We are celebrating a very big weekend. Yesterday, Jenny took Cheeky to an OFA clinic offered by The Pet Wellness Clinic in Fort Collins. OFA clinics are great! We’ve never gone to one before, and were so excited to capitalize on the opportunity. Unfortunately, Maggie was too close to her heat cycle from July to participate and Louie JUST moved away. However, Cheeky was there to be the guinea pig.
If you have the opportunity to attend one, you should! They had all the specialists in one place, they offer discounted pricing, AND you get a discounted fee on your OFA submissions! It made the submission fee 50% off. Check out this website and mark your calendars for a health clinic near you: https://www.ofa.org/health-clinics
Anyway, since we were going to a clinic, we decided to check her heart in addition to her thyroid and eyes (we did her hips and elbows a couple weeks ago — were worried she was going to have a heat cycle and miss this clinic.) Heart issues seem to be popping up in our breed more and more, so we decided to be prudent and jump on the trend early. The Vizsla Club of America still recommends eyes, thyroid, and hips, to get your CHIC number, making our elbows and hearts above the minimum. The thyroid blood draw is off to the lab, but the cardiologist said her heart was normal and the ophthalmologist said her eyes were normal! It’s a great milestone for our first litter! It’s also exciting to know the possibility of breeding Cheeky is still there — fingers crossed for the rest of the results!
And Sunday we celebrated by taking the girls up to work some birds! There are a couple hunt tests this fall, so we thought we’d see if Cheeky and Halo might be ready to enter. It was a super fun group of GSP people that let us crash their training day. The girls did pretty good! The unseasonably chilly morning made for great training weather. Halo still remembered how to hunt and retrieve birds after hunting rats all summer. Cheeky remembered how to point and showed off a lovely natural honor. And Karma, as always, was just happy to be alive and included! If we can sneak in some more training before the tests, we might just be ready!
