Kandu’s The Joker Is Wild UD RE Joker May 5, 2001 – October 15, 2014 One Friday evening in the summer of 2001, I asked my then12 year old son Chris, “If you could have a pet, what kind of animal would you choose?” and he said, “A dog” right away. When I asked what breed, and he immediately answered, “A Border Terrier.” (We already had 4 year old BT Java at the time.) I made a couple of calls that evening, we went to look at puppies the next day, and OMG just like that, came home with an “LBD” – a Little Brown Dog, as the grizzles are sometimes called. Chris began training him in a new class that I started soon after Joker came home, mostly full of experienced trainers. Chris had done some training with Java when Java was a puppy, and he was a natural. Chris and Joker eventually moved to agility classes, which they seemed to enjoy. While I did do some obedience training with Joker, I did try to keep hands off as much as possible, as he was Chris’s puppy. We did family recalls, each family member standing in a different place in our big yard, and I think it created a dog with one of the best recalls we’ve ever had. In 2006, the Border Terrier National Specialty was going to be in Dayton, Ohio. I was planning to show Java there, and asked Chris, by then finishing up his Junior year of high school, if I could take Joker, too, and show him in agility and rally. At 5, Joker earned his one and only agility leg in Novice Standard, and earned a perfect 100 and 3rd place in Rally Novice. About 6 months later, I decided I ought to finish his RN. Then we went on to get his RA, then, since he’d learned to the stand stay for RA, his CD. We just kind of kept going, eventually finishing his UD and RE when he was 10. He didn’t learn to retrieve until he was 5 years old, and there were several exercises along the way that I had to think outside the box when teaching him. He taught me that you can tell a lot about where your small dog is heeling by shadows on the floor ☺. My primary goals when showing Joker were to work towards his titles and for him to put a smile on people’s faces. He wasn’t highly accurate, typically scoring in the low 190’s. He did earn my lowest qualifying score (a 178) when earning his 1st UD leg. The day he earned his 2nd UD leg, he did it with a 195 and 3rd place in Utility B, what I’ve always called his phantom OTCh. point, since if had been his 3rd leg, it would have been recorded as one OTCh. point. Joker had a huge role in raising both Gryffin and Sonic, both of whom were smaller than Joker when they first came home. Sadly, by the time little Jag came home, Joker was pretty unsteady and senile. When Joker was 6 months old, he managed to get a crack in one of the growth plates of his right rear leg, but once healed up from that, he was a very healthy little dog up until the summer of 2013, when he tore the cruciate on his right hind leg. We decided to not put him through surgery to repair it, and he recovered well enough to be able to do everything he could before except jump up on our bed. But that started a downward slide, and he was diagnosed earlier this year with an eye condition that required 2-3 drops, 3 times a day. He also seemed to develop some dementia and balance issues. The August trip to our family cabin in the Ontario woods was a difficult one for all of us, as he had to be kept on a leash, as the risk of him falling off a cliff or drowning was too great. This fall saw him withdrawing more and more into his own world. He was still eating, albeit incredibly slowly due to the nerve paralysis in his face that was affecting his eye, and getting himself outside through the dog door. However, his increasingly frequent falling and night time restlessness, which included a lot of bumping into walls, doors, and bedframes finally became too much to bear. We took a final off-leash walk in the big fenced yard, a place where he could move without obstacles and where he seemed most content. My thanks to Dr. Helen Szostak and her staff for handling the final chapter of Joker’s 13+ years. Rest well, little man. You were a dear little dog, more of a family dog than all of the rest.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 02:18:03 +0000