Back to Zink

In our last episode, Christine was saying, "structure affects function, function affects structure." I say, "Nothing replaces good timing when it comes to a front cross."

Part of day three, we talked about jumping. Much of what was covered I'm familiar with. It was fun using trot bars and playing and jumping.

Later, when we were talking about indicators of lameness, Christine wanted to show lead change and how lead change can be an indicator of lameness. One of the problems I had with the exercises that we did was that too much could be explained away by bad timing of the handlers.

For example, the above exercise was to show lead change. Fin and I have done a bunch of these types of exercises and my timing was not terrible. A couple of handlers were late and so the dogs lead changes were late. It doesn't mean that my dog isn't lame but theirs was.

Her point was that it was one indicator. If a dog is willing to lead with one leg but resists leading with the other that this should be looked into. I totally agree. But pure lead changing and the timing of that lead change can be attributed to other factors.

We had a Corgi that had a mystery limp. Limp seemed to move around from leg to leg, go away for a while, and then mysteriously come back. We did alot of stuff watching the dog walk, trot, and stand still. Then we put the dogs rear feet in corn starch and measured the stride. Lastly we had the dog spin.

Totally lame on right rear. The corn starch test was pretty cool. It was clear that one leg was not striding like the other. The twirl test showed the weakness.

One last area we covered was conditioning. I'll talk more about this next time.