Boy Scout Gone Bad 4-11-09

Post date: Apr 12, 2009 1:02:18 AM

This is Trevor almost a year ago at his agility debut (CPE at WAG in Elk Grove). Here he is holding his start line stay on his very first real agility run ever:

He wasn't comfortable enough on the contacts to run Standard yet at that trial. But he was such a good boy. He Qed in his first run. His weaves were great:

This is what his weaves look like now (below). This is what he looked like on PSJ today, our best run of the day--meaning that we actually got to the end of the course without me walking him off. He Qed in Snooker (despite the same sniffing behavior on the weaves), but I walked him off jumpers (stood and sniffed at startline, despite the fact I was right there) and Std (sniffed so much in the weaves that he came out, at which point I walked him off).

For some reason, I naively thought that we were through the worst of adolescence. We had worked through many phobias, including the teeter, dogwalk, A-Frame, panel jump, and chute. Trevor continued to have a great start line stay and great weaves throughout.

Then spring came. Our agility trials moved back outside. Trevor's nose went down. And stayed down. In Fresno, he experimented with stopping completely to sniff in the weaves. He started regularly breaking his start line stay to sniff. Then at our AKC trial last weekend, he discovered that if he went through the weave poles very slowly and deliberately, he could sniff and look around at spectators and the judge. The weaves became "his" time on the course.

How do you fix that? Of course he doesn't do it in practice. If I pull him out of the weaves at trials and make him start over, I'm teaching him it's okay to leave the weaves. If I let him go miserably slow so that he can sniff and look around, the behavior is reinforced. After I walked him off Std today, I scratched on our final run, and I'm not planning to go back tomorrow.

I made a compilation video of Trevor's recent weave pole mishaps.

Big sigh. I think this is pushing me over the edge in favor of neutering him sooner rather than later. I wanted to keep him intact for as long as possible, but he seems to be losing any ability to focus. All he wants to do is sniff and lick grass. I'm feeling very discouraged.