Greyhound Specialty-Obedience

The Greyhound National specialty this year was in Lompoc California. It is a busy fun filled weekend of conformation,obedience,lure coursing and socializing with greyhound friends from around the country. One of the nice aspects of a specialty is a chance to see different dogs and visiting long distance friends.



The day started off with obedience first thing in the morning. We had an entry of 4 dogs-one Novice and three Open dogs. This was Whisper's debute in the Open ring and I was worried whether she would perform or still be too moody to work. She was in season only a month ago and was still well into her false pregnancy. I knew she wouldn't qualify since we had encountered a problem with the drop on recall. On Tuesday I had finally figured out what had gone wrong but three days wasn't enough to retrain the exercise. She did super and I was very happy with her performance. She wanted to be in the ring and work. Unfortunately it was a nonqualifying score because of the drop on recall but otherwise everything else was qualifying.



Lyric also did not qualify but it wasn't for the lack of trying. She amazes me with how much she learns with how little she can be trained. Her interest in obedience is minimal and she quickly loses interest and then shuts down. Any exercise with the dumbbell is to be hated. However doing one dumbbell exercise per night for dinner has really improved her outlook on the matter. In fact her go out for the dumbbell is now quite fast. She is definately a less training is more performance type dog. She probably has had less than 1/10th the training that Whisper has had. Luckily she is smart enough to pick up the concepts quickly. The repetative training for perfect fronts, finishes and heel position is where she loses interest. She qualified until the long sit-she held her sit for 2 minutes 50 seconds before she went down. Oh those last 10 seconds.......

Andretti and Lisa Stine were also in Open obedience. He also unfortunately did not qualify. The Novice A dog did not qualify so this was the first Western specialty in years that had no High In Trial.