This weekend

So another full weekend of agility. First the good....Smudge was a fab boy as usual and got four 1st places over the course of the weekend. Little Maisie was also running well and managed to get a 2nd! I was so pleased for her. The (not so) old girl still has it at times!

Warning - moaning post is coming so please stop reading right now if you want to avoid it!

And now the bad.........firstly in my opinion (and I may have been wrong so please don't shoot me down in flames those who ran them well) there were a few questionable tyre positions on a couple of the courses. One this morning in particular. The tyre had been placed directly after a sharp turn, and most of the big dogs were finding it almost impossible to straighten up to take it safely. Scared the life out of me watching that class! I was contemplating how to run it with Smudge, and was considering stopping at that point, but I didn't even get that far anyway! The reason why I will move on to in a minute. Tyres scare me at the best of times, but when they are in certain positions it makes it even worse!

Secondly, why do people bother to have dogs when they are so flipping impatient and quite frankly horrible to them!? Surely no one enjoys screaming, shouting, and generally moaning at them all the time? It really upsets me to see it and I find it very difficult to hold my tongue! On more than one occasion this weekend I witnessed less than desirable behaviour from handlers both in and out of the ring. I saw people visibly blaming their dogs for faults when they left the ring (ummm have they ever considered that perhaps it was their training? Heavens no, how dare I suggest that? They are obviously perfect and the dogs are clearly stupid ;-) Not!!) I also saw one person 'correcting' their dog for pulling, with a nice yank of the lead that almost had the poor dog off all four paws. How pleasant. And this was all just the tip of the iceberg really. For some reason this weekend seemed to be particularly bad for it, and as the show was fairly small it was all the more visible so noticing it was almost unavoidable. I'm not stupid, I know there are many people that train like this, but so many incidents in two days made it very sad to see :-(

And lastly, the reason I did not make it to the tyre! I had already left the ring by that point. I was not allowed to replace my dog on a contact, even if I left the ring directly afterwards. So I left anyway and decided not to run my other agility run that day. I had absolutely no problem with this, it is complete judges discretion which I fully respect and appreciate. What upset me was that I was the only one not allowed to!!!! I asked politely (as I always do) if I could replace my dog and leave the ring and was told in no uncertain terms no. Up to that point I had run as normal and had not done any other obstacle more than once. But people that ran after me were allowed to do exactly that and did the obstacle twice with their dogs!?! The reason I was given was that it would have taken too much time. Ok so why were others allowed to do it then? And why were dogs who struggled to jump full height allowed to run again at a lower height, taking extra time? And why were dogs allowed to run NFC with a toy? And dogs running out of order? None of that was in the show rules so why do the rules apply so stringently to me, but not to everyone else? And not replacing your dog on a contact isn't even technically a 'rule' per se. The one thing that I can't stand is unfairness, and today it really seemed that I was being treated differently. I was also told 'well this judge is a championship judge' - I don't care who they are, judging should be consistent throughout a class regardless shouldn't it? And it is NOT a championship class, it is a flamin local show! Fine if they want to apply those rules so strictly, but do it to everyone!! I have never been so upset or mad. Wish I hadn't even bothered to ask now and had just done it, but I'm too polite! Incidentally I have no problem with the people who did get to do different things, I think that was great, just couldn't understand why I couldn't do something so tiny!

Eventually I came to the conclusion that some people just let power go to their head. Very sad, but there it is. Just because someone judges to a certain standard it does not make them better than anyone else and rather than being angry, I just felt quite sorry for them really. I already had my reservations about this person after they gave some less than positive advice to Paul once, and this just confirmed my opinion. What a shame they felt the need to be like that. I'm sure they have a different version of events, but I couldn't see it any other way.

So all in all, not an enjoyable weekend for me. And no video because I was too mad!

P.S Have just read my post back - hmmm think everyone might just sense I was upset :-) I have vented.......so now, onwards and upwards.