MACH Photo 51’s Friendship Seven Firefly MX MXS MXJ MJB XF ACT2
I said I would put a CH in front of his name one way or another, and damn it, we did it. It has been, without question, the most challenging thing I have ever done.
The ONLY reason any of it was even remotely possible is because Adam has supported me in all of it, every step of the way.
Fly is, was, and will forever be my only Novice A “home bred” solely owned (with Adam) little creation that carries my own kennel name. I knew Fly had significant potential to be my shot at trying Agility very early. He turned his whole world into an agility course from the age of about 4 weeks and he had amazing mastery of his body. When we eventually attempted to start agility foundations, I had no idea what I was doing, our trainer was pretty clearly not very experienced with the breed, and Fly’s brain was absolutely not ready for any of it. It was an abject failure.
A couple years later I mentioned I very much wanted to do Agility with Fly but didn’t really know where to start and Andrea West (a fellow Samoyed owner) told me to call her the next day at work and she would get us signed up for classes. I didn’t know it at the time, but that phone call would completely change our lives, and I’m so grateful to Andrea for setting us on the path.
Landing in Terri Bartz’s Agility 1 class easily ranks among the most fortunate things to have ever happened in my life. I had been training dogs for almost 20 years at that point, but this was a completely different game and her teaching style was a perfect match for Fly and me. There is absolutely no way to express how profoundly grateful I am for Terri as a teacher and a friend.
For being a Novice A agility dog, I think Fly’s early agility career was pretty great. His ability to work at a distance is wonderful, he is more than willing to make up for my shortcomings in speed and experience, and he wants so badly to be right that he gives me everything he has. Jumpers courses have always been a challenge for us, but eventually we made it out of Open Jumpers with some truly gorgeous runs. Then, Covid put a screeching halt to everything. We were exceptionally fortunate to be able to do individual floor rentals as things started to open up and in many ways getting to start doing even limited amounts of agility made the whole thing so much more bearable. Because I suffer from asthma and have had some breathing issues in the past, we waited quite a while to start trialing again. When we did start back up, I actually enjoyed some of the aspects of “Covid days” trialing because there was less overstimulation for Fly. Though, if I never have to run agility in a mask again, I’ll be perfectly ok with that.
Fly has always been “different”. Adam perfectly describes the way he gets over stimulated as being much like a person who is running late for a really important meeting and is frantically looking for their missing car keys. His hyper readiness for overarousal made agility a great outlet in many ways because the course could help him run off all those big emotions. But, this also makes doing agility a big challenge for us when there is a lot of added stimulation. I resisted putting Fly on prescription medication for his anxiety and over arousal because we did a pretty good job of managing it at familiar places and I was skeptical it would really help him.
In October of 2022, Mendel had to be neutered, Buzz started maturing, and Fly’s world turned upside down. He came completely unglued, began marking in the house, licked Mendel’s ears obsessively, would attempt to climb me when the washing machine was in the spin cycle, and just generally was not in a good place. This huge fluctuation in emotional state was a real trick to navigate across the board, including in agility. We were finding a new normal every time I turned around, it felt. Time and some supplements helped, but it was rough.
We managed to keep it together at Oshkosh trials with the blank walls and limited stimulation out on the course and even got to the point of being ranked high enough to secure a spot at the AKC invitationals two years in a row, which was a goal of mine even though I would never ask him to run in an environment that would be so unfair to him. We were making slow progress on our QQs and points, sometimes going 6 months without one and sometimes managing 2 in a weekend, depending on where we were and how he felt.
In September of 2023 things seemed off, but I got really worried when Fly opted out of taking a jump in a trial. We made an appointment to get him checked out right away. I was 90% sure he had pulled something in his back. He and Buzz run so recklessly that I had to stop letting them play together for a while and I guessed that was likely how he got hurt. While at our appointment I realized how much Fly’s anxiety had progressed in certain situations. He was terrified of the people wanting to touch him and take him away from me for an x-ray and I couldn’t find a way to help him out of his panic in the exam room. We discussed anxiety medication and decided to start him on Trazodone. With a full work up to investigate the injury, all they found was a slightly enlarged prostate and several very tiny stones in his bladder. We promptly decided Fly had to be neutered to get the swelling down in his prostate and do everything in our power to make sure those tiny bladder stones didn’t cause trouble. We scheduled the surgery for a month later.
After a couple weeks to rest whatever muscles he had pulled, we started back up with agility and his body seemed to be healed, but now that he was on the trazodone, we again had to adjust to a new normal. While using the trazodone I really came to understand how much Fly’s progressively worsening start line stays had been a result of building anxiety over being abandoned while strange people and dogs lurked behind him. He had experienced a couple of situations where dogs behind him bumped the ring gates, etc, and I could tell that progressively worried him more as his general anxiety also worsened. With the meds, he was much more able to wait, but he was also not the same dog on the course. New normal.
I knew his coat would change after being neutered, but I wasn’t really prepared for how much other things would change as well. As the testosterone levels in his body gradually came down, it got to the point that nearly every time we ran we were chasing a new version of “normal”. When they describe testosterone as the “let’s go” hormone, they’re really not kidding. I started noticing it was getting more difficult to maintain Fly’s conditioning so as long as they promised to be responsible, I started letting him run with Buzz again, which helped a lot.
Fly started getting Trazodone 3 times a day and I was starting to notice that he had bad crashes between doses, or worse if he missed a dose. When he was on the meds, he was ok, but as he got closer to time for his next dose he became positively manic – his whole body would tense and he’d try to climb up me sometimes without really even understanding what he was so afraid of. We decided to try Prozac just to see if it would help keep things more steady. By day two with the Prozac I noticed tremors in his back legs, he couldn’t pee well, and he didn’t trust his body enough to jump up onto the grooming table. Adam and I immediately decided that was enough - we weaned him off everything. New normal.
The meds had helped Fly focus enough to get our required 20 QQs but some of the Q’s were literally for 0 points. Now, drug free, we battled his attention challenges and waning hormones without any help. We lost, a lot. We struggled at Packerland, we struggled in Fond Du Lac, we struggled at Think Pawsitive…. we struggled for over 4 months to get those last 34 points. We won some, too. In August at Packerland we didn’t have to stop for a re-assuring hug on the way into the building a single time, he had multiple runs where he stayed totally engaged with me the whole time even with SO much to distract him, he didn’t hang around for extra “lookout” time on the A frame, and we finished the weekend with nice fast weaves.
After 6ish years running together and through all of our experiences, I have learned the lessons. I’ve run myself through all the various stages of over analysis, running cautiously, feeling guilty about wasting money, questioning my motives, feeling frustrated if a bar fell, etc. I feel like I have finally reached the ultimate place of “enlightenment” that has allowed me to genuinely not care if we Q or not, as long as Fly had fun. I have come to know exactly who Fly and I are as a team and I could not love him more. I know he’s amazing, I know he has exceptional skills, and I know that sometimes he just can’t show them, and that’s ok. From this day forward, we run for the fun of it. No more goals, no more counting. Just “Hey Fly, check it out, you’re gonna LOVE this one!”
