Dogged Pursuit Page 3

  The equipment was all set up and I was eager to test Dusty’s mettle against the teeter or the chute, but this first class was almost entirely devoted to establishing some guiding principles. Dee didn’t get into much of the background and history of agility—I suppose that might’ve been too much for a room filled with squirming dogs on taut leashes—but, thanks to my spate of Internet research before signing up Carmen, I already had a pretty good grasp on that.

  The sport’s origins date back to 1978, when a British dog-show producer named John Varley was charged with finding something to fill the dead time between the end of obedience championships and the start of “group breed” judging. Drawing on his prior experience in equestrian trials, he came up with a series of intricate obstacle courses through which dogs ran, jumped, and climbed to the finish line. It was fast, fun, and the crowd went nuts for it. The next year it was added to the program as its own dedicated event, and thereafter went wide-screen all across the United Kingdom. In 1986 Kenneth Tatsch, a Texas dog lover, seeing it for the first time and sensing its potential in this country, hurried home and founded the first American agility club, the United States Dog Agility Association. Soon there were more than a dozen others, hosting trials all year round, all across the country. The American Kennel Club (AKC), not about to be left out, embraced agility and is now the predominate presence in the sport. AKC trials are open to only purebred dogs, but there are other organizations, such as the North American Dog Agility Council (NADAC) and Canine Performance Events, that allow competition by mixed breeds and by breeds that aren’t recognized by the snooty old AKC.

  In short order canine agility became one of the fastest-growing sports in America. Now it’s even attracted its first celebrity contestant, the Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis—who has not, as of this writing, gone quite as far in agility as he did in diving. (Nor has he cracked his head against the A-frame, so let’s call it a draw.)

  It turns out that I myself was the celebrity in Dee’s new beginners’ class. She’d occasionally punctuate her pointers on how to approach the obstacles by saying, “Just ask Rob—he’s already trained another dog and even competed with her,” and the students would crane their necks and look at me reappraisingly.

  But any authority I might initially have had melted away over the following weeks. Carmen had been a quick study, grasping what was required of her and improving it on each successive go-round. Dusty, on the other hand, in his general trepidation over being in the same room with so many potential arch-nemeses, seemed to forget everything I told him the moment I stopped talking.

  The training started with the easiest of the obstacles: jumping. All dogs jump, so in theory it’s simply a matter of teaching them to do it on command. There are several kinds of jump used in agility trials, including the standard bar jumps, double jumps (two bar jumps abutting one another), wing jumps (with extensions on either side of the bars), panel jumps (with wooden slats in place of a bar), and so on. What they have in common is that they can be raised or lowered from eight to twenty-six inches, to accommodate different-sized dogs. Competitions are divided by bar height: dogs that jump at twenty-four inches are pitted against other twenty-fours, and so on.

  Since Dusty was roughly the same size as Carmen, I knew he’d be jumping at sixteen inches. There were a few other sixteen-inch dogs in class, as well as twenties, twenty-fours, and a couple of twelves. No eights (which was a relief; some of the larger dogs on hand looked like they’d happily eat an eight). But here, at the outset, we set the bar at twelve for all the dogs so that their natural inclination, when they came up to it, would be to hop over it. As Dusty and I approached, I said, “Over!” so that he would begin to associate this command with the move he was about to make. Except he didn’t make it. He stopped short, glanced at the bar, then glared up at me—as I tugged gently at his leash from a few paces beyond—shooting me a look that said, “How do you expect me to follow you when there’s this large metal impediment in the way?”

  I must have appeared flummoxed, and I was: Carmen hadn’t had this trouble—she’d cleared her first bar as though she’d been waiting her whole life to do it. “It’s okay,” Dee said. One of her shining qualities is that she’s rarely discouraged (or at least she rarely shows it). “Try again, and this time you go over with him.”

  I blinked. “You . . . you want me to jump over the bar?”

  “Yup. Show him how to do it.”

  I hesitated a moment; but only a moment. If I was out to produce a champion, I couldn’t fold at the first hitch in the training. There would be greater sacrifices required of me, I was sure, than a simple loss of dignity.

  I took Dusty by the leash, walked him back to the approach, and then together we trotted up to the jump. “Over!” I cried, and I hurled all 180-odd pounds of my bulk up and across the bar. I could feel my feet dangle in the air. I must have looked like a massive, spastic marionette. Then I landed with an oof, turned my head, and saw Dusty seated primly on the far side of the jump, his head slightly turned away from me as though to reassure any onlooker, “Hey, I barely know the guy.”

  Eventually—long after all the other dogs in the class were leaping to and fro over their bars, and the class looked like the Martha Graham Dance Company celebrating the joys of spring—Dusty finally got it. The metaphoric lightbulb over his head switched on, and he sailed easily over the jump. I praised him profusely, the high pitch of my voice betraying my obvious relief and also costing me a little more of my dwindling reserves of manhood. We did the jump again, and then again. Then we raised the bar to sixteen inches, where Dusy would be competing—if we ever got to competition, which wasn’t something I’d have bet cash money on right at the moment. He nailed it. Then he nailed it again.

  “Okay,” said Dee, clearly happy to be making progress at last after so much effort, “try it without the leash.”

  I unhooked him and commanded him to sit and stay; then I went to the other side of the jump, looked him dead in the eye, conveying all the authority I could muster, and said, “Dusty, over!”

  He turned the opposite direction and made a mad dash across the room, vaulting over the gate and into the lobby.

  I looked at Dee sheepishly. “Well,” I said, “he did jump.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Dee-lightful

  Of course Dusty and I weren’t the most difficult team Dee had ever trained. There were plenty of dogs whose exuberance could not easily be funneled into a structured activity, and there were handlers whose thickness made your average two-by-four look like Stephen Hawking. “Try that again with the dog on your right,” Dee would call out after a botched jump, which the handler would then repeat in exactly the same way. “Your other right,” Dee inevitably corrected him. Her patience seemed, well, not infinite; occasionally she’d get steamed, but never by forgetfulness or clumsiness or even stupidity. The only times she’d come close to losing her religion were when people casually abandoned their dogs on the course. When one such handler snarked about how her Shiba Inu should “know better” than to screw up, Dee would have none of it. “He doesn’t know better,” she snapped, the set of her jaw forbidding all argument. “That’s why you’re out there. That’s your job. To help him.”

  She never let us forget that this was an activity for dogs, which meant that their enjoyment was paramount. She wouldn’t allow any scolding, rebuking, or, God forbid, striking of the animals. Whatever they learned would be learned through encouragement and praise. They would have fun.

  She had the imperturbability of a medieval saint, spiced with the whiplash wit of a 1940s movie sidekick. She was a North Side Chicago girl, born and bred, which explained both her grit and her grin; it’s a tough breed but a good-humored one. She had a typical midwestern face too—open, earnest, bright—and I never knew her to muddy its sunniness with makeup. It helped enormously, when your dog was subverting your every attempt to enlighten him on some point or other, to have such a face over your shoulder, cheering you on.
Even more encouraging was her back-length blond ponytail—by far her defining feature—which would wag like a tail when she wildly applauded your hard-earned successes.

  Like most dog people, Dee had a special affinity for a certain breed, and as is often the case, the affinity was cemented in childhood. Ironically, the fateful introduction almost didn’t happen. When she was seven, her family set out to adopt a collie but had to renege because of her mother’s allergies. (As a collie lover, I have to wonder why they didn’t just replace the mother.) A miniature poodle was then considered but rejected as too small. Finally, they found a breed both the right size and suitably hypoallergenic: the Airedale, king of terriers. A female named Annie came into Dee’s life and set in motion an enduring love affair.

  Airedales—and dogs in general—were a constant in her life ever after. Her college boyfriend (now her husband) gave her a puppy for graduation, and so her subsequent identity-seeking years—which find most of us drifting temporarily away from the profound canine friendships of our childhood (and into the kind of behaviors we have to spend the next few decades living down, if not surgically correcting)—benefited from the constant presence of at least one indestructible touchstone.

  And Dee did indeed undertake some extensive identity seeking, passing through both law school and a spell as a dancer. She wouldn’t readily admit to the former (“I don’t want people to judge me,” she quipped) but credited the latter with giving her a head start on building her agility prowess. In fact she claimed to be able to tell which of her students had also trained in dance—or gymnastics or the martial arts or any similar endeavor. They possessed a kind of integrated, whole-body awareness that made them agility naturals. I longed for Dee to ask, after marveling at one of my runs, whether I’d studied karate or participated in any triathlons, but the most she ever asked me were things like “Do you want to sit down and catch your breath?”

  Marriage to a breadwinning husband provided her the luxury of time to discover her destined place in the world. But even as she wafted through a succession of office jobs, the future was never really in doubt—just waiting for her to stumble on to it. In fact, almost literally so. Among the handful of possessions to survive her transition from childhood to adulthood was a copy of the pioneering text The Koehler Method of Dog Training—a method she later came to regard as too “yank ’em and crank ’em” but whose presence among her belongings was a testament to her early interest in the pursuit that would become her career.

  Even as Dee’s professional life remained in stasis, her immersion in the dog world deepened. With her new Airedale, Mariah, she competed in both obedience and conformation (the Westminster-style best-of-breed trials). This was, she hastened to point out, “Before I knew better,” as Mariah was too short ever to embody the breed standard. (She’d have better luck with her next Airedale, Darby.) But she was so successful at obedience that she ended up teaching classes for the Chicago Park District—her first foray into the world of professional coaching.

  When agility reached the Midwest, Dee got into that as well, though in those early days that meant driving way the hell out to places like Antioch or Naperville—places where you thought twice about pulling in for gas because what if they don’t like your kind in these here parts—and that was just to train, never mind compete. Undaunted, she mastered the basics and entered trials sponsored by various clubs, including NADAC and UKC and other alphabet pileups, and became familiar with the full breadth of the sport’s terrain. She found herself most comfortable in the AKC and focused her energies there. Before long Dee found herself in the upper echelons of the sport.

  When the Windy City K-9 Club opened on Chicago’s North Side in the mid-1980s, she had an impressive enough résumé to work a deal whereby she conducted agility classes on its premises twice a week. Some of her first students—Marilyn, Andi, Bruce—remained faithful disciples and provided the foundation for what Dee decided to call All Fours Dog Training. The group even developed its own logo and a Web site with the rather characterless address of chicagoagility.com. (As Dee tells it, she and her husband, Keith, had typed “allfours.com” into their browser to see if the URL was available. “Lo and behold, up comes a porn site! I had to warn all my students not to go there. But every once in a while I’ll catch Keith looking at it and he’ll be all, ‘Oh, I was just checking to see if the address is still taken.’ ”)

  It was a testament to Dee’s sense of humor and ability to inspire devotion that on my return to agility I encountered so many people I’d known before. Some, like me, were training brand-new dogs. (This included Dee herself, who was now partnered with Darby’s heir, an irrepressible female named Kaleigh.) It was also revealing to note that Dee’s methods had evolved. This was not a woman ever likely to become set in her ways or to ignore new ideas and advances in other quarters.

  For instance, back when I trained Carmen, Dee had a certain way of teaching the weave poles—a row of twelve upright masts the dog must negotiate slalom-style. To achieve this, Dee set the poles in two rows of six and then had the handler call the dog through the space between them. With each pass, the rows would be moved closer together, till eventually the dog couldn’t maneuver between them anymore and had to snake through them like a cat around someone’s ankles. It worked well enough; Carmen became a very proficient weaver. At her peak she even banked, like a skier.

  Dee’s new weave-pole method was radically different. It started with just two poles, and the idea was to get the dog to pass through them correctly; i.e., leading with the left shoulder. The theory being that once the dog has the principle down the succeeding poles will just fall into line. At the heart of this approach is the notion that the dog has to figure out the poles for herself—even in the absence of a verbal command. That means breaking down the weave-pole entry into very small components and rewarding each one. For example, you reward the dog if she looks at the weave poles. Once she figures out that turning her head that way earns a treat, you stop. Now she has to figure out what additional behavior you want to add to the first. She might run through a variety of possible solutions, but the moment she turns and steps toward the weave poles, you give her a new treat. Eventually, incrementally, the dog gets the idea that going through those poles is a damn fine thing to do, and could she have another Snausage please?

  This makes for a long, tedious process, and occasionally a largish wallop of existential despair, but in the end you get your dog to make a perfect weave-pole entry time after time and, most importantly, it was her idea. She figured it out herself, you never once commanded her. This is something of a quantum leap, training-wise, and informed much of what Dee now passed along to us. What it did was take the dogs from a place where they were obeying orders to one where they were thinking independently—acting instead of reacting.

  Dusty took longer than the other dogs to reach this milestone because he disdained all material inducements. You might have called him monastic had his anxiety level not been ratchetted so high; you only find monks this nervous in Boccaccio. He sat by the two weave poles and looked, not at me, but at everyone else around him in a dither of distress. My job was to reward him the moment he made the slightest gesture toward the entry pole, but his eyes were darting too fast for me to follow, and besides I had no means of rewarding him beyond praise, and he wasn’t listening to me. We stood there, twitching and flailing as Dee made the rounds, checking on everybody’s progress, so that I was in a something of a lather myself by the time she reached us.

  “How’s Dusty doin’?” she asked—just as Dusty nearly toppled over from leaning away at her approach.

  “We seem to be having trouble,” I said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Well, basically, existing on the same planet.”

  She gave me a come-on-now smirk and rolled up her sleeves. Then she took us through the whole process in baby steps, and by the end of the hour had Dusty making a solid weave-pole entry two times out of three.

&nb
sp; “He’s a good boy,” Dee said. “Bless his heart.”

  A Southern friend once told me that “bless his heart” is Dixie code for “he’s so stupid.” Since Dee is a Chicago gal, I figured she might mean something different. Anyway, I was too grateful to argue. Somehow the scattered pieces of our enterprise had been gathered together and we had been forged into a team—exhausted and gasping and streaming with sweat, sure, but still a team.

  And Dee, it was now blindingly apparent to me, was a woman who had found her true calling.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Obstacles of My Affections

  Dusty and I spent a year and a half slowly building proficiency, speed, and (theoretically) mastery of the ten obstacles that comprise an agility course. I’ve alluded to these before, but, to convey exactly what mastering them involves, I’ll describe them a tad more explicitly. In no particular order, we have:

  The A-frame: Two large platforms, about three feet wide, hinged together to form an A (hence the name). The dog’s job is to climb up one side, then descend the other. Sounds easy, but this baby gets steep—between five and six feet. Sometimes bigger dogs, when their center of gravity tilts too far, can find themselves skittering down on their stomachs, like it’s a waterslide.

  The dog walk: Three planks, eight to twelve feet long and about a foot wide, joined so that the center plank is roughly four feet off the ground. As with the A-frame, the dog must traverse its length.

  Jumps: Just to recap, several kinds are used in trials, of different materials and widths. Each bar can be raised or lowered, from eight to twenty-four inches, depending on the dog’s height at the withers. Knocking a bar off its frame is an immediate NQ. It’s also very embarrassing for the handler—sort of like farting in church.

  Broad jumps: Same principle as the above, only the emphasis is on the length of the jump rather than its height. The dog jumps horizontally over a row of slats, rather than vertically over a bar.