The decision: I’m no longer going to do agility with Zoey.
It’s taken me awhile to get here–for years now I’ve been hoping that with just a little more training, she’d be able to handle trial situations. But, she just doesn’t seem to be able to hold herself together when it comes time to compete: bars fly, weaves are ignored and contact zones don’t exist. I stopped putting her in standard classes over a year ago because she was so very fond of flying off the TOP of the A-Frame. Since I’ve been trialing her in jumpers and a few games classes, I’ve seen ZERO improvement in her ability to do the weaves or keep the bars up.
It’s frustrating since she does so well in class (she rarely misses her weaves and hardly ever knocks a bar)…and because she is so darn fast. The last open jumpers class we did in NADAC clocked her running at nearly 6.5 yards per second.
But, the beauty of dog sports is that there is a huge variety of sports to compete in–if one doesn’t work for you, another one probably will. So, we will focus on flyball, a sport she seems to love (not quite as much as agility, but almost). She seems to be running faster having had a few months off from the sport, so I am encouraged that she may end up running faster than she did last year in competition. Our next tournament is at the end of April so I should be able to get some idea of her current speed then. Of course, she’s jumping an inch less than she did last year (7″ instead of 8″) so I think that makes some difference in her performance as well.
I will miss agility, but I can always hope my next Cardi will be my agility superstar (on the other hand, when Zoey gets to be, say 15 years old, she may have mellowed out enough to give agility another try).
The question: Does anyone know who the 2nd (larger and more mature) blue merle from my “Cardi-Fest (Part 2) post is?
A couple more pics:
A New Addition: Arriving on Thursday!
