A "Do it All" Day

We started at 6AM and finished just now, at 5PM.

First, of course, all dogs had soup, as we planned to run. I didn't really plan the teams ahead of time and that was obvious in the first hook up. No helpers were here today, so I first hooked up Buffy , Ruthie, Medio, Herman and Rosie. The theory is that they (except Ruthie) live together so they should be pretty calm in hook up.

Well, Herman, the steady reliable guy, ate his harness and tried to eat the gangline. I moved him to lead to take his mind off of waiting and Rosie went to wheel (tiny Rosie). She ate the tug off her harness. We took off, Buffy pulled out of harness; Herman pulled out of harness and all was a mess. Without a helper , of course, I used the brake, reharnessed as best I could the leaping leaders and took off again. I'll bet we stopped ten times. Poor little Rosie, ran extremely well but she was tired after all of the goofing around. She is the smallest dog and she ran in wheel.... what was I thinking? I was thinking, let's just GO!

Stars that they are, Medio and Ruthie just kept their heads down and did nothing but run like troopers. Buffy definitely did not like Herman in lead.

NEXT: I decided to run the Kiddo 'family'. The hookup took 11 minutes and that was with only two harnessed. But the takeoff and run were picture perfect, no problems at all, 2.5 miles. They missed one command. If I had had a helper, I would have stopped but it would have been an assured tangle to do it.

After that run, I free ran 25 dogs, all in different combos. Then I took six dogs on a trail walk. We picked up the cameras and found a great photo of a coyote, just 20 minutes ahead of our first team run this morning. Maybe the scent made that first team wilder.

After cleaning all the pens and watering all, we fed hamburger soup, fed the deer and it was getting dark, so that was it. Copper did extremely well today with his new penmates. He was off of his tether all day and had a ball, running and playing and digging.