We’re Not on Trial Here

I’ve been “in” dog sports for more than 30 years, about as long as I’ve owned dogs.  I’ve always wanted my dogs to have things to do that will challenge them mentally and physically, and with my current crew, I do Nosework with my two Finnish Lapphunds; Tricks with my little brown “All American” dog; and Tricks and Agility with my young Border Collie.

Several years ago, when COVID shut down all our routines in dog sports and training, I stopped trialing my Lapphund Alex in Nosework.  He’s got titles in a number of venues:  AKC, UKC, CWAGS, and NACSW; but I just didn’t like the trial atmosphere and the way some of the trials were run.  I made a token return to trialing this year by putting Alex and Siili both into a CWAGS trial, where they did well, but our weekly sniffing sessions are for enrichment only at this point, and we all enjoy them immensely and feel no need to ratchet anything up a notch there.

My senior retired Border Collie, Rowley, trialed in CPE agility for a few years, but when the only nearby venue that offered CPE trials at that time changed its location, we stopped that – and again, didn’t miss it.  Rowley attended two agility classes per week until he had to retire from the sport a few years ago.  Then I started Mylo, a sport-bred BC, in agility and never thought about trialing him, because I’d made the trial experience out in my mind to be a big hassle.  When you get into your sixties, big hassles are way less inviting than they’ve ever been, let me tell you!  But Mylo is a truly fine agility dog, and loves the sport a lot, so I decided I would put him into a few AKC trials, provided the trials were close to home and in facilities where he’d trained, so he would be familiar with them. 

In February, we did three runs at a trial and the results were gratifying to us both:  we got an NQ in the first run (Jumpers With Weaves), but a Q in each of the following two runs (Time To Beat, and Standard).  It was a long day, with a lot of down/waiting time, and I figured I could tighten that up in future by entering only two runs that were close together in the judging schedule.  I put in an entry for an April trial, with us in Novice Standard and Novice Jumpers With Weaves.  That trial took place this weekend, and it will probably be the last trial I bother with, and I use that term with precision and intention.

The down and waiting time in any trial is an ordeal, for dogs and for handlers.  There are a lot of ways that handlers cope with it.  I’ve not found one that works for me.  The dogs often wind up crated and with the crate covered and spend most of the day that way; that also doesn’t work for me.  The Agility Gate app is a godsend, letting the entrants know how the running order is progressing.  In theory, you could check in on the Gate and not show up at the trial venue until just before your first run – genius!  But since this was Mylo’s second trial, we had to be there earlier than that, because he had to have his second measurement by the judge in order to determine his permanent jump height.  We showed up in plenty of time for that, got it out of the way, and settled down to wait for the Novice Standard class.  Mylo doesn’t mind being in crowds of people and dogs, and is not reactive in the slightest, but he and I are both easily bored and would rather be doing something else on a nice spring day, so we were glad when the Novice Standard course was built.  Walk-throughs completed, we lined up when the 20” dogs were called.  We started off very nicely indeed and were through almost half the course when the prolonged blast of a whistle penetrated my consciousness and brought me to a halt, with my dog on the down contact of the teeter.  The judge was whistling me off the course in an NQ.  Big clouds of question marks formed over my head – WTF?  She indicated that the belt pack I was wearing was in violation of the AKC’s rule against bringing bait or bait bags into the ring.  “But – it’s not a bait bag,” I explained, “it’s my phone and my keys!”  The judge was sorry but a rule is a rule and I was in violation.  Mylo and I departed the course, both of us confused and unhappy.

Here’s the thing:  I was wearing a belt pack.  I did have my keys and phone in it, since I did not want to leave them unattended on the sidelines when I was on the course.  It wasn’t a bait bag, and I never kept treats in it, I used the pockets of my hoodie for that.  And I didn’t have any treats or toys on me, because I know the rule against using those in the ring or bringing them into the ring.  I should have thought of the belt pack, but I didn’t.  And now I was rapped across the knuckles with a ruler and basically accused of cheating.  Wow, did that light me up!  I know it’s a rule, and I know that my belt pack could be considered a violation of that rule, but the more I thought about it, the less willing I was to see it the way the judge saw it.  Consider these factors:

  1. The judge saw me wearing my belt pack well before I started the run with Mylo.  She measured my dog, and I was wearing it.  She conducted the briefing, and I was wearing it.  She could have noted it then, and reminded me that it was going to get me an NQ.  No, she didn’t have to do that; yes, I know she was just following the rules.  But sometimes the alternative to ‘just following the rules’ is to act like a human being and treat another person like a person, not like a criminal. 
  2. When I disputed the characterization of my belt pack as a bait bag, there was no appeal and no consideration given to the truth of my statement.  The AKC says it’s a bait bag, so it is.  And following that logic, the AKC says that I wore it into the ring so that I could give my dog an unfair advantage in some way, so I must be sanctioned for that.  I’m a 68 year old woman who’s been doing dog agility longer than the AKC has, but they will tell me what I am wearing and why I am wearing it.  Seriously?
  3. Given that I had committed an infraction of the rules, the judge could have let me finish my run with my dog, while signaling to the scorers that no points were to be given for it.  The whistle blast and banishment from the course mid-run was just the judge being a jerk.  Or, ‘following the rules’ if you will.  Her choice.  I can’t say I was surprised, since it’s always easier to be a rule-enforcing jerk than a sympathetic regulatory person.  Twelve years in CME Market Regulation showed me that.

We stuck around for the other run, Novice JWW, and had a pretty nice run, but mentally I think I had already checked out of the whole notion of trialing.  I find it stressful enough being in a trial atmosphere for hours at a time:  I saw one woman whose reactive Border Collie was clearly struggling in that atmosphere and she was grabbing him by the head, trying to force him to look at her – I felt such sympathy for the dog I couldn’t stand it.  I saw a guy giving his Aussie a serious talking to (yes, really!) and telling the dog how disappointed he, the owner, was in him and how the dog had let him down “out there” (on the course) – I wanted to smack the owner upside the head and give him a lecture about realistic expectations.  I hate those glimpses into toxic dog-human relationships, and anyone who says those aren’t on display at a trial is blowing smoke.  I know I cannot extrapolate entire relationships from vignettes like the two I mentioned, but I deeply dislike seeing dogs made to be or feel uncomfortable, or being the recipient of the off-loaded stress of their owners.

So I look at what’s on offer at a trial, and I think about how much I want these things:

  1. A chance to run my dog on some nice courses.  I always love running my dog.  But I can do that in lessons and in ring rentals.  Not seeing that the trial courses are worth enough to me to compel me to pay the money and give the time.  And honestly, the six weave poles in AKC novice is just stupid, and no matter how careful I am to put it in training, it throws my dog off every time and I am annoyed all over again.

  2. A chance to have my dog do well enough on those courses to get placements, qualifying scores, and titles.  With ribbons!  I gotta say, I have genuinely no interest in those things.  I know how good my dog is.  I’m the one who has put in the years of working with him to make him that good, to capitalize on his brains and natural ability!  Is he ‘better’ than other dogs?  Oh please – all my dogs are better than other dogs, in my eyes, because they’re my dogs!  Is he objectively more accomplished than other dogs?  Who cares? 

Everyone’s got to do that calculus for him or herself.  Some people do care more about those things than I do, and would even characterize them differently, or would list things that might not exist for me.  That doesn’t make them right and me wrong; nor do my feelings make me right and them wrong.  It’s more like:  for whom are the trials run, and who derives enjoyment and rewards from them?  (We know what the AKC derives, don’t get me started on that.)  I am not a person for whom the trials are run.  And at long last, after years of thinking that I should feel otherwise, I am happy to realize that there is no shame in that, and that if I object to being whacked over the knuckles with a ruler for a perceived infraction, I can opt out of that and find ways to enjoy my dogs that contain more humanity and don’t require me to tolerate people who are, as my fave author Jennifer Crusie so charmingly put it, winched to the eyebrows.

The deciding factor, for me, is the sad state of society today:  that in general, since the Covid-caused lockdown, our interactions with other people have become less considerate and more abrupt, that there is an edge to encounters and situations today that is often mean and even downright nasty, that there are fewer filters keeping people from being openly antagonistic and aggressive to other people.  I’m in full retreat from that, and while I hoped that dog sports would be one refuge from it, I’m not inclined to keep on thinking that with evidence to the contrary.   So goodbye to dog sport trials, for what is likely the final time.  Best wishes to all who participate, and congratulations to all who find more pleasant ways to enjoy time with their dogs. 

What the hell do you mean, it was positive?!

I learned that Rowley had heartworm when our veterinarian called me on the morning of April 14 with the news.  Yeah, I took Rowley in for his annual exam and heartworm/tick test on Friday the 13th – I probably won’t do that again!

It took me several minutes to process what I was hearing.  Heartworm?!  What the HELL?!  No, I was halfway prepared for the news that Rowley had tested positive for some kind of tick disease – in 2016 he was positive for Lyme, which necessitated a month of doxycycline and several very expensive Quant C6 tests; but Lyme, although nasty, doesn’t feature WORMS LIVING IN MY DOG’S HEART!

So as we staged his treatment for heartworm, which I’ll detail in a later post, I gave a lot of thought to the question:  how did we get here?  Because once I know that, I’ll know how to never get here again!  And after a good deal of remembering, and considering, and admitting stuff to myself, I found that we got here because of a really bad vet that I saw back in 1999, and because I, like many people in my area, allowed myself to become complacent about a pest that was rarely seen in our own backyards:  the mosquito carrying heartworm microfilarae.

Now, the bad vet of nearly 20 years ago isn’t responsible for Rowley’s heartworm in 2018.  Certainly not.  The effect the bad vet had on me was to turn me against pretty much everything I heard from a vet, any vet, for quite a few years.  The bad vet was the vet who vaccinated my first Sheltie, Briar Rose, literally to death, by administering every vaccine he could lay his hands on to a dog who had dermatomyositis (an autoimmune disease similar to lupus, and found in Shelties and several other breeds) and was on Prednisone to ‘manage’ that disease.  And yeah, he did it knowingly.  He told me once that Briar NEEDED the vaccinations because her own immune system wasn’t working well enough to protect her from parvo, lepto, distemper, blahblahblah.  Makes you wonder why the vaccine companies put the instructions to not vaccinate immune-compromised dogs in with the vaccines, doesn’t it?  To be fair, I think Dr. W truly believed in the miraculous properties of vaccines; but his faulty grasp of basic immunology, and his failure to heed the instructions in the vaccine packets, sure harmed my dog.  She died when she was only 9 years old, and I can’t count how many annual vaccinations she’d had – it still bothers me when I think about it, and she has been gone since 1998.  I also think his heavy hand with the vaccine needle contributed to, or might even have caused, Sander’s cancer, which was diagnosed three weeks after Briar Rose died.  Two dogs, two calamitous collapses of the immune system, that pretty much shot his credibility with me, and rightly so.

Because Dr. W told me such arrant bullshit about that aspect of veterinary science, I decided that everything he said and had on offer was equally suspect.  (Remember, I’ve got my first dog dead at 9 and my second dog diagnosed with cancer at 7, and all I’ve done is everything this vet told me to do.)  That included the need for heartworm preventive in any chemical form.  And here I fell into the second part of the cause of today’s problem, the ability of dog owners in the Chicago area to discount the likelihood of heartworm because it’s not nearly as frequent or prevalent here as it is in other, warmer, parts of the country.  We do have winters that feature entire months of temperatures below freezing, when even if mosquitoes can survive, heartworm microfilarae certainly cannot.  I stopped giving Interceptor or any other chemical preventive in 2002, and since then, I’ve had more than a dozen dogs in my household, and none of them tested positive for heartworm – and all were tested annually for as long as they were here.  This made me think that the non-chemical protocol I was using to prevent heartworm was working, although there’s no way I can ever prove or disprove that.  But where would my dogs get heartworm – that’s something that rescue dogs coming up from Southern states have, it’s not something that my dogs can get in my yard, in my neighborhood, at my training centers!

But, of course, it is, and Rowley did.  And Marina Zacharias, who set the protocol that I used for more than a decade, isn’t around any longer, and I can’t ask her if there was, in fact, a scientific basis for the herbal preventives we used:  does black walnut hull extract kill heartworm microfilarae in the bloodstream of a dog?  I really do want to know that, and maybe some time I will find an answer to that.  Last summer I didn’t use black walnut hull, for the first time since 2002; I went with a preparation called HeartwormFree (HWF) (news flash – it doesn’t work) and abandoned Marina’s protocol.  Would Rowley have heartworm now if I’d stayed with Marina’s program?  I’d like to think I could go back to Marina’s program, but I know I won’t, because the risks are too great.  Unless I can verify the efficacy of black walnut hull extract, I’m not going to put my faith in it again.  (Marina also used heartworm nosodes, and I consider nosodes and homeopathy to be utter bunk, so she and I weren’t always on the same page.)

Once I left Dr. W and stopped doing things the way that had been so toxic to my first two dogs, I quit giving vaccinations after the initial shots, and I avoided rabies vaccinations whenever I could, and I switched all my dogs to a raw diet; but I did those things with a pretty solid foundation of proven cause and effect.  Titer tests showed me that my dogs had ample circulating antibodies to any given disease, even rabies; and the purpose of a vaccination is to raise the circulating antibodies, so I wasn’t assuming they had the protection conferred by a vaccination, I could verify it.  Raw diets had enough research behind them that I was very comfortable with what I fed (and still feed), and I never went to the extreme end of the raw-feeding spectrum, never went ‘prey model’ or even BARF.  I just gave/give my dogs unprocessed food, including grains, vegetables, dairy products, and meat and fish.  I never had the feeling that I was playing Russian roulette with their health, although the third time that my Sheltie, Sundance, tried to swallow half a turkey neck and only horked it up as I was putting him into the car to go to the emergency vet, I did stop giving HIM raw bones of any kind.

I guess my confidence about the vaccination and diet aspects of my dog care program carried over to the heartworm prevention part of that program.  That was a pretty serious mistake, and not one I will make again.  Rowley is on Heartgard; Alex, Dee and Beau are on Interceptor; and the Merle Girls are on Sentinel.  I’ll give the Sentinel and Interceptor at 6-week intervals and I’ll stop when the weather gets cold, but I’m not confident anymore that anything other than chemical preventive can kill heartworm microfilarae that might end up in my dogs’ bloodstream courtesy of a passing mosquito.  I don’t think this positive test was a fluke; I think it was an indicator that heartworm is here and not going away, and it’d be as stupid to ignore that as it would have been to let Sundance eat more turkey necks.
Seriously – WORMS WERE LIVING IN MY DOG’S HEART!  No, no, no, no and NO.

 

Next:  The step-by-step guide to eradicating those worms.