I’ve been bad about updating what’s going on with Ringo, but rest assured, he’s going strong the usual way. Which perhaps isn’t all that great. ;P
The cold, snowy winter meant a distinct lack of training outdoors, so a few weeks ago I finally got us signed up for a class at the local boxer club. I wish this one had been offered a year ago, because I am getting some good help both with how to train Ringo for the possibility of a working dog competition and, more importantly, with how to work to calm and balance him. They’ve worked with boxers like him before and its helping a lot so far.
Unfortunately, it did not help one bit yesterday when we finally got around to doing his second mentality evaluation as part of the process called “korning”. It is test for working dogs, which if they pass earns them the title “Korad”, that looks at their mentality and conformation. The conformation went just fine, but he missed passing the mentality evaluation with 10 points. We had all been worried that his fear of fireworks would mean problems with the gun shots (plus, up at the regular club he has had issues with shots, though I have a theory or two about why), but that part he passed with flying colours. However, he missed a huge chunk of the test completely when he was too wound up to actually grip and tug on the test object. Instead, he just kept jumping up on the person handling the test…
In part, I feel he failed this section (which he did poorly during the first mentality evaluation too) because he was allowed to spot the toy used for the next part of the test and ran off to play with that instead. His concentration is poor, so a distraction like that made it so much harder for him to get it right. The more I think about that, the more annoyed I get ... but, oh well. Can’t do anything about that.
Overall, the evaluation showed what we expected: he’s extremely high-intensity and he goes over the edge into stress a lot of the time. I did not agree, however, with the evaluator’s feelings that once he had worn himself out a bit on the initial, quite physical tests, he became more passive out of being a little weighed-down by the following tests which are more about challenging his nerves. No, he became more passive because he was exhausted. He was also given a 3 for whether he approached the scary obstacles on his own or needed help. The 3 is supposed to describe that he needed help several times, but he only needed help once, which should have been a 4.
In conclusion, I will be annoyed about this one for a long while, especially after considering it a bit more. He was never going to get fantastic points, because he has his issues, but I think his chances at the “grip & tug” part were spoiled by him being allowed to spot the other toy and I think that there was one incorrect 3 that should have been 4. So, yeah. Annoying.
But, we’ll of course push on with the class in hopes of some future competitions if he becomes a little calmer and more balanced. We will also be going to a boxer show next weekend and two or maybe three more of those during the summer. The local one sure, and the Swedish Championships, but the rest depends on how it fits together with vacations and such.