Oh, shoot!

Hi faithful Schutzhund Adventures readers. We're back. Well, actually we never left, but from the lack of blog postings, you may have thought that we left. Sorry about that.
We kind of took the summer off. Too hot to do a lot of training, and we found some important "problems" that will prevent us from trialing until we fix them, so....here we are.
The days are finally cooling off a little bit and we are ready to get back at it.

The main problem I'm having is that Kane doesn't like the gunshots. My bad. I should have asked to practice it more instead of relying on the (false) belief that we'd just pass that test, because that's what everyone does, right?! :-) 
In Schutzhund there are gunshots during the obedience section, once during heeling with your own dog, and then once while the other dog is heeling and your dog is in the long down.
While Kane doesn't run away screaming in terror, he definitely shows that he doesn't like it. If we are heeling, he "checks out." By that, I mean that while he may be heeling next to me in the correct position, his eyes are down, ears are back and he is not paying attention. During the long down he does the same thing, and I have a feeling that he would probably get up during a trial and flee to me.
So I got a starter pistol. A good one. Not cheap.

One side reaction to initially testing the gunshot at the training field, is that Kane started to anticipate the gunshot at the field which is NOT good. We would be doing basic obedience and as soon as we started heeling down the field, he would check out....while there was no gunshot. It has taken us several weeks to get over this. Basically we have just been playing on the field. Bring a ball out, do a few legs of heeling and play ball. Until he felt comfortable again. We've just about reached this point where we can start training obedience as usual again.

It's slow going, and right now our trial goal is our club trial at the end of November (before Thanksgiving).
We're practicing like crazy, so hopefully I'll have more pictures and video soon.