This is Maebe. She is Fast. She is a mutt. She loves to play agility. Within weeks of the beginning of our agility career, I realized that if didn't want to be barked at or bit on the knee, I had to become a better handler.
I didn’t train Maebe to be fast. Or to love agility. She just does. I got her mainly for her temperament. I didn’t have any aspirations beyond just having fun with her on the agility courses, but given her potential, I could not take her speed or enthusiasm for granted. I feel like she is a real gift and that I have a real responsibility to help her achieve her potential.
There are a number of organizations that host Agility trials. One of these organizations, until recently, barred mutts from competition. Many of our friends who compete in agility compete in this organization, which has a certain amount of prestige attached to it. Some of these friends encouraged us to take advantage of sort of a loophole that would allow us to attempt to “register” her as a purebred, even though we knew she was not. The rationale was that other people do it and why shouldn’t she be able to compete just because she is a mutt. While these friends were well intentioned, my wife and I both felt uncomfortable about doing this for three basic reasons: 1. It involved lying. 2. It was unfair for a dog that wasn’t really a purebred to potentially knock an actual purebred off of a ranking. 3. Why try to hide that Maebe is a mutt? I am not ashamed of her breeding. In the end, just because we wanted to play in this other venue, we weren’t going to reach out for something we had no right to. Our patience was rewarded several months later when the rules were changed that allow mixed breeds to complete. Now we are registered legitimately. There is a separate issue that there is still resistance to the very concept that mixed breeds are allowed, and judgment over her specific breeding, but that is a whole other story.
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