Off Topic: Miki the Wonder Dog...

[SlightlyLoony]

My wife (Debbie) competes in dog agility with one of our field spaniels, Miki. To anyone who knows about the sport and the breed, that's a bit like saying she's taken up automobile racing — with a John Deere tractor as her ride. Dogs that do well in agility must have focus (the ability to concentrate on the job at hand) and drive (roughly the equivalent of competitiveness in people). Field spaniels are famous for their lack of both — they are ridiculously easy to distract, and famously enthusiastic only about what they feel like doing. Border collies and standard poodles dominate the top ranks of dog agility because those breeds tend to have lots of focus and drive. Field spaniels...not so much.

But we love field spaniels (we have three of them), and Debbie loves dog agility, so she was determined to make the two things work together. It took several years of training, during which there were many setbacks and disappointments, but now she's got Miki behaving more like a border collie than a field spaniel. Knowledgeable onlookers are stunned when they see him run for the first time — spaniels are not supposed to be able to do that!

Miki is currently running in the top class of agility: Excellent "B", and he's collecting points toward his MACH, the highest award in the agility world. Only one other field spaniel has ever gotten a MACH, in the entire history of dog agility. Miki is going to be the second one!

You can see one of Debbie's runs with Miki from a couple weeks ago below the fold. Debbie's wearing a red shirt; the judge a green shirt. The objective is to get your dog through the course in exactly the order of obstacles laid out by the judge, while following every rule, as fast as you can. The rules range from "Don't knock any bars off the jump" to "When leaving the A-frame, the dog must briefly have two paws on the A-frame and two paws off" — and there are a lot of these rules. Debbie and Miki took third place in this run, against a large field of dogs including many border collies and poodles...