My love of dogs began at a young age. At just five years old I started asking my parents for a dog, then kept asking for the next eight years. During those years I was determined to learn all I could about dog behavior, evolution, and training. Many an hour was spent watching animal planet programming and reading every book about dogs that I could find. On my thirteenth birthday, my parents made my childhood dream come true and surprised me with an adorable Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, whom I named Scooter. I was determined that my new puppy would be the best behaved dog the world had ever seen, and began teaching her obedience commands from the first day she joined my family. From then on I was "hooked" on dog shows and went to as many rally obedience trials as my parents were willing to drive me to. In less than two years, Scooter earned the AKC's highest rally obedience title, Rally Advanced Excellent, became a APDT Rally Master Extraordinaire, qualified and placed at the All Star Dog Rally Obedience tournament, and was even nationally ranked in both AKC and APDT rally obedience.
During the time that I was trialing with Scooter in rally obedience, one of my friends suggested that I might like to try taking agility classes with her. Consequently, I went to Krusin Kanines' open house and got to watch some amazing dogs zooming over jumps, through tunnels, and weave between weave poles. Never looking back, agility became my new passion. Scooter and I quickly progressed through the club's agility classes and became ready to begin trialing. Though Scooter was very good about taking direction, she was often not fast enough to finish runs under standard course time and we didn't qualify very often. After fighting our way through the early levels, I took time off from trialing and focused on learning how to motivate Scooter to run faster and feel less stressed at trials. Since our break, she went on to earn her Agility Excellent and Agility Excellent Jumpers titles and is currently working on her Perferred Agility Champion (PACh) title in AKC and CPE's Agility Trial Champion title (C-ATCH).
While I worked through Scooter's confidence issues, I decided I wanted a dog that would require less effort to motivate. Though a Shetland Sheepdog or Border Collie might have been a more conventional choice for a "fast" dog, I felt like I wasn't ready to handle so much speed or drive. I chose an English Cocker Spaniel, Trixie, for my next agility dog. To say Trixie was a challenging puppy to train and live with would be an understatement. From the beginning she was demanding, and really didn't want to have anything to do with agility training, or any kind of training. Because of this, I decided I would just let her be a "regular dog" for a while. After developing a strong bond together over several months, I found that Trixie was more than happy to do absolutely everything I asked of her and more. If she has taught me anything, it's how important loving and having a strong bond is in both agility training and life.
After searching for someone who could help us improve, I met Kathleen Oswald (member of the 2012 and 2013 AKC European Open Team) who suggest I train with her and her mother, Diane Goodspeed (member of the 2010 AKC World Championship team, and 2012 and 2013 member of the AKC European Open Team). In a short period of time, Trixie and I finally began to come together as a team who trusted one another to be in the right place at the right time and our times on the agility course have improved dramatically. Currently Trixie has attended five national events, is qualified for four more, including the 2013 AKC Agility Invitational as the #4 English Cocker Spaniel.
Currently, I am in my freshman year at Cornell University and plan to major in physics and minor in business and nutrition.
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