You Win Some, You Lose Some

A fellow Newf owner, recently posted a video of her disqualification on a draft test. Her Newfie did all of the very complicated exercises except for failing one recall which is normally very easy for her. This Newf person commented that people are always so quick to brag when they succeed, but rarely talk about their failures. She was the inspiration for this post.

Yesterday, Katie and I went into the ring for the very first time ever to compete in Rally Novice A. I was very nervous and Katie was quite distracted. But for her first time I think Katie did great. She actually got second place with a score of 89. I can't believe she scored that high considering her turtle like pace.


There were 10 dogs total in our class. At least one did not qualify. Here we are about to get our ribbons. My brain was almost completely non-functional by this time, so I didn't even realize that we were in second place. I thought we were either third or fourth.


Me, Katie and the judge. Katie was cracking me up when we were trying to take this picture. When I was trying to get her to sit on the stand she thought I wanted her to jump over it. I think she jumped over it three times before she finally got the message that I wanted her to sit and stay.


Today, when I went to the ring to sign in I was filled with dread the moment I saw the course map. Our weakest exercise was the fourth sign. It's the one where your dog has to do four fronts in a row with an increasing number of steps back between each one. When we were warming up we practiced this and Katie did well, but as you will see in the video she was even more distracted in the ring than she was yesterday. There was just no way she was going to complete the exercise. My only regret is that due to my lack of knowledge as a newbie I made the decision to leave the ring after we failed our retry. I found out after the fact that we could have completed the course and possibly still qualified. Oh well, lots of lessons learned today and lots more practice ahead for me and Katie.


Me and my best, sweet Newfie girl back at the Happy Haus. I'm just as proud as ever of Katie. No matter how we do in the ring, Katie will always be my precious Newfie who brings me, Gary, Louis and so many others a lot of joy.