorable.  On our ride home with her, she rode in the back of our Land Rover, which had a dog guard.  She howled and howled.  Sounded to me like she was saying “Help, I’m being dog napped!  Help!” When I finally looked around, she had squeezed through the 4-inch area between the guard and vehicle.  Of course howling like her life depended upon it.  Just so you know that I do love the earth, I got rid of the Land Rover several years later and got a Honda Insight – electric hybrid.

Shadow was a star in puppy obedience and continued on in beginner and advanced obedience.  She started her agility training at Bud Houston’s Dogwood in a puppy class.  Dogwood was an hour and a half drive, so already you can see I’m a little fanatic about training.  At about a year, came home from work and Shadow was limping.  Long story short, she had a partially torn ACL.  We were advised to crate her for about 4 months and walk her on a leash.  We did this, but in order to keep her fit, we got a very large above ground pool.  I got in the pool almost every day and got her to swim.  I learned, to Shadow’s dismay, to hold the toe of her good back leg, so it forced her to use her injured leg to swim.  Once healed, I took her to a dog physical therapist in central Michigan.  The therapist was quite surprised with Shadows condition.  She thought she would have lost muscle tone due to the crating.  Obviously the swimming kept her in good shape.  Learned about 8 exercises that I had to do with Shadow daily. I did ask Shadow to take some responsibility for her recovery, but all she heard me saying was “Shadow – yada ,yada, yada, yada, yada, good girl.”  Oh well.

Shadow was easy to train in agility, she was my second ESS trained in agility.  ESSs so want to please and be with their humans, so it was easy and fun.  We continued to train with Bud Houston until he moved.  We also trained at our club, the Gem City Dog Obedience Club.  Trained twice a week and at home – you get the picture.  At the end of 2007, Shadow was on her way to earn a MACH from AKC – highest title for agility, which requires 20 double Q’s (a double Q consists of clean run in a standard course and a jumpers course)  and speed points.  We had lots of fun training and competing.  Agility really cements the bond between dog and human.  My husband started taping our runs, so we could review the runs for improvement.  There are several pictures of Shadow and me both looking at the cam recorder reviewing the last run.  Really looks like Shadow is saying in the picture “See, I knew it was you who messed up.  Your body was telling me to go left, when you should have told me to go right.”  You see, it is almost always – 99.9% of the time that the human messes up and not the dog.  But dogs are very forgiving and rarely bark at us or scold us.  Shadow was always willing to give me another chance.