Dog Sports: Part 1

Since I don't have any qualifications or enough experience to start teaching people about dog sports, I figured I could share my experiences over the last year as a dog sport novice.

While I never had a dog growing up, I was always someone that wanted to do things with my dogs. I knew about agility and obedience, but it wasn't until the last few years and a friendship with my dog-sports crazy roommate did I realize the sheer breadth of activities available to dogs and their owners. Agility, flyball, obedience, rally, earth dog, dock diving, herding... and the list goes on. When I got my dog in November, I was so excited to try a few of these things with him.

So far, Myles and I have tried three dog sports: flyball, agility, and rally obedience. For those of you not familiar: flyball is a relay race with four dogs on a team that run over four hurdles, grab a tennis ball out of a spring-loaded box, and run back over the hurdles. Team with the fastest time and no mistakes wins. Agility takes the dog over an obstacle course of jumps, tunnels, weave poles, a see saw, and other obstacles. Rally obedience is toned-down regular obedience. Handler and dogs walk around a course and perform maneuvers such as sits, downs, about turns, and walking around the dog while it stays.

Flyball course

Let's start with the sports we've tried and have kind of veered away from, for various reasons. We tried a flyball class over the winter, to introduce us to the sport without having to join a team. The class was taught members of a local flyball team, who competed often and had trained many dogs. First, you teach them how to run the hurdles. Since we had done some beginner agility, this wasn't a problem for Myles and he picked it up fast. We then started foundation work for teaching the dog a proper, efficient turn at the box. In a race that comes down to hundredths of a second, a fast turn can make all the difference. Myles could execute a turn fairly close to the box, but just wasn't interested in the tennis ball, which made getting him excited to do drills with the box pretty difficult. Any breed, pure or mixed, can do flyball, but it really helps to have a dog with very strong drive for the tennis ball and plenty of energy. While not too keen on the tennis ball, Myles loved running the hurdles, especially when there was a dog running in the lane next to him. He especially loved to go into herding mode and chase down the dog in the other lane, which is decidedly not allowed. That behavior had to be gotten rid of quickly! Somebody stood between the lanes and yelled whenever Myles seemed like he was veering into the other lane. That seemed to work.

The other student in my class was a big male boxer, who was not at all interested in Myles, not pleased with Myles' little herding game, and was very possessive of his tug toy (the humans bring tug toys to entice and play with the dog when it reaches the end of the hurdles). His human was actually the mother of the owner of the dog (or something) and was always keen to point out to me how her dog 'just needed to do a job' and was 'so focused, look he doesn't even care about your dog'. Needless to say, when Myles was racing down four hurdles, grabbing the tennis ball from the ground in front of the box and racing back over, her dog was still working on grabbing the ball and coming back over one hurdle. Focused, huh? :-P
To the delight of everyone involved, especially the instructors, the boxer was brought to class one morning with a fantastic, hacking cough, which culminated in him hacking up white foam all over the mats and everyone in the room freaking out and telling her to bring the dog outside. His cough was classic for kennel cough, which is SO contagious that even after we had disinfected the entire area I was tempted to just take Myles and go home. That dog should absolutely never have been brought to class that morning, and while Myles never came down with the cough, several of the dogs on the team, who practiced in the arena after class was over, had kennel cough by the next weekend. Class was cancelled for weeks. Ridiculous.

An excellent box turn

After a few classes, Myles seemed to be doing well, but just didn't seem excited about it. He had fun, but I could tell it just wasn't holding his attention. Additionally, if we really wanted to pursue flyball we would have had to find a team to join (which can be scary, and not entirely accessible to outsiders) and it would have been a time and money commitment that I just wouldn't be able to handle with school. Additionally, that specific environment (and I know teams differ, of course) was a little too intense for me. I decided flyball wasn't our thing. Not at this time, at least, and probably not with this dog.

Stay tuned for our adventures in rally and agility!