Well, Yorkster, you raise an interesting issue here -- technically, spaying a dog later in life is not a bad thing and beats the heck out of dealing with the estrus cycle if you are not planning to breed. I would, however, keep an eye out later on in life for cancerous tumors that might develop, especially in the mammary glands. Not to say it will happen, but usually spaying later than 6 months to a year increases the chances. At least, so I've heard.

Congratulations on getting started in obedience. I hope the instructor at PetsMart is good and being very helpful. I would talk to him/her about trading in the giant (I'm assuming) crate for a large. If you still have the receipt and it's not too "eaten", they should be willing to accomodate you.

I don't know for sure if other groups like AMBOR (American Mixed Breed something) have herding trials or not. I like to use www.askjeeves.com for stuff like that as you can phrase your search in the form of a question and it gives you lots of options to choose from. The same with the agility. There are several sites about agilty, but I've been off-line so long, I've forgotten what some of them are. You might open that topic back up in Dog Games. We had a lot of discussion on that last August or so, but I don't know if the archives go back that far still.

As for how she looks, you could contact the AKC (I believe it's www.akc.org) and request the papers for an ILP. They will require a letter from the vet listing the day of her spaying, there are forms to fill out, and you will need to send two pictures of her -- a front view and a side view. Even though her coat is more Labbie, it sounds like she's pretty Border Collie and they may well allow her an ILP. That would be fun.

As for teaching her to work with the frisbee, first, you want to teach her to hold it without chewing. The way to do this is to actually open her mouth, put the edge of the frisbee in and gently hold her mouth closed over it for a second. Then, release her mouth and take the frisbee back. The commands are "take it", "hold", and "give". Once you can get her to hold the frisbee for a while and give it back to you, you can start holding it out a bit and encourage her to "take it" such that she has to reach for it. Then, use hold and give to get her to hold it and return it. At each step of the process, LOTS of praise at what a wonderful girl she is and treats won't hurt either. Eventually, she should be willing to go after the frisbee and return it to you for the praise and treats. This is how we taught our two older dogs to retreive the dumbells for the more advanced obedience work the kids were getting involved in. Shiloh, our JR mix, was suspicious of the process at first, but once she understood what we wanted, she loved retreiving. Lacey, our cattle dog mix, on the other hand, thought it was a waste of her valuable time and Shiloh could go fetch the silly thing -- until Swiss cheese made it's way onto the dumbell. Then, suddenly, retreiving was really fascinating for Lacey. Anyway, I hope this helps and I hope you find information about the herding and agility. Check with your instructor at PetsMart about agility, she may know someone that does training in it, or look in your phone book for obedience schools. Most of them offer classes. Good luck. Sounds like you're really making progress with an active dog.

Daisy's Mom -- I LOVE Daisy's patriotic pic.

[ October 14, 2001: Message edited by: ktreva52 ]