In my 20 years long agility career I have myself attended two seminars. The first was circa 1998 at my own facilities with the indomitable Nancy Gyes. And the latter was about four years ago, four days with Stuart Mah at his and Pati’s place down in Florida. I was handicapped all that week by a terrible flu made all the worse by uncle Stu’s merciless pushing and attack-the-course take-no-prisoner’s style of play.

I mention the paucity of outside training for myself to explain my unique approach to training and handling for agility… those things I teach. It is as though I came up in a system of evolution far apart from the rest of the world, some place like Mars, or Perth, Australia.

I used to say that I wanted to be uninfluenced by outside systems so that I would remain pure. But it is hard to escape the systems, hypotheses, methodologies, and idiosyncrasies of my peers as all of these are made public in the pages of the Clean Run or are presented on one internet list or another in some fashion.

These days I somehow don’t react to criticism of my teaching as I once did. This is partly a matter of coming to peace with the world—you know, a quiet confidence kind of thing—and a part of it is resignation. There was a fella years ago who about once a week would give me a terrific attack on some public internet forum. Our chief disagreement was that I believed in rewarding a dog when training, either with a bit of food or a game with a toy. He maintained that any “honest” working dog should do the bidding of his handler and trainer. Period. And he was fair committed to exposing me for the fool I was.

He suddenly stopped ranting at me in public. And I’ll tell you how it came about. I wrote the fella an email message and told him that I found him to be a complete coward for hiding behind his keyboard whilst attacking me; and, should I ever meet him out in the world I’d whip him around the block.  Afterwhich I declined ever to open a message from him. And I’ve heard no more of him.

Not too long ago someone on a public list responded to a post of mine on agility handling systems saying “I never thought I’d say this… but I understood you Bud, and actually agree!” I’ve heard that tone before. What it actually means is that the writer was completely ignorant of my teaching and is reluctantly surprised that I could have a cogent thought.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been thinking a lot on the precarious world of the dog trainer. We each of us know that either we are endowed with bold genius and canny instinct; or we are completely mad and lunatics disconnected from reality.

Cognizant that we pay our monthly bills by maintaining credibility, respect, and authenticity, the vast majority of dog trainers migrate to adopt the “golden verse” of the moment. Mindful in any case that madness is a measurement of the distance from the center, the majority should always gravitate to t he security of that center where there’ll be plenty of democratic approbation for the methods and practices that mapquest our activities.

A Found Poem

I ran across this wonderful course designed by Pat Guticz for the 2000 Great Dane National Specialty. I really approve of this course because it is as though she was thoughtful about how a Great Dane might perform in the sport of Dog Agility. There is nothing quite worse that getting a judge for your National Specialty who is so clueless about the breed that he or she will design a course that will doom the field. We wouldn’t particularly notice that a course is wretched for the Great Dane if there were only one Great Dane at the trial.

 

This was the course. It seems vaguely NADACtic, featuring wide sweeping turns and no terribly hard yanks and pulls. Most of the challenges are simple traps in which the dog is accelerated towards a dummy jump and the handler left the riddle of actually turning the dog.

Pat Guticz did a wonderful job on this course.

Oh for the record, only one dog was entered CH Legacy Delnorte's Dijon who, presumably, won the class.  

Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston: dogwoodbud1@earthlink.net. And Checkout my new publication the Idea Book – Agility Training for a Small Universe available at www.dogagility.org/store.