Today is “why volunteer,blog action day.” Organized by Agility Nerd Steve Schwarz, who was motivated to motivate all of us, by the discussions on the Clean Run List regarding the agility volunteer dilemma.

I put off writing today because I just got home from World Team practice which was held in Seattle at a beautiful donated facility, It’s a Dogs World, owned by Kathy Wendt. Team practice was staffed over three days by no less than 20 volunteers, how cool was that? I have been surrounded by volunteers, every one of whom gave up something to help the team. Kathy gave up making income for three days in her facility and the workers gave up competitions, and play time with their own dogs and family. I will just bet these folks volunteer at local trials too, it is in their giving nature.

Photo of some of our volunteers by another volunteer, Derede Arthur.

I am not always an active volunteer at every single AKC or USDAA trial I attend. I try to work at minimum a class every day, sometimes I do lots more than that and every once in a while I don’t work at all. (I get busy catching up with work on the computer or playing with my dogs:)

I volunteer when and where I am able. I chair the largest USDAA trial on the west coast, which until the Cynosport Games moved east, was the largest USDAA trial in the country outside of the Games. I am on our local agility club’s board, and have been on lots of club committees. I try to do my part where I can, and working for our club outside of trials by being on the Board and chairing a trial has always been very important to me.

I think we have some great volunteerism going on in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live and compete. We have a huge club of about 300! I just wish that more of them would actually participate by helping at trials. Don’t get me wrong, I love the membership dues they pay annually to be part of our club:) and if they don’t have the time to come and help, I am sad but understand.
The Bay Team, is mostly run by one Type-A (Karey Krauter) and one totally dedicated President (Kathy Wheelock), with a small core group of people, with another 20 or so being extremely active volunteers not just at our trials, but at every local trial I attend. I am sure this is pretty much like every other club in the country, a handful of dedicated folks do most of the work both behind the scenes as well as at the trials.

Our club is pretty generous. If you don’t run a dog and you work all day, you get a $50 gift cert which can be used at all the local trainers classes, (like ours here at power paws) or used for local show entries or at all the vendors at the trial. And the local clubs all accept the certs for entries at their trials too. Workers at almost all the local trials get free lunches and raffle tickets for each class worked and the raffle folks get some pretty cool stuff. The vendors all donate an item each day and our club spends $300.oo a day on purchased goodies as well. Each time you work a class you get raffle tickets and everyone wants them because of the great stuff our Raffle Czar Marty puts together.
Even with all this cool stuff, we still have a hard time staffing shows at times. In some ways it sort of feels wrong to pay workers, we want them to volunteer, not to stand in line to be paid, but I don’t think many of the workers would sign up to work without some kinds of perks. I think we long ago passed a point where people will work for nothing at our local trials.

I don’t have the answer and it isn’t from lack of conversation with club members and the board. At some of our upcoming trials we are now asking entrants to be assigned to one class a weekend or they need to “opt out” by signing a spot on the entry. Will we have an uprising, I dunno. I do wish we could go back to straight volunteerism like the “good old days”.

As a board member I spend countless hours working for our club for no pay, no free entries, de nada. Our board has consistently over the years voted NOT to take any benefit for our work, if we want to foster volunteerism, then we need to volunteer ourselves, so we do. I sometimes feel stretched to the limit helping with our club, and I am going to take the next term off starting in January, but I assume I will be back again when I catch my breath.

While we at The Bay Team (the best USDAA club in the whole country) really try to treat those who attend our trials as customers, and we throw a damn good trial, we will always still have room to improve, and motivating and rewarding volunteers is at the top of our to do list. If you want to read a whole lot of other blogs about volunteerism and of course many other cool things, go to Steve’s blog http://agilitynerd.com/blog.

I hope all of you reading this volunteer when you are able, and encourage your friends and students to do so as well.

Nancy
PS: Scoop is pretty good but the fungus is not gone. The BIG snurfling went away for a while, but the little snurfling has returned so I assume he needs to have another one of those horrid treatments. Poor Scoobie. We are playing at a little bit of agilty everyday but I think it will be a while before we compete again:(

pps: wordpress has been fighting me with formatting this blog for an hour, now I give up, it may look funky, and maybe I can fix it tomorrow.

Scoop and Ace and I were in Southern Oregon last weekend teaching at Lisa and Robert Michelon’s agility training center for three days. I parked my RV right next to the training yard and had a really great weekend hanging out with my dogs. Yeah I guess I worked for three days, but teaching friends and long time acquaintances in a beautiful environment does not really feel like work until you are done and tired to the bone. I got some nice photos afterwards, especially of Scoop and my new blue boots:) Thank you Dawn for the Blue Boots and Scoop photo, I love it!

The weather in Oregon in June is more likely to be 100 than it is to be cold and rainy, but we got lucky and hit the middle of the temperature range, a perfect 70 degrees most of the time, and since I am a weather wimp, it was totally absolutely perfect. Is there a place on the planet that has 70 degree weather all year round without humidity and still has sun much of the time? Do they need to have an agility instructor there? Exactly 7 minutes before the seminar was to end Sunday the sky opened and the rain came down in buckets. We all jumped in our cars and were out a there. Well since I am a driving wimp too I only made it three hours to a really nice RV park during daylight so the boys and I could go for a nice long walk along the river in Red Bluff before we hit the sack.

Scoop has ‘snurfled” less every day since his procedure so he got to help out by being a demo dog some of the time. He is so much better that I am totally optimistic that we are on the downside of this disease. His doctor is optimistic and thinks we must have a good combination of drugs for him to be doing so well. I am relieved and happy yet still anxious about the outcome.

Scoop is a really great demo dog. All my dogs have to work for a living, I teach agility and so do they. Some of my dogs have been or are better than others. My first border collie Scud was a great working dog until the demo ended and I started to talk, then he grabbed his toy and dumped it in the nearest handlers lap and of course unless I threatened their expulsion if they played with him, they would happily toss the toy and I would yell for him to come back and lie down and he would till the next moment my back was turned and then the toy/lap/toss/yell thing started all over again. Oh my!

Riot was the best demo dog I ever had and a great helper too. She never interfered with any handler or dog but she loved to watch. She would demo a drill, lie down with her toy, then when a handler went to the line with their dog she would sneak up behind and after the handler dropped the leash she would pick it up and watch the dog run and then deliver it to the finish line where the handler would have to ask Riot for the leash. She would always oblige then silently creep over behind the next dog to run and repeat the scenario. No dog ever gave her the evil eye, or cared that she was watching and taking their leash. She has dog instinct and manners and never took a dogs leash until they left the line. She was my all time perfect working assistant while I taught, and of course great entertainment for all.

Wicked was too silly to demo. She is the sweetest dog there ever was but unless you were actually running her in agility (which she would do with anyone) she could not focus on the job of demoing a little exercise. She was just too silly and would jump around playing with the toy and maybe do what I asked her to do, maybe not. Stage fright? I dunno. Panic was a darn good demo dog, he loved to work but would also chill on the sidelines while he waited for another turn. He was a bit too fast and frantic at times, but he tried as hard as any dog ever could when the reward was to get to do agility.

Ace is not a really happy demo dog. I cannot speak to anyone or talk at all while he is working. He can do anything in agility if he is thinks he is on a course, or he and I are doing a drill on our own, but he is suspicious when I talk to people after or during his working times. It is like he is saying “if we are working why are you looking at them and saying things I don’t understand? Am I doing something wrong, what are you saying? Why are you talking about something we did, while you are playing with me? This is too weird, I can’t work if you are talking to ghosts”.

Scoop worked at a foundation seminar when he was just a few months old. He coped with the audience, the distractions, and the job of doing one thing and being rewarded then sent to a crate to hang out til the next opportunity to work. Somewhere around 5 months old demoing in a class situation became pretty difficult, and not because of the difficulty of the foundation exercise, but that he was too excited after the drill to settle quietly. He would scream when watching other dogs work. When he was older self control started to kick in and he learned to wait quietly for a turn.

Scoop will lie at my feet for the most part, or in his open crate and is not at all naughty unless I am helping a handler perk up their dog with a restrained recall. Scoop will occasionally without invitation join me to “help”. That’s ok, I don’t mind the occasional naughtiness, I am not perfect and neither is he:)

I hope you have a dog that can be by your side while you teach, or accompany you to your workplace and hang out politely. If you have to go to work, always best to do so with a dog by your side.

Nancy

That is the sound Scoop makes while he is trying to forward and reverse sneeze this horrid fungus out of his nose. One week ago Scoop went under the gas for the third time in as many weeks, this time to flood his nasal cavity with anti-fungal poison. I was hoping that the gagging and sneezing would diminish after the treatment, but instead it has blossomed into a ragged sounding head cold.

Scoop is on two oral anti fungus medicines as well, and hopefully this three pronged aggressive approach to killing the fungus will do the trick. The fungus can take hold and start working deep into the bones in the nasal cavity, and it can takes months and possibly years to totally clear up. I have also heard there are some dogs that remain on medicine for life. I so hope that Scoop’s treatment works as planned and that we caught it early enough so that in a couple months this will be behind us.

He will get blood tests monthly to check for any ill effects from the meds, and he is being monitored by his internist who is luckily also my student Dr Helen Hamilton! When she came to class last night she looked him over and checked lymph nodes for swelling and nose for any discoloration or discharge. He obliged her with some reverse sneezes, but that was about it. I am happy to report she watched him jump last night and said I could train a bit since his head does not seem to be in any great discomfort. I thought he jumped really well, yeah!!

During the time all this was coming up he was also jumping pretty funky, I thought I had two things going on, not just this one. Only time will tell but I believe his head was so uncomfortably that he really could not jump well. Landing big 26 inch jumps can’t be pleasant when your head is being eaten by a fungus!

I have no photos or videos of Scoop to share, but Ace and Scoop and I spent last weekend at a 4 day AKC trial and Ace had an almost perfect weekend going 7 for 8 in regular classes,  and also getting 3 of the Excellent fast legs. I like those triple Q things. If it wasn’t for pulling the panel jump on standard round #8 he would have been perfect. I think I jinxed myself because I texted a friend before I ran that I was on my way to 8/8:) I also skipped the practice jump, which in hindsight I might have popped him over a couple times to remind him how high to jump. How do they forget those things anyway?? Uh, they probably don’t and if I hadn’t excelerated out of decel while he was on top of the panel he probably would have kept it up.

Here are Ace’s standard and jumpers runs, thanks Silvina and Agility in Motion for the excellent video footage. Ace looks pretty great to me, this is about the last time he will jump baby 20 inch jumps, we will go to the European Open in July in Austria and of course run in the 26 inch class where Ace earned a bronze medal in 2009, our last time competing at the EO. The EO is one of the most competitive International trials in the world. Just alone in the 26 inch class in 2009 there were more than 300 dogs from almost every European Country, and a total honor to win a medal with that kind of competition. It is an exciting and competitive event and I can’t wait to get there!

I hope your juvenile is healthy and that your trained adult is helping keep you sane and patient for the times that your pup does not oblige!

NJG