A SG Response

I’m impatient to get back to training, mainly because Dylan is going stir-crazy and driving me nuts. He walked backwards, herding my feet and biting the snow, for the majority of our evening walk today. That’s about 2 miles. Crazy …

So! Susan Garrett posted this in her blog yesterday: what (if anything), do you think separates you as a competitor in the sport of dog agility, from the best competitors in the world?

A lack of dedication: I love agility training and competing. But I also love flyball training and competing too. I’m not dedicated enough to drop flyball from my schedule and concentrate solely on agility. Sometimes I’m not dedicated to do agility or flyball, and we just laze around all week. I don’t actually think it’s possible to have a World class agility dog who also does flyball or obedience or whatever, as it happens. I know that Char (Summerick) got to Championship level in Agility and Obedience with Tia, which shows some people can be dedicated enough to at least give it a shot, but would she ever have got 3 Obedience tickets and 3 Agility tickets? That would be dedication to a whole new level, and it still doesn’t put you into the “World class” category. Happily, I have 2 dogs who are moderately successfully at agility and flyball, and that is how we roll.

My dogs: Ooh, controversial! Well, not really. Firstly, my dogs do not have the natural motivation to do agility. They both enjoy agility, and in an arena full of equipment they will take the obstacles and do contacts ( … Dylan) of their own accord. But if we stopped doing agility today, and never trained or competed again, I don’t think they’d mind. And please don’t use the argument that no dog would ever mind because they wouldn’t really know, because if Mollie had to stop flyballing today, she’d know. It might not be obvious to us, but somewhere in her little doggy soul, she’d be sad, even if she didn’t know why.

Back to the point. Secondly, my dogs just aren’t fast enough. You can only get so far with tight turns and solid contacts and clean jumping. At some point, it’s going to come down to speed, and not all dogs have it. Mine don’t. You can improve acceleration, stamina and encourage 100% sprints with conditioning, but there has to be a natural turn of foot to take you to World class. I honestly believe Kim had it, and that if we’d been training with a good trainer 6 years ago she would have been an Agility Champion by now. Kim used to be fast.

(By the way, someone remind me of this post when I get my next dog. It’s going to be a Whippet).

Apart from those two points? Probably a thousand other things. If I owned Ag.Ch. Gunran Misteree, he wouldn’t have just won Olympia or have competed in the European Open or be an Agility Champion right now. I am 99% sure of that. I think he’d be a good dog, and a fast dog, and a flyball dog, but he wouldn’t be a world class agility dog.

Anyway. Expect a new layout in the next few days … I think I’ve got it sorted now.