Pawticular Training

Positive training and dog blog

Hello, 2019

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Oh, I shall skip the usual spiel about how I am going to start updating this blog regularly. We all know that will never happen. My track record for the 6 or so years that this blog has been in existence shows that. But I am in one of those reflective moods where I felt I would summarise my year, for myself, and try and hold myself accountable for any goals in the year ahead.

Where to begin? Well, it has been another year that I said I would compete every single weekend, made a long list of goals, achieved some, and then proceeded to finish my competing season by August. Standard Abbey! But you know what? Despite all of that, it has been one of our best years competing; less from a results perspective, and more due to the fact that my partnerships with my dogs have blossomed, things have clicked into place, and we have had huge amounts of fun along the way.

Maisie won into grade 6 early in the season. This was my goal for the year and we achieved it fairly easily. She has become more consistent and as a result, we gel far better in the ring these days, with considerably less frustration from either of us. We have trained more regularly and had more input from others. I have stopped trying to run her safely (which it turns out was never that safely at all!) and the change in attitude has brought out new fun! We attack courses now.

As with every year, we have had ups and downs. I have never hidden the behavioural issues that my youngster has. I have constant battles inside my head, trying to figure out what is best for her. About whether I will ever have a solid partnership with her. About whether I will ever truly enjoy running her. About whether she can ever be a truly normal dog that doesn’t just take a huge amount of management. I have seen light at the end of this tunnel this year. We have bad days – days when it feels like we will never make any headway. But we have good days too, days when I see things click into place and her finally becoming more of a normal dog. And the good days far outweigh the bad days, for her incredible temperament with people overshadows her incredibly poor and unpredictable temperament around other dogs. She has come into her own in the ring now too. I still find her rather hellish to queue with, but she is a different dog in the ring and is finally becoming far, far more level-headed and sensible. This is allowing her at last to show me she can manage everything I have taught her away from my field and in other, far more exciting environments. That is exciting.

Inca remains much the same. At nearly 9 years old, she rarely competes these days, however, she managed to gain herself some placings this year at some of the UKA shows we attended. She enjoys her life being naughty, raiding any food supplies she can get her nose into and just generally doing the opposite of what I tell her, all in typical flattie style.

And teaching remains a passion. I teach so many incredible partnerships. Whether those partnerships are just in it for a bit of fun or whether they intend to compete at a serious level, they each bring something to my day that keeps the sport alive for me. Youngsters learning how to interact and train their dogs in a fun and responsible way. They are the future, and so many people lose sight of that. I am blessed to meet so many amazing people, every single day. I am blessed to meet so many incredible dogs, every single day. And I am blessed to be able to try and make a difference in some of these dog’s lives, every single day. No lesson is the same, no dog is the same, and no handler is the same – I am blessed to get paid for something I love.

Reflection over. Here’s to 2019. Another year where I fully intend to throw myself into agility, and having all the fun whilst doing so.

Falling out of love

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I’ve both written and spoken about this so many times, and perhaps in many ways, I feel as though I am repeating myself. It is also one of those things that as someone who does agility training for a living, I probably shouldn’t be publically writing about this on my blog! However, I think that sometimes you’ve just got to be honest and pretending otherwise is never the right way forward.

The short story, I guess, is that I have a totally love-hate relationship with the dog sport that is both my career and also my hobby. I have days when I would quite happily never run an agility course again. I have days when the thought of going to a show fills me with dread. I have days when I am scheduled to go to a show, that I will snooze my alarm and stay home instead. But equally, I have days when I feel inspired. Days when I feel like all I want to do is train. Days when the prospect of a show at the weekend gets me through a tough week. My emotions and feelings towards this sport are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

I frequently get asked when I do attend shows, why I have not been on the circuit much. It’s mostly just assumed that the partying lifestyle takes precedence over any dog-related activities. That isn’t true, agility is possible on a hangover (HA!). But do you know what the honest truth is? I cannot hack agility in every aspect of my life. I have a lot of respect and perhaps a bit of envy for those who can go to weekend-long shows, week in and week out, train people all week, and all the while not lose the love for it. I envy those people, I do. But I am not one of those people. I struggle with and resent things that I feel take over my life, and unfortunately, at times I feel agility does and has.

Sometimes hobbies overrule our lives. Sometimes it all just gets that little too much and we need a break. I started the season off with every intention of competing every single weekend. I had high hopes for my youngster, I had hopes of trying out. But that spark left fairly early on. A long and busy summer teaching left me wanting weekends to be, for the most part, agility free. As a result, by the middle of August, I had had enough and the desire to continue competing until the middle of October had vanished. But that’s okay. I still have fun with my dogs. We still play on our equipment and keep ourselves ever so slightly in the loop and up to date with what’s going on. We just take the pressure off, and ease away from the pressures that sometimes come with competing.

The reality is that I, and many other people, will not be physically able to do as much competing as some without sacrificing other things important to us. It is so important to find that difficult to reach balance we need in life sometimes. Don’t be made to feel inferior or less serious, just because your choice is to not compete as regularly as some. At the end of the day, there is more to life and to agility than competing.

For now, I am putting agility with my own dogs on the backburner. We still train, we still keep up-to-date, but we also keep it at arm’s length, enough so that it doesn’t become everything.

As an aside, I finally got around to putting together a few highlights from some of the shows we did do!

My Love Hate Relationship – and my new found inspiration

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I’ve always found that I have had quite the love-hate relationship with most things I do in life. I suppose one could say I get bored easily, I constantly need something new and exciting to keep me interested in my passions, or else they quickly become a chore instead. Agility has always been a sport that has provided me with that, at least, nearly always. Adding animals to anything always makes life far more interesting as things rarely go as planned! Like they say, never work with children or animals!

I say all this, however, I find myself falling out of love with the sport that had completely consumed my teenage years. Every moment I had spare, every moment I wasn’t in school, every weekend I had free, I was always training the girls and travelling the country to competitions. It consumed almost every part of me and I was living the dream in my mind. Those dogs of mine helped me through some very tough years, and it was always a fantastic escape. Yet here I am, all these years later, with no desire to spend every spare moment I have training or travelling the country to shows. Here I am wanting a life that isn’t consumed by extremely early mornings and long drives and late finishes. Here I am loving spending my time enjoying my dogs for being them, with the occasional agility session thrown in, but with the majority just being far more relaxed. Here I am fast falling out of love with the sport I have loved for many years.

Last year I scarcely competed. I found myself with my priorities elsewhere. My weekends were spent finding cool new places and going for amazing new walks with the dogs. Very rarely did I find myself in a showground throughout the summer of 2017. And you know what? I can’t honestly say I missed it. I can’t honestly say that I regret the fact I set foot in a show ring about as many times as I could count on my hands. I had very little to show for last year. A few wins, a few places, but I didn’t find myself striving particularly to fly up the grades further. You could say we plateaued, not necessarily in how we grew in our partnerships in the ring, but how my ambition was greatly reduced and never did it increase again.

I find myself becoming sick of all of the pointless and petty arguments that surround what is such a fantastic sport, and frankly, it makes it seem less like it used to! We live in a society that likes to complain about more or less everything, and we have the chance to make agility the exception! Yet we don’t! And we forget the fact that such dog sports are supposed to be about dogs and humans having fun – together.

I always set myself goals. The goal with Maisie being to get her to grade 7 by the end of 2018. The goal with Envy being to get her calm and happy running in the ring, maybe into grade 4 by the end of the season, but hopefully no further. And then with Inca, just to have fun, as I have to consider retiring her at some point in the not too distant future. And I have these goals, I do, yet I don’t find myself wanting to compete all the time. And those goals are not going to be reached with no shows! We will probably end up at some of the larger shows, some of the shows we enjoy and a few local ones, but this is not going to be something that takes over our summer and weekends, at least, not with how I feel right now! But maybe that’s just January talking!

And yet I find myself with a new love. A love of teaching. A love of seeing handlers and their dogs, most of whom have never set foot near a single agility obstacle, making huge leaps forward in their relationships together. Dogs that were once terrified of anything that moved happy to negotiate seesaws. Dogs that hated anything strange under their feet happy to go through tunnels. Dogs that once had no interest in their owners, happy and engaged, and having fun! These are the people that inspire me. These are the dogs that inspire me. Agility is about inclusion. Agility is supposed to accept everybody and allow anybody the chance to run their dog at any level. And for me that is what’s so rewarding about teaching. You don’t have to be a champion sprinter with the world’s fastest border collie. And teaching agility has reminded me of that. I want to as excited as the people I teach are when their dog goes through the tunnel for the first time, or starts to wiggle through the channel weaves, or does a line of 4 jumps. We forget that so often the littlest things can be the most significant. Enjoy your dogs. They don’t live forever, and before we know it they’re too old and retiring.

I am quite sure that once the season sets off I will feel a little more inspired, but I don’t think we will ever be at it every weekend…not at this point in time anyway.

There are different measures of success, never forget that.