SUMMARY: Is Boost fixable, and should I even try?
(photo by S. Hitzeman)Boost seems like all the agility dog raw material that anyone could hope for. She loves the game. Loves working with me. And smart! And a great start-line stay!
Loves running. Running flat out, can't be beaten.
Blazingly fast weave poles (during the periods when she's going in correctly and exiting correctly).
Pretty darned fast contacts, and an often spectacular teeter.
Capable of earning high or nearly high points in, say, Gamblers, out of 40 or 50 or 60 22" dogs including some of the top ones in the country or even the world (when she's not running past obstacles instead of taking them, or doing the "what, THIS tunnel?" dance).
She knocks bars, a lot. Even more than Tika ever did, and I thought Tika was quite the bar knocker. She has runouts and refusals constantly, and now even when she's clean I see hesitation at many obstacles as if she's *thinking* about not taking it or going past it. She hates coming in to me on serpentines. These are all things that Tika never had problems with. (Tika had other challenges, of course, but they were more clearly behavioral than performance, if I can make that distinction.)
I have to fill in some background for an interesting conversation I had this weekend.
I have an agility friend who has had mixed luck with her Border Collies. Her first one turned out well; not super-fast, but plenty fast enough to place fairly regularly and to be a pretty reliable Qer. He has had some heat-related issues, but it's manageable. He's now ten, I think, and of course you start thinking about retiring a dog at that point.
Her second dog, about Boost's age, is an amazingly driven, super-fast Border Collie. She screams with excitement when waiting to run or when running. She can cover the ground like she's on jet fuel. Her littermate was a world team dog. But there's something amiss with this dog. When she does jumps, she does the dread stutter step, and knocks bars half the time. They've done every test that anyone can think of and they can't identify anything. But: When you hold up a toy, she focuses intently on--a point a couple feet above and to the side of where the toy is. She clearly sees the world differently than one would expect. An astonishingly driven dog who wants to do agility and can't. (Or probably could if it weren't for getting over jumps.)
So I was (yeah, as usual) moaning about how frustrating it is to do run after run with Boost and she just doesn't seem to get the idea that it's about taking obstacles, not about running. Or maybe she does get it and doesn't like it. I dunno. Or maybe I haven't trained enough, or on the right kinds of exercises. I *know* that I'm not a dedicated trainer. I *know* that there are things I could work on more, and I work on only some. But that strategy worked for Remington (mostly) and Jake and Tika. But my perfect agility dog--well, would she have been a world team dog with a different handler? Or would even a world team handler have thrown up their hands and let her go?
So my friend said: at some point, one has to face it -- We have our older, reliable, not top-of-the-line but close, dogs who Q and are getting older. We have our expensive, driven, excited dogs who want to do agility and can't. And sometimes that's just the way it is; it's no reflection on us as handlers or trainers, and we just have to accept that and decide how we want to handle the fact that they can't and never will be "successful" agility dogs.
Then, in rapid succession this week, people posted links to these blog posts, which of course now you have to read because they feed right into that topic. (Fortunately, both are shorter than my post already is.)
This blog post by Susan Garrett, and this blog post by Suzanne Clothier.
So. Do I quit agility with Boost and take up herding? Quit agility entirely? Keep paying money to compete and just accept that I'm doing it for fun and it's just a pricey way to have fun? Really throw myself into training and give it, say, 6 months of a very carefully planned out, assisted training regimen and see whether I make progress? Or am I trying to fit a round peg into a square hole? And how will I ever know?
[Feeling: Discouraged, confused, and a bit lost.]
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