a Taj MuttHall Dog Diary: Tika the Very Naughty Nose Wizard

Monday, March 02, 2020

Tika the Very Naughty Nose Wizard

SUMMARY: She loved food. Even on the agility course.

This is expanded version of a Facebook post Mar 2, 2020.

P.S. Food is not allowed on the agility course in most cases!



Tika was an absolute food hog. We were competing at the Masters level in USDAA--already had Silver Championship and Platinum Tournament Master--and one day, we were flying around a course with her way ahead of me as usual, when she suddenly skidded to a halt, veered off in an entirely different direction, completely ignored my attempts to get her attention, trotted about 40 feet away from where we had been to the edge of the ring, and nosed a tiny piece of some kind of food out of the grass! Then turned, blasted back to me, and continued full speed with what we had been doing. Seriously, how can a dog detect that tiny a piece of food, at that distance, at that speed, doing something that you'd think requires a lot of attention to avoid killing yourself??

But she wouldn’t eat bananas.**

(BTW: It was Steeplechase. Qualified and came in 2nd. Crazy dog; how she managed with all that wasted time, who knows!)

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** By contrast, Jake would tear things apart and escape from his crate to get a banana.

Terminology for non-agilityers--

  • Qualifying (Q): Meeting the requirements for the class/run (time and faults or points) to earn a "leg" towards eventual titles.
  • Silver Championship: Earning enough Qs to achieve multiple championships.
  • Tournament Platinum:  Means she was really good at qualifying (had earned many Qs) for the often-challenging three classes that are eventually featured at the national championships. At the time, that was the highest title you could earn for collecting Tournament Qs.
  • Steeplechase: Designed to be very fast. It's often the hardest of the Tournament classes to earn Qs in, because so many dogs are so very fast and, to Q,  you must be in the top 15% of the dogs running that course. (This is a simplification, but close enough.)
Photo by Sarah Hitzeman

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