In response to last week’s Training Update, my writer and blogger friend Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell (who writes about living large in a little house) asked for some background on why exactly I would work so hard and continue to put so much effort into training Lilly. Here is my best attempt at answering that question, which is bigger than I suspect Kerri suspects.
If you too are new to our blog and wonder what on earth all this is about, I suggest catching up via a handful of early entries filed under Backstory. You can always find them under Category Archives in the sidebar to the left. In particular, see my second-ever post entitled Why Champion of My Heart? (A much-shortened version of that post lives permanently in the sidebar as well, under Lilly’s smiling photo.)
A couple years later, let’s revisit this big question of WHY?
Essentially, living with Lilly, a dog with such generalized fears around the house, to noises and motion, with people, and particularly with other dogs transformed me into a different kind of Dog Girl. To communicate with Lilly and to help her LEARN to handle the world, I had to move far beyond what most people consider dog training.
Lilly is my first-ever “performance” dog. And, yes, for those outside the arena, that is a kind of “show dog.” Leave it to me to have a a performance dog with performance anxiety.
While our ultimate activity GOAL is indeed to return to hard-core agility training (and, we hope, some competition before she gets too old), let’s be clear that the dog came first, the sport second.
I did NOT set out to adopt an agility dog. I adopted a dog who sorely needed a job, and agility was an early contender for Lilly’s work. The idea came from Hilary Lane, who was Lilly’s first trainer at the shelter and our adoption counselor five years ago this month.
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