Dog Handling

A NEW CLUB YEAR

Here we are into another year. January gone already. This is the year that I start my retirement plan. From now on I will not be doing any dog training on Mondays. It is my day to do home things on my tiny farm and try to catch up on all the things that have been neglected for the last ten years while I worked to help Dog Sports Rotorua (Inc.) become a strong dog training institution. To me the best work the Club can do is helping people to understand their dogs and what makes them tick. How to get best results for a pet dog with a Good Citizen type program that I call Good Dog Training. This program has never been extended because the club got sidetracked into being an Agility Coaching Group, which is fine for the minority of people who have the time, money and ability to get somewhere in the sport, but for the most of the people it is just an entertainment for their dogs on the side.

The areas of agility I set out to broaden and improve have not been achieved to date, but maybe as the next four years roll by and I slowly stop doing all the conventional coaching for Fly and Agility, I might get the opportunity to go back to my original aim which was to build a sport using some Agility equipment that suited big dogs, Huntaway’s at the top end of big and Great Danes and Mastiffs and of course suitable for German Shepherds and Labradors as well. Traditional Agility is totally unsuitable for large boned dogs as their bodies would collapse trying to keep up with the kind of course work and speed of the collies and heading dogs. There is also way too much impact on the dogs bodies in traditional Agility even for the middle sized dogs and even if good coaching is about making sure the dogs are fit enough to do the sport and that they have all their techniques in place for takeoff and landing from constant jumping and their contacts are trained to the stand on the contact standard.

So I foresee that a much lower much more spread out sport for big boned dogs with equipment other than hurdles and tunnels that replace the contacts but still make it fun. A lot more of passing through interesting spaces perhaps hung with curtains to brush through. Teaching the dogs the age old circus trick of jumping through a hoop covered in tissue paper. All sorts of interesting stuff can be built into the game that is perfectly harmless.

The other end of that scale is to build specialist courses and equipment for the tiny dogs in a smaller ring with the gear closer together and still with some contacts like specially designed dog walks that are longer, lower and can change direction.

In my opinion this kind of game would attract a lot more dogs from ‘pet’ homes than the Sports of Agility and Flygility do currently. The rules and the protocols of Kennel Club Sports are so strict and unforgiving that the average person just doesn't want to cope. I think the time limit game is the best of all. You have forty seconds to do a specific course and every obstacle you do on the second round reduces the score. So if by the time you get to forty seconds you have completed the 18 original obstacles and gone into a second round then every obstacle reduces the forty seconds by 5 secs or 10 secs, depending on the difficulty of the obstacle concerned. Then you might end up with a bunch of people with the same scores, so let’s say the top ten then run off on the same course for a time. Then you have your winners. But every clear round within 40 seconds is worth something? Points maybe? Which enable you to progress to harder games. Everybody then has the opportunity to improve themselves without being stuck in Starters and Jumpers C for simply years until the dog finally falls to bits.

So that is what I set out to do but instead I have been coaching regular Agility for the last five years anyway. So that's fine and I am very proud of the members of Dog Sports who have gone on to Champs level Agility and followed Fly Tournaments around the top half of NZ and are becoming well qualified in the sports of their choices.

The Tuesday night class at 5.30 to 6.30 is Beginners Agility and we are in the first round of a set of five classes featuring:
1. Just Tunnels
2. Just Hurdles
3. Tunnels and Hurdles
4. Miscellaneous things like hoop and long jump A frame and dog walk, blind jump, wing jumps and chute tunnel
5. Weaves

Then we go back to the beginning of the round again and compare the progress we are making. Every step along the way will be tested out at our Club Competition which is held once a month. The exercises the new team are learning will be their test on the day.

I am also keen to make sure Sprints stay on the agenda at Club Competition. It is a great game for the dogs and it is very good warmup for the Agility courses. Warming the dog up for Agility is a sadly and badly neglected part of the sport. No wonder we have so many pulled muscles and ligament injuries and that is just the dogs. With the people running not being the fittest they can be, then the injury list grows there as well. Whenever I suggest a bit of a warmup run with the dogs everyone groans. But I am sure that if general fitness and fit for purpose strengthening work for both dogs and handlers was properly followed through then the opportunity for a long and fruitful career in dog sports would be enhanced. I will always feel that there is a lot more work to do to make sure that people really esteem the ownership of dogs. That it is seen as a desirable thing to participate in by the public generally and that really well trained and well behaved dogs can change the public perception that dogs are a menace.

Because the leaders in our community are always looking for votes and if wiping dogs out of huge swathes of the City is vote catching then I can guarantee it will happen. What a huge pity this will be. All because the people in power will not insist on a WOF for owners of dogs including a Canine Good Citizenship course to be passed over one year that ensures the dog is as safe as it can be. It would immediately reduce the number of people with dogs and it would make dog ownership a pride issue. Those who had dogs would be seen as good citizens too. It takes a year to train a dog to be a trustworthy loving house pet. It is much quicker to train a dog to do Flygility or Agility and the result is a highly skilled competitive dog wearing a muzzle outside the ring because nobody taught him any manners yet.

I do hope all of you who are part of Dog Sports Rotorua will attempt to enhance the Club this year by giving time and adding value. Without those who clean the clubrooms and mow the lawns and turn up to put up the Nala courses and are happy to sit and do timing and scribing and repair the gear and paint it and help with shed maintenance, there would be no club. There are never enough helpers at Fly Tournaments. Dog Sports could specialise in running Fly Tournaments and run six or seven a year which would give an income in the thousands. It is not that difficult to run a Tournament and there are virtually no tournaments listed for this year around New Zealand. If a committee of five got together and promoted the sport Dog Sports could be 'the place to go' for Flygility. I am unhappy to continue to do most of the work on my own. I have had about four good helpers over the years, but they come and they go. Right now it is down to two of us to carry the organisation and get the final results to the NZ Secretary.

Give it some thought and let Debbie or I know what information you need to participate more fully in management of Tournaments.

Mr. Sam Chan FDX 1.9.08 - 27.1.16

It was with a heavy heart that I had to let my Black Velvet Boy go to sleep forever. I tried so hard to keep him fit and going and he tried so hard to be the best but in the end his brain tumor won and he really didn't know what day it was or where he was and his confusion was driving him crazy.

The diagnosis happened in July 2014 and the prognosis was not good with the expectation that he might not see Christmas 2014. But he did and he saw Christmas 2015. He was almost blind and had lost some hearing and finally he was trying to drag the skin off his head to get at the source of his pain. In the last months of his life he achieved his first Agility AD Cert and Won First Place in Jumpers C Champs. If only I had had the opportunity to run him more in the last three years he would have been a very well qualified Pitbull/Whippet x Sharpei. His greatest love was Flygility and it wasn't possible to enter him anymore because once he got any distance from me he didn't know what to do. He was a dog I taught to work at great distances even with agility and to see him so lost and alone and unable on course work was heartbreaking

I believe he had spent quite a long time in pain and it may account for his short fuse with other people and dogs. There is no doubt that my Dog Management Skills had to match my training ability to keep Chan safe throughout his life. He never had issues within his own pack and welcomed every dog that came to live at our house. He loved to Mentor 'his' dogs and has loved having a harem in Boo, Fae and Sophie. I was concerned as to how he would get along with my boy pup Chip but he just accepted him as a big brother and taught Chip everything he knew including how to terrorise people at the gate.

He was separated from his Mother at 3weeks of age and brought up in Fordland’s by a family with two young boys who just adored him. He slept in their bed and they fed him goodness knows what. It wasn't an ideal start in life. I had an outreach program taking agility gear to a park in Fordland’s so that people could bring their dogs and get free Eukanuba food as it was sponsored by MasterPet. They came in their droves with their cats and dogs and did the tunnels and dog walk and hurdles and I talked to them about their Pets' Health. A lot of Pitbull crosses turned up and most weren't registered with the District Council. They seemed relatively benign. I fell in love with the Black Velvet Pitty Sharpei X five week old pup even though he looked very unusual and almost like a fetus. I encouraged the Children and made a special effort with the family as the puppy had some amazing traits. His sense of balance was incredible and he was very fast even at six and seven weeks. He reminded me more of a monkey than a dog. I was fascinated. I saw him for about two months and then they disappeared off my radar.

Out of the blue months later I got a call from a woman who reminded me she was the Mother of the two boys and the owner of the little black pup. She simply said ' Can you come and take this pup we can't keep him anymore’ I tried to tell her the boys would be heartbroken but she insisted. I thought that they were probably in trouble for non-registration etc. so I called by the house. The Father of the house was at home and he gave me the pup to take away. No matter what I said he insisted I take him. I asked him why. 'I have to give him the bash' he said ' he won't let my missus or I into the boy’s room'. At seven months he had mated the dog across the road and was literally terrorising the neighborhood taking on all-comers people and dogs. So I took him away.

The boys had called him Sam. I already had a Sam Donkey. He looked much like a Sharpei, with quite a bit of spare skin at aged 7 months ish so I decided that a Chinese name was appropriate. I asked some Chinese Friends about the name 'Chan', they told me it was a name for a' Good Man’ and showed me the Chinese Symbol for Chan. When I introduced him to a friend with a pup I was helping her to train she instantly labelled him Mr. Sam Chan, so we decided that was his proper name and Chan was the shortened version.

When Chan won his first Flygility Beginners Ribbon I took it to the boys who brought him up and took him with me. He knew where he was and knew the boys. They were happy to have the ribbon but they had another dog now, a pitbull jack russell cross, so I got out of there before I ended up with the ugliest looking dog in the world. Tied to a kennel in the yard surrounded by dust and faeces.

It took me two years to get Chan's behavior in a place where he was capable of being in a public place or attending events where there were large numbers of other dogs. Training him to do Flygility was no trouble at all, so then I started on Agility and he learnt that really quickly too. He was always a work in progress but he trusted me with all his heart. He was obedient to me to the letter of the law. My voice could stop him in mid-flight towards another dog when he had a wrangle in mind. He had a beautiful soul. There will never be another dog quite like him. I am proud to have owned him and shown him off at Agility Events. Even if there were times when he totally exhausted me the good times we had in the end were worth every bit of it.

RIP MY BABY BOY