Tuesday T-Shirt Tales: Mixed Breed Dog Club

T-shirt tales? Because every t-shirt tells a story, don't it.
And I have so very many of them. Shirts. And stories. ---- Whaaaaat??

All T-Shirt Tales

SUMMARY: Back before agility and AKC both fixed and ruined it all.

Bought in 1998. Still wear it.

Even before I adopted Amber, my first dog, I knew that I wanted someday to train an Obedience Champion. But, in my naivité as a first-time dog owner back in the '70s,  I didn't know until a member of the local AKC dog training club told me: "If you wanted to compete, you should've gotten a purebred."  I felt insulted and angry. And that was that. I  washed my hands of AKC. 

That same year (1978), Mixed Breed Dog Clubs of America was founded to allow AKC-rejected dogs of any kind to compete in Obedience and Conformation.
MBDCA was an instant hit: All that pent-up desire from owners of non-AKC breeds and mixed breeds and otherwise unpedigreed pups. Affiliates grew up across the country. 

I had no way of knowing about it and, in any case, the California affiliate (MBDC-CA) wouldn't exist for another 15 years--which happened to be the year Remington was born. How convenient!

Unaware, Remington and I started basic pet obedience classes, and then my instructor told me about MBDC-CA. So! Yay! We began training in earnest with a private instructor.  A possible Obedience Champion dream come true at last! We were [almost] good enough to start earning legs [qualifying scores towards specific titles].  

Most of ours scores were not nearly this good--I got a bit of a vibe of "how sweet that people are bringing out their mixed breeds" from this judge--but I wasn't going to turn down a close-to-perfect score! [We also started competing in agility in 1996]

Demonstrating tricks at the MBDC-CA picnic: 
Jake Shake
Tika "Bang!"

A bonus: The club hosted several events through the year, but in particular their annual picnic with a smorgasbord of fun and games, and of course too much wonderful food. Someone in the club demonstrated advanced tricks, which inspired me to push further into that fun activity with Rem.   Later, for a couple of years, Rem and I demonstrated our tricks repertoire to inspire others. 

The MBDC-CA cemented some of my nascent friendships, expanded my understanding of dog sports and organizations, and gave us a chance to just have fun with our dogs and friends in relaxed, dog-friendly camaraderie.  

Meanwhile, something else that I initially had no idea about had begun only 10 years before MBDC-CA's founding. It would, directly or indirectly, lead to the collapse of most of the MBDCs a mere 10 years after I started training Remington. Yes: dog agility (mid-1980s).  

Obedience was interesting but pretty low-key, and Remington wanted more more more! And so did I.  We tried tracking, too. And "Circus Dog" classes. And then my original obedience instructor told me about another thing -- dog agility. Went to a class, loved the look of it, was accepted for training, and ...  I had no idea what I was in for. Among other things--a rapidly growing collection of new friends with purebreds and mixes all with a common love of dogs and, now, agility.  Even though clearly Obedience would be my main thing.

A year after I started agility with Rem, Jake came home with me, so then I had two mixes with whom to have fun at the annual MBDC-CA picnic. One year, Jake won the hot-dog diving contest (bits of hot dog in a bowl of water) almost before the timer could start the stopwatch. The club's monthly newsletter reported everyone's titles and achievements and new puppies and the passing of old dear friends and activities. An eager, active, close-knit, and successful organization, with dogs earning obedience and conformation titles left and right.

Of course I have no photos of me in the MBDC-CA t-shirt at one of their events, but at agility competitions, we'd gather for photos anyway.
Here, four of us wore our MBDC-CA t-shirts. (Me with Tika and Jake.)
Arlene (to the left of the sign) and I became good friends outside the world of dogs.

But something was happening--I began to lose interest in competitive obedience, because: Agility. And other people began to lose interest in competitive obedience, because: Agility. People wanted demos of agility and articles about agility. evvvvvery body, it seemed, was doing agility. 

And then, the finishing touch: AKC, under pressure from a huge agility community and other growing dog sports (or possibly to tap into all that money that wasn't going their way), made it possible for mixed breeds to earn AKC obedience and agility titles. The purpose for MBDC had nearly vanished; only conformation remained as a unique draw. Fewer and fewer people came out for MBDC events. Fewer and fewer people had interest in doing the work to keep the club running.  In 2013, it folded completely, as did all but one affiliate across the country. Long after I had ceased interest in obedience.

I appreciate that it existed at all, at the time that I needed it.

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References for fun:

• MBDCA on Wikipedia
  

So long, and thanks for all the fish

History of Dog Sports--the Taj MuttHall view

SUMMARY: Are obedience, agility, and rally-o "traditional" dog sports?

A friend's comment on one of my posts identifying those as traditional made me laugh out loud in bemused amusement.  Which are "traditional"? Which are "new"?   I suppose that this goes along with my own place in time, which begins in a global sense with "What were you doing when Kennedy was shot?" which I don't think that even any of my younger sisters can answer.

Not that I'm saying that I'm old.  I'm still in my 20s, just the face is changing.

Sooooo here is my immediate reaction.

Agility and rally included in "traditional" dog sports!  Rally-O wasn't even invented until about 4 years after I started agility, which in turn didn't have a presence in the U.S. until only 7 or 8 years before I started.  So they're both new in my world view.  (And both, incidentally, were introduced into the U.S. in a large way by the same man, Bud Kramer, whom, incidentally, I believe is in fact the inventor of rally-o because he was concerned about dog folks leaving obedience in droves for agility--and, incidentally about that, see my discussion on MBDCA below).

They're new sports, as are dock jumping (about 2 years after I started agility), freestyle (only about 6 years before), weight pulling (about 10 years before), Treibball (among the baby dog sports, just 10 years old), of course barn hunt and nosework, and a whole slew of others.

In other words, to me, most dog sports are "new."

To me, "old" sports include herding (forever), sled dog racing (forever), field trials (1866), disc dog (early 1970s), and lure coursing (around 1970) (which, incidentally, was founded by Lyle Gillette, a man for whom I did some work at his kennels* one summer as a kid--which, incidentally, I blogged about 10 years ago).

The rise of dog sport varieties has amazed me--when I got Amber, my first dog, nothing really existed in my world view except Obedience, and we couldn't compete in that because it was only for purebreds. The Mixed Breed Dog Clubs of America, which provided  a place where non-AKC dogs could do conformation and obedience, was founded only at about the time that she came into my life, and I didn't learn about it for another 15 years, when Remington arrived in my life.

The MBDCA lived for only about 30 years. Remington won tricks contests there our first couple of years.  Dog agility gave that club a nearly mortal wound--people like myself found the new sport to be more exhilarating than obedience--and AKC allowing all dogs to compete has pretty much killed it off.  They still exist, but the CA branch, which was thriving when I first got Remington, has gone extinct as near as I can tell.

SOoooooo there you go, a short history of new vs. old dog sports!

Wikipedia has a pretty good list of dog sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_sports. --Which, incidentally, I created in 2004 and contributed to greatly -- and, incidentally, I refer to that effort in the old blog post that I mention above, where I said that I was researching lure coursing: It was for Wikipedia articles. And here are the sports that I listed off the top of my head in that page before saving it for the first time:

• Dog agility
• Field trials
• Flyball
• Frisbee dog
• Obedience trials
• Schutzhund
• Sheepdog trials
• Tracking
• Greyhound racing

By the time I was pretty much done with it a year later, it had added:

• Carting
• Dog show (conformation show)
• Dog packing
• Earthdog trials (or go to ground trials)
• Lure coursing
• Musical freestyle
• Mushing
• Protection sports (including Schutzhund and Ring sports)
• Pulka
• Sled dog racing
• Skijoring
• Weight pulling

And that is PLENTY of "incidentally"s for today.

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The house and kennels, incidentally, went to the big house graveyard in the sky reserved for those cleared away by freeways (to which, incidentally, I also briefly refer in that previous blog post); CA State 85 was nothing more than a corridor cutting through the west side of the Santa Clara Valley for decades, and Gov. Jerry Brown in his first stint in office (incidentally, he's also the current governor) declared that it would never be built, so it stayed empty with occasional bold folks building in it, believing his statements.  When we were kids, my friends and I used it as a shortcut from one neighborhood to another. Decades later, when I was in my 3rd purchased house, just a quarter mile from the right-of-way, plans were finally finalized to start building on it. Friends who had bought a lovely new home facing the open space that "would never be built" 20 years earlier suddenly found themselves facing a 6-lane freeway. The day before the freeway opened to traffic, they allowed pedestrians and bicyclists all along it for a last shortcut from one neighborhood to another.  The point being that Phydelma and Lyle Gillette's home was in that right-of-way and is no more.  I still often think of them as I drive over the freeway overpass where, if you look to the right going south on Stelling, you can imagine the ghost of their spread.