Take Heart

After snow stopped play last week, both dogs have had really positive training sessions this week.

In trying to introduce a bit more drive into Maisie’s agility we went back to basics in playing with individual bits of equipment and trying to speed things up. We particularly worked on the dogwalk and weaves – “revving up” and approaching from different angles and distances, making it even more FUN, and rewarding with a thrown toy after (which sometimes she loves and sometimes she flatly ignores! Ho hum.) She already loves the seesaw and the drive she’d gained over the dogwalk transferred to that too. A long way to go yet in keeping her focus and drive up whilst there are scarey other humans nearby, but very well done, little Mouse.

Billy and flyball. Had another really good session – faultless runs from Billy and we also got some excellent changeovers going within the team. I also noticed something else really pleasing.
Billy suffered from heart failure a couple of years ago – possibly as a result of damage caused by a kennel cough virus/bacterium picked up when he was in rescue kennels. At the time it was all very worrying and his prognosis was not good. As his heart rate was very slow and unhealthily irregular, it was a very close decision not to send him down to London for a pacemaker fitting – major op, scarey stuff. We chose the ‘wait & see’ and convalescence-through-exercise approach instead, and wow, has this worked. Since then, I’ve monitored his exercise tolerance and recovery, which have, at times, been notably weaker than those of a ‘normal’ dog, and his vet has regularly listened to his heart. Last time he was seen his heart was proclaimed by the vet to be: “the healthiest unhealthy heart I’ve ever heard!” and he now has an excellent “sinus arrhythmia” – which is the healthy irregularity dogs’ hearts have because the body is feeding back messages to the heart telling it that its internal pacemaker control is making it pump too well for the body’s needs, and thereby slowing it down to a “regularly irregular” rhythm.
I’ve also been really pleased recently at how well Billy has been coping in general, and specifically with the extreme exercise of flyball. Today we were running on the lane with electronic timing which shows split times for each dog and I thought it would be interesting to try to quantify how well he’s doing. I kept an eye on Billy’s times, and those of the other dogs, and was delighted to notice that the rate at which his times dropped down slightly through the whole session, was comparable with the best of the other dogs, and even significantly less marked than some of the others. The lad is super fit! He’ll probably always struggle a little more than others in hot weather, but overall this is brill, and chances are now that he can continue life in the fast lane for a good long time, and that he will make grumpy old bones one day after all.