Ring Around The Rosie - And We All Fall Down

We have been at the Sommer Ranch for the past couple of days to include our dogs in the study of Border Collie Collapse Syndrome.

Some old faces were familiar, as two of my old professors were the head honchos conducting the study. I had this sudden urge to sit in a chair in the back and raise my hand to ask questions.
It was an excellent study, and a lot of good information will definitely be found by this. There was also flyball dogs in the study as well. There were dogs expected to be normal that showed signs. A lot of discussion was brought up, and the main point was that this was a very eye-opening event, and hope that people think about the whole dog when people are breeding.

The testing included making our dogs work 10 minutes very intensely, and then going through a barrage of chemistry testing and ECG's pre and post exercise. Videos were done to document the movement of the dogs pre and post testing as well. Being of the scientific mindset, I found this quite fascinating to be a part of this.

After we were done, then we went to do the most important part of the stay at the Sommer Ranch, and that was to train our dogs.

Bev put Jock through his paces.

Norm worked Lexie as well as Jill's upcoming star Jaimie.

Jaimie Van Ryn also worked her dog Max,

We all got the privilege to sit in the honored chair - where it serves multiple purposes - resting your tired feet, allowing one to develop the perfect training methods, and the most important - the ability to spin the chair the other direction when one has drunk too much beer to cause their head to spin uncontrollably.