• 05Apr

  April Showers

  Contests 27 Comments

  April is here, showers and tricks and all! Tell us about the best trick your dog has ever pulled (trained, or untrained) for a chance to win an aqua hurdle in the correct size for your dog (8”, 16”, or 24”).

  Agility is rarely called off for rain (as anyone who watched or attended the AKC Invitational 2009 knows), and dogs need to learn how to work in mud, rain, and wet obstacles. Practice so you’re not caught flat-footed!  All Affordable Agilitys’ water obstacles are great for getting your dog used to rain-training without the rain!

  The winner will be selected by a random number generator, and notified via email (providing you are a registered user here).   Deadline is  April 23rd.  Good luck and have fun! 

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  How to enter this contest:

  1. If you have never done so before, you must first register your email address on this blog. We will then notify you if you are a winner of this contest. You only need to do this once, and you will be good for all future monthly contests (and get priority notification of when they occur)!
  2. Scroll to the bottom of this page and enter your comment/answer. Or, if there is no box, click on the “comments” in the upper right corner.

  

  Tags: agility obstacles, member stories

• 12Feb

  AgiliJack!

  Member Photos & Stories 3 Comments

  Jack Russels in Agility

  They are fun to run. When it is perfect, it is like flying a little radio controlled airplane or running with a feather on a silken thread. Those are the wonderful fun runs with the Jack Russell Terrier. They are worth all their quirky ways. They love to work and love to play. In fact if they don’t have a job they can be bored as unemployed dogs. They have been used for work for over a hundred years and kept with packs of foxhounds. Everything in the Jack Russell’s profile is life applied to work.Take this compact athletic dog and give it agility and you have one laser beam of a dog to play agility with. They have the capacity to be a true teammate. It is important to know that they were bred to have courage to face a fox below ground. They have the intelligence and the athletic form to be able to follow the fox to ground and dislodge it by barking at it so it would bolt. Their job was to eject the fox by its invasive presence or they would lunge at the fox and hold it at bay until the handler dug to the dog. The other technique to hunt the dog and the hardest, is for the dog to stay with the fox until the handler calls the dog out. Often they are not eager to come out, the fox having the dog’s undivided attention.

  Jack Russell’s name was given to define the dog apart from the popular show ring terrier the Fox Terrier. At one time the Fox Terrier and the Jack Russell Terrier were exactly the same dog. Soon the conformation of the show ring Fox Terrier changed. Russell’s known strain and others breeding working terriers worked their dogs and did not go in the show ring. Russell’s dogs were hunters. Russell himself said the dog should never be a murderer of foxes. He said the intelligence of the dog should prevent him from doing such a crime. Jack Russell was a popular figure in England and was a fox hunting man and a Parson. The dog has not changed in appearance over the years. It is never to be questioned this little dog has courage and needs to meet lots of other dogs early on and be protected from itself. They must be well socialized with lots of people in lots of places. Oddly they have very strong likes and dislikes when it comes to other dogs. Many have been known to go hunting alone because they are hard wired to explore. They will obsess over a caged bird or gerbil. To harness their compulsion and aim their boundless energy to agility can be a lot of fun.

  Continue reading »

  

  Tags: dog breeds, member stories

• 09Jan

  Wait fur me!

  Member Photos & Stories 1 Comment
  

  Wait for me! I'm not as big as you!

  Thanks to Fred Lutz for this fun action shot.

  Fred is one of our dropshippers at: www.agilitytools.com.

  

  Tags: member stories, simply funny

• 10Dec

  Bone or Coal?

  Interesting and Funny No Comments

  Thank you to everyone who participated in our mini-contest! You shared your wonderful stories on why you feel you dog is deserving of a special Christmas treat. It was so hard to choose! We are convinced around here. Our customers have some pretty special dogs, and these dogs have some pretty special owners too. Five of you are going to be sent a free doggie bone rawhide advent calendar. If you haven’t already sent me your address, please do so and I’ll get it mailed right off to you.

  If you would like to get priority notification of these special contests, make sure you have registered on this website at least once. You will then know about them in time.

  To read all the great winning stories, click below!

  Continue reading »

  

  Tags: member stories

• 07Nov

  How I spent my Summer (A Member story)

  Member Photos & Stories 1 Comment
  

  Patch, Beverly Skilling

  Summer is off season for Florida agility except for the DACOF state team competition in July (indoors of course). I spent my summer giving lessons in the evening after it cools down and I took on a new dog.

  Patch was offered for adoption because of health issues with his owners and because a 60 pound energetic dog is not what they expected when they bought a cute puppy 10 months ago. An AKC registered Australian Shepherd and a beautiful boy, he was offered by the breeder free to “active” home.

  Patch came to my home a counter-surfing, home destroying, untrained doofus soon to turn a year old. I puppy-proofed (I thought) a room so that he would not have to live in his crate. I soon discovered that his idea of puppy proofing and mine differed greatly. Carpets were chewed, crates were chewed, window shades were shredded. I gave him a doggy door so that he could go outside at will and he chewed the doggy door.

  I decided, on the encouragement of one of my agility students (who is a certified instructor for the Karen Pryer Academy), to try clicker training for the first time. What an eye opener!
  He was learning how to learn! In just days, this dog was targeting from across the room, offering behaviors quicker than I could mark them. Whenever he would start getting into mischief around the house we would have a short training session and learn a new behavior. This helped keep him out of mischief by occupying his mind with the added benefit of some cool tricks to show off with.

  We soon moved the targeting to a board 2o2o and then right on to a small teeter. In just a couple of weeks we moved the target outside and clicked our way over all of the contacts. Tunnels? no problem. He really was not paying enough attention to the jump bars so we went inside for some one-jump excercises from the book Developing Jumping Skills by Linda Mecklenburg. I clicked for a bar left up, just reset with no comment when the bar came down. The rate of bars left up has improved greatly.

  After only two months of training I took him to his first public run-through and was very happy. He took all obstacles, left all bars up and stayed with me. I feel that my “off season” was well spent by learning a new training method and starting another dog on the road to the fun of agility play and competition.

  Beverly Skilling

  AnnaLuna (JRT) O-EJC, O-TN-E, ECC, S-TG-N, EAC, O-WV-E, HP-N
  OA, 0AJ, XF
  Kaikaina (BC), AX, AXJ, NF
  OAC, NJC, NCC, WV-O
  Navrock’s Snuggle “Patch”(Aussie)

  

  Tags: member stories

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