Obedience Musings

When I first became involved with purebred dogs, my main interests were lure coursing and competition obedience. I know it seems strange that a sighthound person would be so interested in the latter, since sighthounds could hardly be considered traditional obedience breeds, but for me, competition obedience was reminiscent of the dressage work I was so interested in when I was younger and working with horses, and I was intrigued by the challenge of figuring out creative ways to make traditional obedience work fun, interesting, and motivating for sighthounds.

It was my enormous good luck that my first obedience dog  – my greyhound Owen, an all-breed and specialty High in Trial winner who really loved obedience work! – was such a natural, and really reinforced my belief that obedience training promotes a deep and profound communication between handler and dog, a powerful teamwork that is a joy and privilege to experience.

I have been teaching companion obedience classes for around 10 years at The Dogworks in Monroe, WA. I loved teaching, it gave me invaluable experience, and taught me so much about working with a wide variety of dogs and people. Without a doubt, it improved my training skills, helped me overcome some of my confidence and shyness issues, and improved my communication skills.

But, after finishing Wren’s CD in 2002, ironically, I found that the longer I taught, the less energy and time I had to train my own dogs, so much so that for the last five years or so, I had completely stopped training at all, with the exception that I continued to take all my puppies through a basic puppy obedience class for socialization and to provide them with a solid foundation in training and self control. Oh, I always brought a dog with me to class to demo the exercises, so those demo dogs really picked up a lot of good training just through demoing in class, and because I taught a CGC class, many of my dogs earned their CGCs on the strength of their demo work in that class. For a few months, I enrolled in a competition class with Tiercel, but I just couldn’t sustain the training required to keep up with the class and eventually I started falling behind and dropped out. By giving so much time and energy to my students, I barely had enough left for myself. Finally, last year I faced the reality that obedience work was no longer a priority for me. In a busy life, full of commitments to other dog sports, dog clubs, personal responsibilities, and limited time, I felt I had no choice but to admit that it was time to let it go.

But I continued to have this nagging tickle in my heart and my mind… I missed working with my dogs. Really missed it. Itched to get back to it. Dreamed about making time for it. And eventually it dawned on me that the real problem was one of balance: if teaching was sapping my energy for training, then giving up training was a band-aid. The real cure was to make the selfish decision to reclaim that time and energy for myself by retiring from teaching.

It was a really tough decision, but once made, it felt so right. My students were no help, begging me to continue, telling me how much they loved my classes and how much they’d miss me. But I was strong, gave notice, and finished out my last session. Graduation night was a few weeks ago, and it was bittersweet, but I walked out of the building that night feeling like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and looking forward to this new year and a rededication to working with my own dogs.

Last night, Ringer and I attended our first competition class in probably four years. I’ve lost track of exactly how long it has been, but before we dropped out of class, Ringer was trained through novice and partly into open/utility, and just needed proofing and matching before entering the competition ring. But it has been a LONG time since I’ve done any work with him at all, and I figured he’d be pretty rusty.

Boy did I ever underestimate this wonderful and willing dog! He remembered everything! His heeling was spectacular: attentive, enthusiastic and reasonably precise! He hit all his halts, his fronts and finishes were beautiful, he remembered his stand signal and his stays were rock solid. It had been so long that I couldn’t even remember what his go-out command was, but, though I experimented with several different candidates trying to remember which I’d used with him all those years ago, he remembered how to do go-outs anyway no matter which command I used. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, since I got a little bit of a sneak preview before class when I was cleaning out my old training bag and transferring my training gear to a new bag, and Ringer grabbed the dumbell right out of my hand to show me he remembered how to “take it” and “hold it” but I was still blown away by how well he retained and executed his early training. Good boy Ringer!

It feels like the dawn of a new day. I’m enthused about training again and looking forward to getting Ringer ready for the novice ring, and beyond that, to getting Tiercel back to class, and then Lark and Branwen and…

Tagged as: Owen, Ringer, Wren