Quigley and I went to the first day of the APDT Rally trial in Goleta today. Sadly I have no brags to report, but I met some nice people and got my feet wet with my first real ring experience, period.

At the first run this morning Quigley blew me off completely, just like on his bad days at class when he just wants to sniff around and isn’t interested in me at all. The second run in the afternoon went much better, still not good enough for a qualifying score. That NQ might have been due to me going off course – I’m still not 100% sure what exactly happened there. Quigley was excited and bumped into me more frequently than normal, so we got nicked for that too.

Interestingly enough, most participants either scored over 200 or NQ’d – there were only very few in-betweens with points in the 180s or 190s. And Quigley was the only mixed breed dog entered.

It still was a good learning experience, I now know my weaknesses as a handler and also the parts of exercises where Quigley tends to mess up, so I can work on that during our training sessions.

The funniest thing is that both runs today were level 1, but during the lunch break they set up a level 2 course for people to practice. I did a couple run throughs with Quigley off leash and he did much better than on leash – it seems somehow like he thinks having the leash on takes away a lot of his responsibility of paying attention to what we are supposed to do.