Popper And his Insatiable Hot Dog Cravings

On Saturday, I took Popper to the BRAG Agility Demo at the OSU Vet School. It was his first time he'd been outside in an unsecured area off-leash, and I was pretty nervous. I had a TON of dog treats on me to try to keep him with me. But he was very good! We did several demos with no problems at all. It was good practice for our first outdoor USDAA trial in June.

That is, until they hauled out the grills and started cooking hamburgers and hot dogs right next to where we were. That beagle nose flipped up into the air, and he started licking his chops and looking around feverishly for the source. The first incident happened when we were practicing between demos - Popper heard a man sitting right on the edge of the grass open a bag of cookies - and off he went to beg.

The second time, Popper ran off and followed his beagle nose all the way to the nearest grill, where he promptly sat down and gave all the folks in line big puppy dog eyes like he's never had a meal in his life.

The third time didn't actually happen for a long while... we were doing relay races, with big dogs versus small, and he never ran off. He did consistently lose it for the small dog team, though, because he's not good yet with weave pole entry from another obstacle so we had to keep starting over. He's a green dog so I'm not terribly worried about it at this point. :) I should note that on the next demo, he entered and did the poles perfectly! LOL!

So at the next demo, I took Popper over to the teeter, which was kind of far out and right next to the crowd - big mistake. Everyone was sitting on the ground around the edge, with their hot dogs and hamburgers... You can imagine what happened. Bye bye, Pop pop! I yelled to everyone to cover their plates but not everyone was fast enough (or listening). At that point Popper became out of control so I snapped his leash on and that was the end of Popper's agility day.

He was so exhausted on the way home his head was hanging off the seat. And his extremely full tummy looked like it was going to explode.

Yes, it was altogether a very eventful day!