Radical Canines

As you may or may not know, depending how long you’ve been reading, I love disc. It’s my favorite thing to train and play with my dogs. As I’ve mentioned, toss and fetch is not my forte but I’m working on it. One of the great opportunities out there is the worldwide K9 Toss and Fetch League. Each season of league lasts 5 weeks and they offer a commemorative patch to participants feature a disc dog of years past. This season, Summer Down Under, features an amazing doberman named Karma that the disc world lost in early 2020. Karma, being from Canada, competed and kicked ass at many of our local qualifiers in NH and at the events in Canada that we’d travel for. Her and her owner were an amazing team, and a true testament to what big dogs and rescue dogs can accomplish.

I wanted to be sure I got a Karma patch, but as you can imagine the ground is rather frozen, icey and snowy this time of year in NH. Therefore, I opted to run league indoors. It’s not optimal for many reasons, and the space we have available to quite short (20 yards) so top scoring opportunities are not available but that’s okay.

I tend to use league as an opportunity to work on specific skills in our toss and fetch game. Rumor is working on tracking and handoffs. His first week was great! Not a single miss and beautiful handoffs each time. Because we’re playing a shorter game, Rumor got in 6 throws each round so 12 handoffs in total, which is great! Rugby is working on handoffs and collected leaping (and I am working on throws that hover to encourage said leaping). Our handoffs were good, the hovered throws and collected leaping was about 70% but a solid start. Ryder doesn’t really have a focus, he just gets to play for fun, without pressure (how he likes it).

It’s not our typical league season but I’m glad to be able to play with my boys, to continue to grow our skills, and remember a phenomenal disc dog.