So, after being apart of an online dog sim for a number of years and making great friends and sharing and keeping up-to-date with people and their dogs, I decided to look for another forum-based dog community.
My name is Dani, though online I go by the alias Owl. I'm a teenage girl living in Southern Alberta and I've had a passion for dogs my entire life. When I was nine years old my parents bought a fat little yellow lab pup, and he single-handedly put me on the path to a life in dog sports. After he passed, I was determined to find a pup who could live up to every dream of competing I had and I can happily say, I found him.
Murphy is my 17 month old border collie lab mix. He's nothing special at first glance. He was the last of his litter, born on a farm out of a working stock dog and a trained retriever. I actually hadn't planned on taking him home, it was the first place we looked and I had planned to hold off on the pup until after looking at a number of different available dogs. Not to mention I was set on a full blood border collie from working lines -as a lot of aspiring performance dog trainers, border collies seemed absolutely perfect. But when we pulled onto the property and I saw two gorgeous dogs round the corner, followed by that tiny black thing, I knew he was mine.
Just over a year later and Murphy and I have come a long way. I started training the day he came home, and as he grew and learned, so did I. I've learnt so much from this dog, I swear he's taught me more than I could have ever taught him.
He's got a lot to offer, and is easily the most focused, work driven, fun dog I've ever met. He goes through training sessions like they're nothing and has never been a stranger to learning a full new set of tricks or commands in one day. Heck, he learnt to handstand in one day.
One of the first goal I made with Murphy was '103 tricks in a year'. Basically, I had written down as many tricks as I could possibly come up with and it came out to be 103. I then kind of said to myself, "wouldn't it me cool if I taught Murphy all of these in a year?"
I spent that first year working frustratingly hard towards this goal, what with him being too young for any of the fun stuff, and a year later, we accomplished it. Murphy knows over 103 tricks, from sit and down to handstands, vaults and skateboarding.
Tricks are boring though. As soon as Murphy hit ten months old we started putting everything into agility foundations, disc dog and dock diving. It was a rocky start, but Murphy has blown me out of the water with his spring and drive for all of these things. We're no stranger to spending 3+ hours at the pond swimming and diving everyday. He knows multiple disc tricks and hasn't dropped a disc in months- and he has a thing for jumping unnecessarily high to catch the disc, which just makes it more fun to watch and play. He's well on his way to an exciting agility career with his debut scheduled in a couple months. He has awesome focus and has just a really fun time on the course, and he's one of the fastest dogs in our class, with his strong points being his dog walk and weaves. We used the two by two method while training weaves, though I didn't own any poles at the time to he learnt to weave sticks shoved in the mud at the lake as weaves. He is a beast while weaving, aggressive and very tight through the poles.
He has an amazingly bright future in agility, disc and dock diving, we also plan on dabbling in flyball, and maybe a little rally-o.
Though the whole sporting dog life is great fun and so rewarding, I have to admit, most of my days are spent just cuddling, playing and loving life with this amazing dog. I take Murphy absolutely everywhere possible with me, my friends are well aware that if you invite Dani, you're inviting Murphy too. Murphy is absolutely my perfect dog. You can often find me just laying in the grass, arms wrapped around him or using him as a pillow. I spend hours everyday at the pond, just me and my dog, and couldn't be happier. This dog is life for me, I'd be a different person without him. He's taught me lessons in selflessness and perseverance and has shown me how to live life in the moment and love every minute of it. He's taught me to live without judgement or the fear of. He's a clown, and I couldn't imagine life without him.
So yup
:) that's a little about my incredible canine companion, you'll probably see quite a bit of updates on him around here, just keeping up with life and such. I hope to get to know this community as a group of friends and look forward to hearing all about your lives and the dogs in them.