Rambo of Rolette, A0, SG, BH, SchHI
Some Background
Rambo of Rolette, or Rambo as he's called, was born on the 2 June 1994. He started off life badly, getting gastro-enteritis at age 2 weeks & needing hand-feeding. At age 6 weeks, he was half the size of his brothers & sisters & when I saw the tiny, dapper little puppy, I couldn't resist him. Knowing absolutely nothing about German Shepherd Dogs, other than to look for V gradings (Schutzhund? What's that?
J ) and A+ hips, we were extremely lucky to get a dog with as much potential as Rambo has got.
Rambo and I earned the BH title in August 1997 after a little under a year of Schutzhund training. Of course, he embarrassed me by dropping back and walking with his nose to my RIGHT pocket, the last place he had seen his ball - of course, this is something he NEVER does in training even when the ball is there!!! He also decided, usually being a very unsociable dog, that the PERFECT time to be friendly to a stranger was when I was walking through the crowd! Doesn't this always happen…
We titled SchH1 on 23rd of November 1997 with a score of 72-75-90... we won't get into the details, aside from his Mom couldn't eat from lunchtime the day before. I of course was just happy he qualified as he was restarted on his tracking only 2 months before.
His tracking is yet another story - lay the track with sausage and lead Rambo over to it. "Oh, I KNOW where this goes & there's food at the end, so why bother to snuffle in the dirt…" and off he goes, straight to the end of the track. Of course he's never really been a food dog, so why should tracking be different? Well, thankfully we've found something he wants to track - dirty tripe. I think it goes through his mind as he walks out there - "My Golly-Gosh, WHAT ON EARTH is this STINK!!!" And his track is settling at last, although there's plenty of room for improvement as you can see when you look at his scores.
His Diet
Rambo, at the moment enjoys an exciting (SARC) diet of Pedigree PAL Professional Formula, fed to him twice a day. He likes it lots more than a wet food, and it's easy to prep, and it's one of the best available in South Africa, so that's what he gets. Of course, nothing beats getting a piece of macaroni off his mamma's plate though!
Rambo has tried most of the foods available - generally combined with some or other meat - as we battled to get him to gain weight initially. At one point he went on to VIOKASE, but I wasn’t happy with that. I think the diet of pasta/rice and minced meat cooked with veggies was the most instrumental in getting him to an acceptable weight - he's now perfect at 30 ½ kg and is maintaining well. He is quite a high-drive dog, so he’s eating for a dog of 32kgs even when he isn’t in training.
Where He’s Going
Well, I was already asked "So are you doing II in February?", but I have my heart set on having him breed surveyed early next year, which means we have to go into training to do the endurance sometime before then. I’m not a show-ring fanatic, so I am hesitant to enter him in another breed show - one’s enough for me, and it’s the breed-survey that counts at the end of the day anyway. As far as SchHII goes, we will carry on tracking and see how we go...perhaps the end of April or maybe May.