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This year’s Upper Hutt NZDAC was the 26th national agility event I have attended since my very first NDOA in Auckland in 1997. My NZDAC prep this year was almost farcical in the number of last-minute things that went wrong, culminating in me hitchhiking up to Christchurch to buy a new vehicle three days before I left for the North Island, so it was a relief to finally make it to Upper Hutt on Thursday afternoon.

Gold Stars

For the most part I really enjoyed myself in Upper Hutt despite the weather, thanks to:

• The committee. Running an NZDAC requires a lot of planning and effort. This year it required a bit more – the courage to be the first committee to ever partially cancel an NZDAC due to weather. I think the committee did a very good of negotiating the situation and I agree with about 80% of the decisions they made (you can’t please everyone eh). I am on the committee for Cromwell 2025 and can only hope things go more smoothly for us!

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.

This post is one of a three-part series on how our sport is administered in New Zealand. I hope it will be useful for newer agility folk, especially those who are curious about how to get involved in the running of their club.

Incorporated Societies

Almost all dog clubs in NZ are incorporated societies. An incorporated society is a separate legal structure – a bit like a company – which keeps the financial affairs of the club separate from those of its members. The key feature of incorporated societies is that they must not be run for the profit of their members, e.g. they can’t pay dividends to their members.

A club becomes an incorporated society by applying to the Incorporated Societies Register, part of the Companies Office. The club needs to submit an annual return to the register with details about its officers, its financial returns, and any changes made to its constitution. Incorporated societies can also become registered charities on the Charitable Trusts Register (also managed by the Companies Office) but most dog clubs don’t, because this creates more paperwork for little additional benefit.

DogsNZ are currently consulting with members about modernising their government structure. In a previous post I described how things work currently – now I’ll share my own thoughts about what’s going well and what could be better.

Representation

Currently 84% of votes at ACOD belong to one code. The only change to the voting structure in recent decades has been the separation of agility from the Dog Training Committee, resulting in 4 extra votes at the table for non-breed show people, but we are still very under-represented.

Over those decades, pedigree dog registration and participation in breed showing has been declining. I’m not a member of a breed club but I’ve heard a few stories lately about how much these clubs struggle to find volunteers to organise their shows.

In the meantime, other codes have been growing in popularity. Two new codes have emerged – rally-o and scentwork – and soon we will have hoopers trials too. An increasing number of people are involved in multiple disciplines, which makes it difficult to categorise members into distinct blocs for voting purposes.

This post is one of a two-part series on how our sport is administered in New Zealand. DogsNZ are currently conducting consultation on changes to their structure, but I thought an explainer on how things currently work would be helpful for newer agility folk who want to understand what’s going on.

Dogs New Zealand (DNZ/NZKC)

Dogs New Zealand is the new name for what used to be called the New Zealand Kennel Club. It is basically a federation of clubs that are involved in dog showing and dog sports.

All clubs that run agility shows (or any other shows) must belong to Dogs NZ, but not all clubs are considered equal. There are “affiliated” clubs, which run championship all-breeds conformation shows. Then there are “associated” clubs, which are all the rest – the ones that run conformation shows which are limited to particular breeds, and the ones that run shows in any of the other codes under the DogsNZ umbrella – agility, obedience, rally-o, scentwork, tracking/working trials etc.

All people who compete in championship agility events (or in championship shows for most other DogsNZ codes) must be individual DogsNZ members. They must also be members of a DogsNZ member club, and that is how they get representation in DogsNZ decisions – individuals don’t have a lot of power to get things done within the DogsNZ structure.

DogsNZ has a small paid workforce of about 8 people who look after the admin and accounting of the organisation. These are the people who send you the bill for your membership each year, collate and publish the Dog World, do most of the show secretary work for the National Dog Show, and much more besides. Some of them have been with DogsNZ for quite a few years and I’ve usually found them very helpful.

Annual Conference of Delegates (ACOD)

The Annual Conference of Delegates is the DogsNZ equivalent of an AGM – the place where the members get together to discuss the direction of the club, elect a new batch of officials, and vote on any substantial changes that have been proposed. It happens in Wellington each winter.

If you ask Google for tutorials about tugging and toy play for agility, you’ll get thousands of hits, and most of them will be quite relevant.

If you ask Google for tutorials about training agility with food, you’ll get … not a lot that’s relevant. A mix of dog food ads, and blog posts telling you that it’s really important to get your agility dog tugging and yes you can do it even if your dog is only interested in food.

Tug toys are great. I view them as the gold standard choice of reward for many agility training exercises. Virtually all of the top agility competitors, both in NZ and around the world, use tug toys for a lot of their training. This is why the content you’ll find online is so heavily skewed towards “So you want to do agility but your dog doesn’t like tugging? Here’s how you can invest hours of your life into getting him tugging!”.

But what if you don’t want to do that? What if you have limited time to train and want to make progress on “real agility” skills rather than tugging? What if you want to try agility training or competition, but you don’t have elite ambitions for your dog and you’d rather just use food? What if it’s your first agility dog and you don’t have the skills to teach your dog to enjoy tugging with only the guidance of a 15-minute video on YouTube?