Poor Rylie

Earlier this week Rylie woke up in the middle of the night.  When I went to let him out he had already peed in his crate.  This is the second time in a month or so that it had happened and I am pretty convinced he was sleeping when he actually peed.  He was soaking wet  both times when I went to let him out and I'm a pretty light sleeper so I think I would have heard him had he woken up and asked to go out.  After the first time we had been very careful about making sure he actually peed on his last outing before bed so I figured that a vet visit would be in order.  It turns out that Rylie has a UTI complete with crystals in his urine.  The only other "symptom" he had which I didn't think too out of the ordinary until he stopped doing it was lately as soon as we got up in the morning he would ask to go out.  My food hounds had always insisted on breakfast first.  After a couple of days of antibiotics I try and let him out first thing in the morning and he looks at me like I've lost my mind.

We went to an agility trial yesterday and Rylie ran by ALL of the contacts (dog walk, A-frame, and teeter).  This is very unusual for him because they are normally his favourite obstacles.  I initially put it down to being a baby dog and nerves on his part but a fellow competitor watched one of his runs and asked if he could have a sore back.  Her dog will refuse contacts when his back is sore.  After she mentioned that I felt bad for calling him back to do each of the contacts (which he did do on the second pass) because I suppose a UTI could cause back pain.  Also he had had a chiropractic adjustment to his shoulder on Friday so it might have been a bit tender.

I think I'm going to limit his activity until our class on Wednesday.  By then he should be feeling 100% better from the UTI and if he still hesitates (he's pretty unlikely to refuse outright in a familiar environment) I'll take him back to the chiropractor.

Max did well in both of his runs but we are running into challenges that show what we need to train so we didn't get any Q's.  Last week we had done a lot of sending to tunnels and building value for the tunnels at home because nine times out of ten I will have to send him to a tunnel in the gamble.  I built so much value for the tunnel apparently that when faced with the choice between tunnel and aflame or tunnel and dog walk he consistently chose the tunnel even though I think I was pretty clear what I was asking for!  Next training challenge will be to work on obstacle discrimination!