With scores of 98 and 95 out of 100 Quigley and I earned our UKC Rally Level 1 (URO1) title last weekend.

Unless another new obedience or rally venue appears in the future, this was the last class where we had to perform on-leash. Yay!

It’s really a tremendous difference between on and off leash – Quigley takes a lot more responsibility when he is not on a leash and pays more attention to me. Going from Novice to Advanced and Excellent Rally in AKC was a day and night difference.

We had a wonderful weekend in Santa Maria, taking two long trips to the beach after arriving Friday evening, and after the Saturday trial.

Unfortunately our 3rd Rally run was an NQ, since unlike in AKC there is no “IP” (Improper Performance = 10 point deduction, but you still qualify if your final score is 70 or better). In UKC Rally, if you don’t perform an exercise correctly on the retry, you’re out. And so it happened to us, since Quigley and I apparently weren’t on the same page for doing “sit – stand”, in his mind it was “sit – down”.

I need to train a different hand signal for the stand I think, they are too similar.

Unfortunately it will be January before we can try for his URO2 – there are so few UKC trials on the West Coast.