Our youngsters group were back and were joined by Bob the collie. I am even more excited about this group than I was last week, this group has so much potential. I have never really thought of myself as a poodle kind of person but I could quite happily steal Peppa. All the youngsters worked brilliantly, including driving down a line of wings to their toys in front of their handlers.
Bracken the Dandie Dinmont Terrier was back from a long break as his owner hasn't been very well so he joined Millie and Rueben. We had two sequences set up one working on tight turns and handling and another sequence that was about driving onto tunnels. Millie proved that she can do a lovely wait start and Rueben seemed to enjoy the bigger spread out course. Our final class got to tackle the same courses, after some rather panicky looks from the handlers when we initially walked the courses they all proved they are more than capable once they trusted their dogs to drive on without them. Even Bertie excelled himself this week and we had very few zoomie moments.
Despite being rather exhausted after a long day training we still managed to have a quick training session with all our own dogs. It's great to see the youngsters really making progress now they are getting good consistent weekly training. After having to miss training for a few weeks through injury, Grace was back with renewed enthusiasm too.
As per usual we couldn't end the day without at least one mishap! This week it was courtesy of Stanley. Stanley is getting rather old and doddery and his eyesight and hearing aren't what they used to be but he still enjoys a potter round Ruth's fields. Unfortunately by the time we'd finished our walk it was rather dark and with Stan being a black dog it wasn't the best combination and as we were heading back to the vans we couldn't see Stan but as we got a bit further towards the vans there was Stan pottering round the car park. As we were happily loading the dogs up in the vans we realised we had now lost Ruth who had headed back round the fields with a torch looking for Stan. Sorry Ruth.