Go onto any dog sport Facebook groups, forums and blogs and you will notice a clique within:
The professionally angry
In the absence of recent peer reviewed scientific backup, they will declare some activities beyond the pale.
I am neither a scientist, vet, canine physio and even worse I am technically very much a newbie to the dog world. I am in pretty much the bottom rung of classes of every discipline, and I only started seriously competing in agility in July this year.
Take what you want from this post, take it with a grain of rice if you will. It is probably a load of rubbish as I don’t have any professional canine veterinary qualifications in canine orthopaedics or similar.
However, actually, I believe in some ways this gives me an advantage. A fresh eye on things that others probably don’t see.
I also believe this attitude scares newcomers off from trying new sports. Then people complain they don’t have any new faces.
Then they don’t make sense because the things that are rage on about, some are guilty of themselves and don’t even see it. This isn’t just spectators, but active competitors or higher.
I would rather someone gently said to me “Maybe you could do ‘X’ this way as ‘X’ didn’t work well”. I think people would would do so much better doing this to competitors rather than raging about them in active forums where everyone knows who you are talking about, causing them to never want to continue the sport, or sharing and commenting on videos they don’t approve of.
I never comment on videos I disagree with now. Even really shocking ones. If I think there are serious concerns for someone or someone pet’s welfare the last thing I want to do is comment, have this on my feed, and give them exposure. People are much better acting on their concerns via more appropriate channels. Like private messaging the person in a polite and rational way, reporting to Facebook if there is a serious threat to human or animal life, or signing government or appropriate authorities petitions etc…
This is my two pence:
I would personally feel it is more of a concern that overweight, have injuries or are drugged, dogs that have 0 enjoyment of their activity, owners that use abusive devices in the name of training and dogs that present exaggerated features that cause health problems within their breed are allowed to compete. Some of these people are the same people that complain people put their egos before their dogs welfare when they are doing it themselves. Compared with older puppies younger than most people would like who are extremely fit, have exceptional body awareness, trained completely force free, never had injuries compete and do more controversial stuff, non repetitively, are obviously enjoying what they are doing personally I see less of a concern.
This goes for all sports whether it is disc, agility, freestyle, rally etc.
On one hand yes we do have some very silly people who are putting their dogs in obvious danger because they think it looks cool. Some do it because they can and haven’t thought through potential consequences.
On the other hand we have dogs every day that ride in cars. That herd cattle and sheep larger than them. That pull heavy loads in extreme weather conditions. That climb obstacles more than 15 times their size that they could easily fall off. That chase after violent criminals that carry edged weapons or guns and as we know are not afraid to use them. That sniff out IEDs that have the potential to blow fully grown humans apart. That twist and turn and catch balls with no holes in repetitively. That assist their owners that may be so disabled that they may not be able to intervene if they were attacked by another dog. That jump great heights into deep and often cold water from moving helicopters to pull people to safety. Dogs that sniff out vulnerable people in the rubble of natural disasters or terrorist atrocities. That climb walls and have to retrieve very small objects, that could be choked on. You get the idea.
I for one make sure that Betsy has more than enough exercise, a good diet, practice training various stretching/balancing/strength/proprioceptive exercises and I am consistently praised at health checks that she has exceptional body conditioning and weight. She has never been injured. I even took her to the vets to have her growth plates looked at before we started serious agility training and disc work.
I personally believe in calculated risk taking. I have done some moves some may perceive as dangerous for their dog at two large events in front of a world class vet specialising in orthopaedics in dogs. The first time we performed in London we scored low by him as Betsy fell off my shoulders, but landed butter side up with a fairly clean landing. This was the first time it ever happened. He said the reason for this was because her balance could be better, which I thought was entirely fair. 3 months later after much more practise launching from different surfaces in the Finals of the competition we do the same move, but this time we receive only a point away from full marks from the same judge.
I would like to think if we were being incredibly stupid by even thinking about the move he would of told us. After we performed, another young and very talented team competed doing also some ‘talked about’ moves. He announced it was the best performance he had ever seen….
Basically what I am trying to say is that I’m not saying go out and take your 8 week old pup over full sized obstacles, that would be a worry. And a serious one. But if there is someone doing a “banned move” safely, (key word here is SAFELY!) I think its less of a concern than say a working dog dying because it could of been issued with protective equipment that would of prevented it.
On the other hand if no thought to decreasing the risk and the risk of impact injury is likely, that angers me.
thehoundwrangler 