Quigley is now officially known as FO Mordanna’s Quigley, RL1, CGC!

He passed UKC Family Obedience with a score of 85 points. The event was fun, even though I messed up on the loooong heeling pattern (which you have to memorize and the judge does not call).

As far as obedience goes, unfortunately we came home without any qualifying scores but we have some NQV’s (Non-Q victories – I just made that up in line with you WW peoples’ NSV’s :D)

1. Quigley did well at the stand for exam in all 4 trials, even with the male judge. In 2 we got no deductions, in one 1/2 point (not sure for what, no comment noted on the score sheet) and in one I made a handler error of giving the “stay” command after I had already moved one foot forward to leave my dog, which cost us 2 1/2 points and was entirely my fault.

2. His heeling (both on and off leash) has dramatically improved, we certainly don’t have that huge sniffing problem anymore, even though we still get the occasional tight leash. We just need a lot of fine tuning so he doesn’t interfere as much with my left turns, and work more on not lagging on the off-leash heeling (he tends to forge on-leash and lag off-leash).

The sad part and reason why we did not Q in one single trial is that he got up from his Honor down every single darn time a few seconds into it. He didn’t wander off or anything, just got up from his down and stood in place until the exercise was over. *sigh* After it happened for the first time, I practiced on the side of the training field and he didn’t get up once, go figure.

As another negative “first” he also once broke the one-minute group sit (went down, then sat back up after a few seconds), something we’ve never had a problem with before.

Oh well, the way I see it is that we’ll get better each time we get our butts in the ring…