Trick or Treat!

This was Jake's first Halloween, so of course I had to dress him up! Mark says that manly hunting dogs don't wear Halloween costumes, but I think that maybe they do, when they're 6 months old at least! This will most likely be the last year Mark lets me dress Jake up, so I enjoyed it while I could.

Jake was so great for the trick or treaters. Lady was made to stay in the living room because she gets way too excited, she is butt wiggles and kisses for the kids, and some of the little ones are overwhelmed by her. Jake--was the perfect gentleman. The doorbell would ring and he would walk with me to the door, where he would stand politely and quietly in his costume and hat while I handed out all the candy. I didn't have to hold him back at all. Most of the time the kids would want to pet him, so I would tell him to come forward and he would just stand there and politely tail wag while all the kids kissed and hugged and pet him. What a good boy! He's a CGC shoe-in. Even the kids couldn't believe how calm he was.

On an un-related note, Jake has outgrown the soccer fields. We've been running him in several soccer fields in a row (I think 4 or 5) near our house to teach him independence, but he's been running all the way out of the soccer fields the second we set out with him. He'll turn in a second if we call him, but the idea is that we don't want to call him back, we want him to go out. So now we'll be searching for another extremely large open field where we can teach him range, that shouldn't be hard in Sarasota right? *sigh*

Right now we also need to be working on ranging when he can't see us. So far that's been a much bigger challenge, but I'm sure that will come with age too. He hunts so hard when he's in the field, the judges comment to us on how serious he is about his job.

Lady is doing great, Mark got his Citori White Lightning and has been shooting over her with it. She's much more consistently steady when he is holding a gun, so he's going to buy a fake gun to bring out to SH with him.

Check out our brag for Dart on the main page! Jake is so proud of his momma. :) She had an awesome time at Nationals, First place Field Trial Bitch, First place Open Standard Agility, and Award of Merit for the NA Field Trial, congratulations Dart! Now that's a Versatile Vizsla!