Ten years and three weeks ago I drove 40km down a rather rugged gravel road to a high country station on the side of Mt Hutt. I’d lost Spring in an accident a couple of months earlier, and I was going to look at a failed working sheepdog to see if she might be suitable for me to train in agility.
How It Began
The dog in question was built well for agility, but she seemed utterly unenthused by the treats I offered her, and wasn’t that interested in playing chasy games with me either. I couldn’t get any sort of engagement out of her and I was a bit reluctant to take her home. The farmer pissed that I was wasting his time, and because I suck at saying no the dog came home with me. I figured she seemed like a nice calm type so it wouldn’t be hard to find a pet home for her if she didn’t want to become an agility dog.
When I stopped in Twizel to let the dog out for a pee, she jumped up on me and semi-politely requested that I stroke her head.
The farmer told me that her name was Trix. I didn’t like that name – I had found all the consonants in “Spring” difficult to say in a hurry – so I decided to chop some of them off and call her “Riki” or “Rikki”. I can’t remember which spelling I originally used, but I do know I changed it every few weeks because it seemed like everybody wanted to spell it the wrong way. The dog in question reckoned she’d never heard of any “Trix” or “Riki” anyway, and responded exclusively to “Oi C’mere”.
I assumed most people had heard of Ricki Lake and would understand that Rik could be a girls’ name. I was very wrong. I also did not know how angry some people get when they misgender your dog (who really doesn’t care as long as she’s the centre of attention) because you gave her a stupid name.
Two weeks later I packed her up and took her to the Gore NZDAC. I was obviously not competing with her, but I was organising the flygility and spent most of the weekend scribing. Rik had seen one unfamiliar dog between leaving the farm and going to NZDAC, and had been so terrified by this strange apparition (a pug) that she ran away and jumped onto the roof of my car. Taking her to NZDAC was clearly a mistake – one of many I made during those first weeks – and she adamantly refused to come out of the car for the first two days, even to piddle.
By this stage Rik was starting to learn that her actions could make treats happen – first touching my hand with her nose, and then stepping over a little triangle of corflute that had blown into my yard the day after the recent election. It was slow, tedious going. She was hesitant at first, dubious that it could really be that easy. Then suddenly she was fully engaged in her training and super keen to learn more silly tricks she could do for treats.
By Guy Fawkes’ Night I was working on her retrieve. I’d had her four weeks, and the only things she’d picked up voluntarily were an entire pack of bacon off the kitchen bench, and a dead rabbit. I saw a quite realistic looking stuffed rabbit at the vet clinic so I chose that to be her first toy. She picked it up for the very first time, I clicked, and then at that precise moment my neighbour set off some fireworks. Rik didn’t bat an eyelid and eagerly came forward to take her treat. A few reps later, she picked up the toy a bit more firmly, it squeaked for the first time, and she spat it out and ran away to hide behind the toilet.
She spent a lot of time hiding behind her toilet during those early weeks.
We made our agility debut at the Southland show in January, three months after I got her. We attempted a little horseshoe of five obstacles from the start to the finish jump in Jumpers C. Rik had never seen a wing jump before so she got two refusals while she figured out what that was, but she enjoyed herself. Yes kiddies, once upon a time we didn’t have no fancy-dancy wing jumps – or we did, but they were much less commonly used than one-piece metal jumps.
The Agility Years
Rik only got one clear round in the first year that I had her. She liked running round over jumps and she got the hang of following my handling pretty quickly but there was one fly in our ointment – tunnels.
Rik did not like going through tunnels. I suspect she didn’t like not knowing exactly where I would be when she came out. She would rocket away from me down a line of jumps, then turn around and come running back to me once she found herself face-to-face with a tunnel. She liked me to run right up to the tunnel with her, and then half the time she’d try to bite my hand instead of actually Going In The Bloody Tunnel.
It seemed like every single Jumpers C and Starters course had tunnels on corners, in places where it was convenient to front cross to handle the next sequence – unless you were running Miss Sticky Riki. Once I eventually learned to keep my hands out of chomping distance near tunnels, she would occasionally deign to go into one and we started picking up a few ribbons.
Rik thoroughly enjoyed her first NZDAC in 2015, and almost came home with a clear round in one of the Starters classes. She got 3rd placings in Starters at the 2016 and 2017 NZDACs, making the finals in 2017. At the 2018 NZDAC she got 2nd in Jumpers B, and put on an epic display of her worst commitment phobia in the finals. At the 2019 NZDAC she came home with a ribbon in Intermediate against all the big kids, and even more excitingly, I knew we could have been a second faster if she hadn’t turned the wrong way.
I have a video of Rik and I running Jumpers B at an indoor show in Christchurch, possibly not long after we’d moved up to B. It was a particularly difficult course and there were not a lot of clear rounds. Rik and I did a pretty nice job of it and had the fastest time on the board – what a shame the last rail came down. I assumed it was my fault for slowing down before she jumped it. I was kicking myself until I saw the video, which clearly showed Madam Rik turning towards me over the jump and then taking a chomp at my hand after she’d landed.
In March 2019 we had an incredible day at the North Otago show. Our first class was AD, which we went clear in – twice, after the timers failed. Then we won Novice. Then we had a really amazing run in Intermediate and came 2nd. Our final class of the day was Jumpers B and I was feeling pretty smug for the first three obstacles, until we came to the first tunnel and Rik told me in no uncertain terms that I could shove the stupid tunnel up my bum. She made up for that by winning Intermediate the next day to move up to Senior.
The Nosework Years
We were just starting to get the hang of Senior and Jumpers A when the first lockdown hit. We spent a lot of time out of the ring that year thanks to the lockdowns (and Rik getting a sore back from me overdoing the wrap commitment training during lockdowns, whoops) and we never really got our #$*& together in agility after that.
I retired her in March 2022 at the age of 10. She’d had a very enthusiastic run in Jumpers A that morning. She’d been really feeling her oats and driving all the lines, and there was no sign of her usual commitment phobia – she even charged into the wrong end of two tunnels! That afternoon when I stepped to the start line for her last run of the day, she was a different dog – a dog who was happy to be out of the car enjoying attention from her owner, but who didn’t really mind if she actually ran the agility course or not. I figured she didn’t have the stamina to manage a full weekend any more, and I didn’t want to drive 2 hours each way just to run her in one class, so we called it a day after my club’s show two weeks later.
We did our first nosework trial the following month. We’d been training for about 8 months and I thought we were pretty hot stuff. We passed our first search, but it was all very much downhill from there. I went home with a long list of things to work on.
We passed 10 out of 10 searches at our second trial in December 2022. We progressed out of all the Novice classes without failing any more searches, and had about a 75% success rate in Advanced. I learned to observe my dog more closely, and got used to the idea of letting her take the lead in what we were going to do in the search – very different to the other dog sports I’ve done.
Rik didn’t need to learn much. She was already a ninja at sourcing odours. I saw her in action at the park one day, hot on the trail of her third placenta of the walk (is Waimate the only council that grazes sheep in off-lead exercise areas?), and when she refused to come I had to march over and take her by the collar and extract her prize from her mouth. When I got back to the car I discovered the dog water container was empty. I did my best to clean myself up with hand sanitiser – and then discovered a big blob of placenta on my jeans when I was walking round the supermarket on the way home.
We did our last nosework show at my club’s trial in 2024 and achieved my goal of moving up to Excellent in all four types of search. She did the best search she’d ever done in Excellent Interior that day, switched on and focused the entire time, without feeling the need to tell me all about what a dumb human I was for asking her to sniff things that clearly had no odour.
Retirement
The day after that trial, I hopped on a plane and went to visit my new employer in Perth for two weeks. I expected that I would miss Able while I was gone. To be honest I thought I might enjoy a break from Rik, her constant demands for pats, her squeaky bark as she play-chomped Able’s face every morning when I first got up, her yelling during phone calls and video meetings if I wasn’t also paying attention to her, her getting into anything vaguely edible that was left within her reach…
I missed her so much. I missed her warm presence snuggled up next to me in bed, or her quiet snoring from the other side of the bedroom. I missed rubbing her ears while I sat on the loo. I missed her ridiculous prancing enthusiasm any time she got to be in the spotlight for a moment, whether for a nosework search or a few minutes chasing a ball around or just having her nails trimmed. I went to lots of brand new places, and there was no delighted face next to me, busily checking out all the new smells.
I put Rik into boarding kennels while I went away to NZDAC (she doesn’t like other dogs and can’t hold her pee for more than 3 hours so I figured she would be happier not coming), but she never got to come home. She became unwell while I was on the ferry returning from NZDAC, and because of some existing health conditions she deteriorated very rapidly and was gone before I even made it to Kaikoura. I’m sad I wasn’t there for her at the end, and the house is very quiet without her.