Barking Dogs

There’s a bit of a debate over on the Agility Forum at the moment about dogs barking in queues at competitions.

If I have a quiet Kim on my hands, I know we’re not going to have a good run. So I want her to bark. I have a dog who isn’t always hyper-motivated (or even slightly motivated!) to work, and one of my sure fire ways to get her revved up is to ask her to “speak”.  I can make her shut up again, but I don’t want to.

Having said that, I never queue, I always get someone else to do it for me until the dog before me is running, when I swap places. I appreciate that not everyone wants to wind their dogs up before they run like I do, and I always take Kim as far away as possible from the queue and the ring to get her wound up and ragging on her toy. I know it’s not perfect, and she could still be a distraction for the dog running, or for dogs in the queue. But everyone has their pre-run rituals – some people ask their dogs to do heelwork, or downs/sits/waits, some people calm their dogs down, some people just ignore their dogs completely. And this is mine!

I suppose the issue with Kim isn’t that she’s barking and I can’t stop her, it’s that she’s barking and I don’t want to stop her. (Well, at agility. I can’t stop her at flyball, but I still want a barking dog!). It tells me that she’s happy and enjoying herself, and that she’s going to run at least one or two of her socks off, if not all of them. How do you feel about barking dogs?