Having fun with my crazy dogs

At Week 5 of room rest/rehabilitation, Wall-e is still looking sound. We haven't started getting back to agility yet, but I'm slowly starting to introduce him to short spans of running again with lunging. As soon as I got home today I took Wall-e in the backyard with some cheese to do a bit of lunging. Lunging, which originated from the horse world, is where the dog runs in a wide circle around the handler. For Wall-e, I use four pylons for him to circle around. Today was only our second session of lunging, so the "circle" isn't very big (maybe five feet across in diameter), but it still allows Wall-e to have some fun running around it. The look on his face is just great; he's super happy to be allowed to run again, even if it's just running around some pylons a few times! Next week I'll let him start running through straight tunnels (just one tunnel per session).

Later, I practiced retrieving with Mika with a toy that I've just recently found out she's totally bonkers for. I braided this toy out of a felt-like material for Wall-e when he first came home, but he's never liked it that much, so now it's Mika's. I want to start using it in her weave training. (I've been helping her with her footwork in 24" weaves by using four slanted poles). Anyways, we went in the backyard to do a bit of retrieving. The first rep was so cool that we didn't do any more reps. I threw the toy and Mika zoomed ahead to get it, grabbing it and racing back to me...but she was having so much fun that she just barreled on past me! As soon as she realized this, she turned around to bring me her toy and we had lots of fun tugging. The way she growled sounded like she was killing something. She always sounds like that when she's tugging, but today she was seriously crazy.