Hellterror training, continued

 

I was fording raging torrents coming back from church again tonight.  I’m frelling learning where, if it’s been raining with undesirable enthusiasm, there are going to be raging torrents on that stretch of road:  I could do without being obliged to acquire this aqueous information.  There are one or two especially raging torrents that I’m going to give names to if this keeps happening.  Arrrgh.

It hasn’t been a totally satisfactory day in other ways.  Got to Forza* and found Vicky on the step, waiting for someone with a key.  We waited.  We chatted.  We waited some more.  We chatted some more.  I finally got Pooka out and checked the tower diary:  it said ringing this afternoon.  We were getting cold.  It’s kind of a wind tunnel, where you wait for Someone with a Key.  Also, no one else was showing up, which was suspicious.

Finally I checked my email, and there was a note from Albert, saying ‘oh, in case you didn’t know, there’s no ringing this afternoon. . . .’  ARRRRRGH.  It had been sent about an hour and a half before.  I was hurtling and feeding hellcreatures at that point.  I was not looking at my email.  I did take a last quick glance at the tower diary when I climbed into Wolfgang.

ARRRRRRGH.

However the hellterror’s first experience of a training class yesterday went very well.  Neither of us died.

I did get up at the dingleblasted crack of dawn**, hurtled hounds, ate something not because I was frelling hungry at that savage hour but because I was going to have to function.***  And then the hellterror (who was delighted by early breakfast) and I leaped into Wolfgang and . . . away.

We didn’t get lost.†  Until we got there, that is.  This is a two-speck village:  it’s not even a wide place in the road.  How can you MISS something when it should be all there is?

We managed.††  Fortunately a man wearing the sort of clothing you might expect of someone about to stand in a field shouting orders wandered past and proved to be the bloke we wanted.  I explained that while there were and had been many dogs in my life, this was my first hellterror;  and that while I’d never had anything to do with dog shows when the breeder of the family Pav’s mum had come from saw how pretty Pav was turning out, wanted to show her.  I’d blithely agreed, not engaging brain about the likelihood that a hellterror who thinks an exciting night on the town is a stroll around a silent churchyard at one or two o’clock in the morning and an exciting night in is three people in the sitting room for handbells and tea, was not going to cope with a dog show.  A large dog show.  Which is what duly occurred.  But Pav has turned out very pretty indeed, and Southdowner is not willing to give up without a struggle.

Hence my attempts to gear up for Operation Super Socialisation.†††  Our new trainer did warn me that some dogs just never take to showing, however well-bred and well-trained they are, but I said I’d worry about that later.  At the moment I just wanted her to get used to more input than she got at home with me.‡

We had by this time arrived at the training field, while Pav was busy proving that she never, ever walks politely on a short lead or pays any attention to me whatsoever.  Sigh.  And at about this interesting juncture the largest dog I have ever seen entered the ring . . . on its hind legs, with its handler grabbing for the extra-strength back-up harness.‡‡

Ah yes, said the training bloke calmly.  Jezebel is a little nervous of other dogs.

And Pav did not like Jezebel, who made Wellington look like a Pomeranian.  There was barking.  There was pogosticking on little short legs.

But it turned out okay.  It also turned out there were only the two of us—well, it was raining—so we just worked on calming our respective mad furry things down.  The Mastiff did very well—as soon as her owner got the sausage rolls out.  Jezebel was walking on a short loose lead and sitting—facing away from miniature mayhem on the other side of the ring—for her sausage rolls by the end.  I had had the forethought to have a couple of packets of treats in my pocket so we did the turning away and gobbling treats too, although I only got about three steps of loose lead out of her in the entire hour.  Siiiiiigh.  Well, room for improvement.  She was sitting on request by the end of the hour—and we’d slowly spiralled in to within eight or ten feet of Nemesis without either of them reacting.

So.  Small cautious yaaaaay.

* * *

* This is about to be the season when I wish violently that my home tower was still a one-minute sprint down the street from the cottage.  Forza will be trapped in Christmas shopper gridlock from . . . any time now.

** An interesting image, the crack of dawn.  I tend to think in terms of thunder and doom rather than widening lines of light.

*** I can mostly hurtle, or at least womble, even when I’m sub-functional.  Driving . . . I’m afraid I certainly have driven when I’m doing my river-bottom-slime imitation but I try to avoid it.

† I even didn’t go the way he told me.  I looked at it on the map and thought, Why?  That’s the long long way around.  Apparently the owners of dogs in need of training/socialising/exposure to more other dogs all lack satnav and have back road phobias.  But this is my briar patch and we went the back way.

†† And satnav would have been no help.  We were in the right post code, what more did we want?  Miracles?  No, the village hall.

††† This week’s agenda includes using the vets’ out of hours waiting room as a training area^ and going to a dog-friendly pub for lunch.

^ The point being that a vets’ waiting room even out of hours is full of critter smells and activities, and Southdowner suggested this as a good socialisation focus months ago.+  I was careful about the vet I talked to about this so the answer would be ‘yes’.++

+ I like the idea of a whole stream of us cranky no-social-life types with volatile puppies using the vets’ waiting room for life-exposure purposes.  They’ll have to post a schedule, and we can all sign up for our slots.

++ Also, the vets’ waiting room floor is the largest piece of floor space I have available.  Especially when Third House is about to go off limits.

‡ An additional reason why I was a clueless twerp about how much socialisation I am giving Pav is because it has seemed to me she’s jerked up a developmental stage—especially noticeable this week, unfortunately, after our spectacular groundwork failure at the show, but, dunno, maybe the show itself had some positive effect?^

Part of Operation SS has been taking her for hurtles over landscape she hasn’t been on before.  Last week and out in the middle of nowhere, one of these blasted bungalow-sized Labradors came roaring out of the shadows at us.  Fortunately I saw him coming in time to pick her up first, while I was myself roaring CALL YOUR DOG.  CALL YOUR FLAMING DOG.  It was a good minute, maybe more, before I finally heard a frantic little voice calling Welly!  Wellington!  Come! —which Welly the Wellington totally ignored, of course, and two minutes before the wretched woman appeared, and chased Welly off—since he certainly wasn’t going to let her catch him.  Now, granted Welly wasn’t vicious—just huge—but I’d’ve expected Pav to react, and she didn’t.  She watched with interest from her perch on my arms—which were clamped to my body so Welly’s gigantic nose couldn’t dislodge them—but she wasn’t bothered.  I was bothered.

Second time, worse, was today, when another bloody terror—scraggily-haired Jack Russell type—came shooting around a corner at us, paused only long enough to adjust its attack mode and FLEW at Pav.  I didn’t have a chance to pick her up in time, and she just stood there looking regal, to the other terror’s consternation.  It was disconcerted enough that it backed off—which gave me a chance to grab her.  At this point the useless owner appeared.

But a month ago I’d’ve expected her to go ballistic, barking, and I wouldn’t have blamed her either.  But she didn’t.  I want to believe this is progress and not just that she happened to have her mind on other things at those moments.

^ Never mind.  I can hear Southdowner laughing from here.

‡‡ As I realised in retrospect.  At the time I just thought we were both going to die.  But it had an ordinary collar and lead plus one of those no-pull things, and her owner was shifting her grip from the snaffle to the curb, so to speak.