Mission Impossible K9

09/03/2025

Friendly reminder that our wonderful client dogs are always welcome back to the farm for boarding! ❤️

Can you believe that Ruby and Scout used to be not just crate & rotate, but *board & rotate*? They are fast friends now! Scout was also thrilled to see Midna again. Hard to think she tried to kill her the very first day she arrived here 🤪 They've been stellar; their owner is doing an awesome job keeping up with their training. 🥰

08/27/2025

Retrieve is not what you think.

I filmed this first clip for a client as visual reference for her puppy's retrieve homework. Relatedly, I've also been seeing a lot of competition retrieve videos floating around in which the dogs slowly, uncertainly drift towards an item, hesitantly pick it up, and daintily make their way back to the owner with an "I guess this is right" look in their eyes, often dropping the item multiple times.

Slow, sloppy retrieves aren't caused by a dog being naturally less "flashy" or energetic in their mannerisms or work style. They aren't caused by "lower drive." They're caused by a dog feeling PRESSURED in the activity, DOUBTFUL of their own choices, and UNSURE about what they're really supposed to be doing. Power and precision don't come from genetics, they come from confidence in the exercise. Confidence comes from CLARITY and STABILITY, *NOT* rote practice of the same muddled picture!

Unfortunately, it takes a lot of patience--that thing no one has anymore--to truly break an exercise all the way down and ensure that the dog is successful on every single level before moving on to the next. It's not flashy. It doesn't look cool on social media. Foundations, to laypeople, commit the cardinal 21st-century sin of LOOKING BORING.

That's why you can't train for "content" or the appearance of progress in onlookers' eyes. You have to train for yourself, and for the DOG. And if the dog is telling you it's not ready to move forwards, if you want results, you need to listen. :)

So yes, back to retrieve not being what you think. I see so, so many people trying to 1. rely on a dog's natural desire to chase (or interest in various novel items) to get them to go to a thrown object and then 2. tack a recall on to try to teach them to bring it back once they've gotten there. They conjure a mental picture of a finished retrieve and expect to teach by semi-replicating it and repeating ad nauseam, ostensibly until the dog eventually puts 2 and 2 together.

But the dogs rarely ever fully do. Because retrieve is not chase and grab the flying object and then bring it back to where you left off. It's PUT THE THING INTO MY HAND (and only my hand), regardless of what it is or where it started out or what happens in between or where *I* might end up on the field--extremely easy, the exact same ask every time. Midna's retrieve is one of her best exercises (I don't think SHE has ever lost a single point off a single retrieve exercise in her entire 4-year competition career at the time of typing this), because she KNOWS in her furry little bones how to NAIL it every single time: just put the thing in my hand (and only my hand). It's as simple as that!

(Please note: We all get greedy from time to time and want to push the envelope a little; nobody's perfect, it happens to everyone. The important thing is to recognize when you've done it and need to take a step--or SEVERAL steps--backwards to get the dog back on track. Remember, there is NO shame in going back to basics, EVER. It's called a "base" for a reason. If it's not strong, everything you build on top of it WILL crumble and fall sooner or later!)

Happy training!!! 😊

08/21/2025

Midna says "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!"

08/17/2025

She says no decoy is getting away from her and she means it 🤣

**rt **rt

08/13/2025

LOKI BEFORE & AFTER - TEASER

Loki's board & train taught me that I am the slowest video editor on Earth. I took a ton of footage of him, posted none of it, got busy and overwhelmed, and now 2+ weeks since go-home, here we are 🤪

I am working on a much longer video with in-between progress clips and annotations/explanations on some of the things happening within them. I will post it once it is finished. :) In the meantime, here's this! Plus lots more Midna content to get through soon.

08/05/2025

Sorting/cutting footage takes me 10,000 years so in the meantime, enjoy some of these photos I took on our field trip to help out for the weekend at my uncle's clinic, Mounted Police Services. :)

07/05/2025

She's way too cute 🥹 These are just a couple of moments I found particularly adorable this evening.

(I do have footage of how Loki is doing also, but the wind knocked my propped-up phone over 2 minutes into a GREAT 10-minute session and I'm extremely salty about it at this present moment. Will probably cut some clips together after I have done a take 2 later 🙄)

06/26/2025

Whew, it's been a bit since I updated on here! We have been Very Busy recently but I had to hop on to introduce the new camper. This is Loki, who arrived yesterday for Operation Don't Eat Grandma, as his owner and I have affectionately dubbed it. 🤪 He is still settling in after a VERY long drive here.

Loki is a long-distance camper from several states away; his owners have understandably lost trust in their local options after being failed by multiple heavy-handed trainers and otherwise turned away from less compulsion-style programs because they were only equipped to teach basic obedience and do not handle behavior cases.

Loki's owners have already put a ton of obedience training into him, and it really shows when he is not panicking! But, he is an extremely sensitive guy with big feelings about stranger danger, very worried about monsters and bogeymen in the environment, and unfortunately most of the "work" he has had with outsiders has only ever affirmed those fears and made his issues much worse. One even said to euthanize him after provoking him into a bite with some extremely high-conflict handling. I would expect nothing less from a working line German shepherd; if the human turns interactions into a fight, they will fight back. It's what they were bred to do, after all!

We will be taking a very different approach from all that here. :)

The clips below (compiled into 1 because FB is stupid and tries to turn whole posts into one 'reel' of just the first clip) are of my first meeting with Loki. The first one shows his reaction to anyone attempting to approach him and his owner, Sarah. Loki says no one is allowed to touch Sarah except her husband, not even her own mom! What everyone else wanted to do was immediately, strongly correct this behavior. While it might not necessarily be wrong to have SARAH correct him/turn away/create space to start out with, we are all about efficiency here, so I instead chose to do something that would get Loki over his fear of my presence and kickstart building a relationship with him much much faster: I had Sarah give a guard cue and praise him, then tossed a tug on a rope at him. :)

At first, Loki only wanted to snap to create space and then retreat. Now, I'm no decoy, but if there's one thing putting enough toy drive on a husky to title MR1 + school MR2 (hopefully title MR2 later, we'll see 😉) will teach you, it's how to play. Working the toy, I teased out the glimmers of prey drive he showed me and had him coming much more confidently forwards after the tug within a few minutes. With the right timing and rewards, including lots of encouragement from Sarah, I was able to work closer until he was no longer trying to make me go away, just playing the game with me.

The rest of the clips are what naturally followed. Zero yank-and-crank, zero ecollar, zero drama. Purely the power of play :). He has been a very polite gentleman with me ever since.

Excited to polish this guy up over the next month! He already has an awesome foundation (including both muzzle training and tools, for the "all she does is slap tools on them" crowd 😉), so I'll be very eager to see how far he can go. One of Sarah's goals for him is to learn bite sports together, and contrary to what she's been told in the past, I think that is very achievable. 👏👏👏

06/10/2025

I sadly can't share Midna's United States Mondioring Association feature from today without the whole post with all its photos and commentary turning into a descriptionless reel of the potato quality footage I have of her DoH hit 🥲, so have some level 2 training footage I forgot to post last week instead 🤪 (Have been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, as we say 'round these parts!)

The first clip is accessories smack talk (😂😍) and then it changes to es**rt towards the end. I'm gonna just film her es**rt myself from up close next time because some of the best moments got missed :P, but the attempted dirty bite right at the beginning of the clip cracked us up, and I was super proud of her knocking the cone since she naturally can be a bit "no touchy" about objects in the environment. Tough girl always trying her heart out for me, always growing and strengthening 🥹💯🥰

05/17/2025

AT LAST, I finished going through all Midna's history-making trial photos from JSK Photography LLC !!! There were A LOT, so many that just picking favorites took me a loooong time. I tried to keep them mostly in order; MR1 (first/only level 1 title closeout in the world by any Siberian husky in any bite sport) is first. I left that jump (palisade) out because it's unimpressive compared to level 2. OBJ2 has both hurdle and palisade at the end. Enjoy!!! 🥰

05/17/2025

05/13/2025

Vinr went to the vet today! One of his big handling triggers is having his feet and legs touched/restrained, but thanks to the work we did during his past board and train, we were able to very easily complete a foreleg blood draw that previously got him kicked out of two other clinics 😅.

Immediately afterwards, I removed the muzzle and Vinr went to rolling around on the floor requesting belly rubs and excitedly giving everyone kisses. Gold star boy. Bet no one ever thought he'd actually have himself a GREAT TIME at what is allegedly his most feared/hated place! 🤪

As always, Dr. Norris (photo posted with permission 💖) deserves a ton of credit for being so patient and making it easy to keep appointments stress and drama free. He really helps me drive home that vets are friends, not food! 😂💯🥰