Devonport Dog Parade 2012

Hi! It's Cinnamon.

We have been very busy every weekend for the last few weeks. Two weeks ago and a week ago we did dog dancing demonstrations at doggie events, and on the last weekend we went to agility competitions.

Our first dog dancing demonstration of the year was at SPCA Devonport Dog Parade on March the 25th.

That day Mum was very nervous for several reasons. After the Paws N Music competition at NDOA (National Dog Obedience Assembly) last October, we hadn't practised dancing much. So, a couple of weeks before the demonstration at the Dog Parade, we started practising our routines again. It seems Mum thought that it wouldn't be too difficult as we had practised tricks regularly. But, what Mum didn't realise was that dancing to the music is totally different to simply doing tricks on commands. When you dance to the music, you need to hit every trick at the right timing, but when you do tricks on commands, you can do them when you think you are ready. Also, because we were to do our demos on the grass, we had to change the skateboarding part of my routine.

Another thing that made Mum nervous was that it was the day when some road rules were to change. Until the previous day we had some road rules that you wouldn't find in any other part of the world. In countries where vehicles must run on the left side of the road, giving way to the traffic coming from the right at round abouts is nothing unusual at all, but you also had to give way to the traffic coming from the other way and turning to their right at intersections, when you wanted to turn to your left. However, the NZ Transport Agency has decided to change the rule and a couple of other similar rules to make them compliant with standard road rules around the world, and the change came into effect on the day when we did our demo. So, Mum was very worried that many drivers might still be confused about those new rules, creating a high risk of traffic accidents.

Anyway it turned out that all those worries were unnecessary. Who cares if you make some mistakes in your dog dancing routines!? Some sniffing makes Beagles' dance performance more interesting and lively! In fact that is what happened in our demo. I admit that I just couldn't resit sniffing the ground at the beginning of my routine, but I could hear the audience's applause when I went back to dancing!

Mint did a little better than I did, in terms of 'not sniffing'. But, he was so eager to do his favorite jumping tricks, he was jumping even when he was not supposed to. But, again, never mind!! If the audience was enjoying watching what we were doing, that's great, isn't it?

In terms of the changes in road rules, we didn't come across a situation affected by the changes at all. So, Mum's concern was unnecessary again.

Well, after the demo, Mum bought us little muffins specially made for doggies. They were so yummy!!

Sorry we have no photos of our dancing this time. But, I promise I will show you some photos from another demo in my next blog post.