Aussies in August

Last Sunday we attended Aussies in August.  It is an informal event held at Bridgman Park for Australian Shepherd owners to meet, play with each others dogs and for new owners to get advice about the breed and so on. 

Being an informal event there are no rules about the Aussies having to be pure bred or a particular size, so there was a great variety in size and type of dog.  Most were very Aussie like but some were toy (very small) and others mini (small) while the majority were standard size.  Some looked quite different because their owners had trimmed their coats for the summer which gives them a much shorter rougher coat.  It was nice that there were none of the pretentions that are usually associated with more formal dog events.

The idea was between 1pm and 3pm owners could just turn up, come & go as they pleased.  By 1pm we already had a number of dogs and their people assembling.

Rocky is a toy-size red-tri.

This is Bronte.  She is a 15 year old red-merle.  Her hearing is mostly gone now but otherwise she’s very active and able even at this age.

Mojo was on his absolute best behaviour and was great with people coming up and fussing him and he played with the other dogs very well.

This black-tri was called Kayo.

Reba was a very good looking blue-merle

The temperature was well over 30 degrees in the mid afternoon and the dogs were getting very hot.  Thankfully Bridgman Park has the creek running right through it so periodically they could run off, have a drink and cool down.

This is Douglas who is an adorable 12 week old blue-merle puppy.  For such as young age he was very confident, happily walking up to much bigger dogs and their owners.

This is Douglas playing with Rocky.  It shows how much smaller the toy-size Aussies are as Douglas at 12 weeks is already somewhat bigger than Rocky who is fully grown !

There was a very basic agility course set up for owners to play & practise their dogs on.

This dog was called Princess !

While this really lovely mini-Aussie (a bit smaller than Mojo) was called Maybe.  Maybe was extremely obedient, having been taught from a young age by her owner, without any formal tuition.  However, she would fetch, sit, stay, even do backflips !  I guess mini-aussies being a bit smaller are that much more agile.  Anyway Maybe was fun to watch.

Then we all attempted to line up for a group photo.

This is Heidi (centre left) and her friend Laura (centre right) who organised the event together with Lauras two Aussies, Bronte (the red-merle) and Kevin the blue-merle both facing away.  Mojo is on the far left of the photo, Princess hiding behind her owner on the far right while perfectly behaved Maybe sits patiently on her own in the middle of all the action with her owner some distance away.  Not sure there were many other Aussies at this event that would do that !

It was a really fun afternoon.  About 30 aussies attended the event with their families, an improvement on the 20 or so they had last year.  We will definitely go again next year and indeed plan to arrange a Winter Aussies when we get our first good load of snow this winter.