4th Annual Great Danes of Summer

I'm taking a slight detour from my typically training and handling oriented posts to share about what we have going on tomorrow. Vegas and I belong to a local club, the Portland Great Dane Community, AKA PDX Danes. We go on periodic events with the group such as downtown Portland walk abouts, forays to the Expo for the NW Pet and Companion Fair, and seasonal events like snowshoeing. The group is highly social with an underlying purpose of providing information both to members and non-members. We've been planning and working on this event for the last four or five months. It's a significant amount of work to market, promote, and coordinate. In the end, it's all worth it. In the past three years we've consistently had between 60 and 75 Danes in attendance with their humans.

We have a lot of new members this year and quite a few young pups. In addition, I have really focused on us promoting the event to the greater public, dog lovers in general. We're close to the off leash dog park, set up in a shelter on the edge of the woods, in my beautiful home park which easily provides enough space and enjoyment for an entire day outing that will undoubtedly result in a ton of tired Danes by sundown. Here is what's on the agenda for the day:

I will tie this back into training just slightly. Vegas will be attending with me, of course, but since I'm a board member and will be heavily involved in running the event, it will require a great deal of cooperation, patience, and restrained behavior for her. Hopefully she'd get to have some fun as well assuming the board can coordinate alternating times at the off-leash area or a bit of romping/playing with our own Danes. I'm really looking forward to the canine cancer talk as this organization is involved in funding research to learn as much as we can about the genetics of cancer in dogs. Hopefully she'll be able to talk to us specifically about what is know regarding the two most prevalent cancers in Danes: osteosarcoma and lymphoma.

One of the people that contacted me about being at the event and helping to support our mission was Jim Stulting of Jim Stulting Photography. I look forward to getting some professional photos taken of both Leo and Vegas and can hopefully share them later in the weekend.