Kaboom the border collie wins the 24" class at the 2022 WKC Masters

September 15, 2022 12:47 AM

Kaboom, with 10 years experience of being a very good boy, goes fast as heck and wins the 24" class at the 2022 WKC Masters Agility Championship. (SLYT)
posted by Harald74 (32 comments total)

Oh cool, I've been getting into the broadcasts of these over pandemic and they are highly entertaining! Go Kaboom!
posted by rhizome at 2:05 AM on September 15, 2022

GET OUT OF MY WAY WEAVE POLES!
posted by Silvery Fish at 2:24 AM on September 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

Awesome. But my vote will always go to Winky.
posted by kyrademon at 3:10 AM on September 15, 2022 [15 favorites]

Collies > all other dogs.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:59 AM on September 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

“Partner” lol. More like roadie.
posted by waving at 4:45 AM on September 15, 2022

Astonishing. Great video. The woman running with the dog is pretty great, too. Such a bond.

As a guy who has been attacked by three different dogs in the last few years, may I ask all dog owners to kindly train their animals at least a little bit? Thanks!
posted by SoberHighland at 4:52 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Good dog go zoom!

I have a new to me rescue dog, and the training is hard. We are still in the "learns commands quickly and executes them perfectly in the kitchen for cheese, but outside is interesting and distracting and OMG SQUIRREL!" phase, and will be for some time. But he loves getting things right and getting praise.

Agreed that all dogs should get basic training, for everyone's sake including their own, but I doubt I'm going to try agility with him, even once we get the basics under the belt. If for no other reason than that currently I can corral him with a baby gate that is barely taller than he is on all fours, and that he could easily vault if he tried. Not going to explain the concept of "hurdles" to him any time soon.
posted by the primroses were over at 5:37 AM on September 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

I love watching border collies do agility. They're like furry bullets! But my favorite agility dog is Rudy the Bulldog: canine cannonball.
posted by pangolin party at 5:53 AM on September 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

As someone with a dog named Shakedown, it's not often I'm jealous of someone's dog-naming ability, but "Kaboom" is pretty great!
posted by dobbs at 6:02 AM on September 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Oh I love Rudy!

Got to laugh at myself. Rudy's trainer obviously has unimaginable levels more skill and experience than me, but I still flinched at the way she keeps repeating her commands. When I was doing agility we were trained to use hardly any vocal commands at all.

It's surprising how difficult it is to stop yourself from using vocal commands.
posted by Zumbador at 6:04 AM on September 15, 2022

I showed the clip to my lab, who farted editorially and clambered back onto the sofa.
posted by Hogshead at 7:10 AM on September 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

An earthshattering Kaboom!!!
posted by praemunire at 7:33 AM on September 15, 2022

This is so great, herding dogs are the best. For a long time, I thought they would be too much work for me personally, need too much time and attention, and then we sort of fell into adopting a third dog a few years ago because she was being re-homed, a Heeler mix (we think she's half Stumpy Tail Cattle Dog, specifically), and she is one of my very favorite people (dog or human) I've ever known.

So now I get up at dawn, have to get moving right away because HEY! IT'S! A! NEW! DAY! and there's a dog literally, insistently lying on top of me, with walks and play all the time and we sometimes get crowded out of our bed while the other two dogs politely sleep on their beds, and so on, and I love it. I think if I started doing anything like agility training with her, I'd lose my job because that's all I'd want to do all day.

My favorite part of this video is how happy Kaboom is because of how happy her human is. Dogs really enjoy the actual agility activities, but I think they enjoy their human's enjoyment even more. How beautiful is that.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:35 AM on September 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

My favorite agility dog is Rudy the Bulldog: canine cannonball.

I didn't know bulldogs could move that fast! What a good boy.
posted by Mavri at 8:37 AM on September 15, 2022

Oh man those weave poles! It's like he's bending space around him. He makes this:

..........

look like this:

. . . . . 
 . . . . .

posted by gurple at 8:57 AM on September 15, 2022

I went to the WKC preliminary agility trials, which was earlier in the day. Think I might have seen this dog run. It was really fun and cool. It's the first agility trial competition I've ever seen, and I had no idea that the dogs don't get to see the course and practice on it beforehand. Even the trainers only get about a five minute walkabout at the start of each heat. Seems like course was also changed between the prelims and the masters.
posted by slkinsey at 10:14 AM on September 15, 2022

Weaves are also a really hard obstacle--much harder than people often think--and relatively injury-prone, so impressive weaves are really something to celebrate.

My spouse has gotten our young dog into a really nice agility foundations program that builds the dog and handler team up very slowly for controllability, contacts accuracy, etc. on the course. I'm having a lot of fun watching and, frankly, squirming to get to play myself with next-puppy (my old lady at 11 being relegated to "and we dick around on courses only insofar as you're having fun, with lowered jumps.) She looooooooooves dog walks, which was hilarious in the last totally-for-fun class we did--the other dogs are nervily trying to worry about where their hind ends were, and Tribble would gleefully rocket up and down at will. I wish we'd had time to be more focused with it when she was younger, honestly.

One of the things I really like about this foundations course is that it builds slowly before you hit the actual obstacles with the aim of really solidifying things like hitting your contacts correctly and learning how to handle and direct the dog consistently before you're trying to do things at high speed. So much of this sport is about handlers and dogs communicating on the fly both verbally and nonverbally! (That's one of the reasons dogs don't get to practice running the course and handlers only get a brief walkthrough--in that way, it's very much like the equine showjumping agility was developed from.) It just makes sense to try and iron out the boring stuff from the beginning.

I have also seen courses train the game by introducing the dogs to a new obstacle and advancing through them at varying speeds, which is certainly more fun for humans than boring details of handling. But doing things that way and then trying to teach the dog to tear around as fast as possible as quick as possible will get you just absolutely nailed when you realize belatedly that your lanky Border Collie believes that contacts--the yellow strips at the end of the A-Frame and the dog walk--are "suggestions" rather than requirements and leaps from ground to the top of the A-Frame to ground in two giant bounds. (This is a bigger risk in the bigger sized classes, obviously, but still.)

I gotta make some time to set up my equipment and dick around in the yard while it's still nice out, clearly.
posted by sciatrix at 10:26 AM on September 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

It seemed to me that the dog walk (ramp up, long plank, ramp down) was the obstacle that separated the lightning-fast from the merely fast. Most dogs slow down a bit on the dog walk, but some seemed to speed up. If a dog zoomed up and down the dog walk, it was almost always going to have one of the top times.

The other thing we observed is how a single wrong move can ruin the chances of even a very fast and clearly smart dog.
posted by slkinsey at 11:27 AM on September 15, 2022

more dog comps with dogs being dogs! Less style foolery!

Anyone know of competitions good for nap loving farting chihuahuas?
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:33 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you so much kyrademon! I also found an 'official' Winky run, for those of you that want to see a version without commentary, but with pretty ridiculous music.

It starts at the 0:35 mark here.
posted by dngrangl at 1:11 PM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

squirming to get to play myself with next-puppy

vallhund vallhund vallhund vallhund vallhund
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:51 PM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone know of competitions good for nap loving farting chihuahuas?

They don't need to compete. They have already won life.
posted by praemunire at 4:02 PM on September 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Thank you for these links! I am sofa-bound with an ankle injury and have now spent all day watching dog agility and flyball. Such good dogs! Seeing the crufts flyball go from "you must have one non-collie on the team" to being totally dominated by lurchers was rather fascinating. They are *so fast*

I wish there was somewhere to watch more amateur versions of these things, for dogs with a lot of heart but not much fast.
posted by stillnocturnal at 4:17 PM on September 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm shocked by Rudy's performance due to my personal experiences with a bulldog named Sam. Sam was a very good boy belonging to my aunt and uncle. Every family dog was named Sam by the way. This is a noble, if unimaginative, family tradition of ours. He was not agile. Whatever the opposite of agile is, well, that was Sam.

When I was ten, Sam probably weighed about half what I did. I was a pretty skinny kid and he was a far sight from svelte. Lifting him up could probably be categorized as my first real experience with weight training.

Sam would occasionally emancipate himself. Slowly. But it being hot and humid in our neck of the woods, he'd just park himself about a quarter mile up the big hill, staring forlornly back at the house, panting like he'd just finished the Iditarod. I'd normally be dispatched to carry his big ass back to a source of water. There was a horrifying amount of slobber.

In the summer, Sam liked to go swimming in our above ground pool. Bulldogs are very dense good boys. As the only sober family member on a weekend, my job was to hold his ass end up from sinking while his front half lazily attempted a dog paddle. He seemed mighty proud of himself.

Good god he farted a lot.

I miss Sam.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 5:17 PM on September 15, 2022 [12 favorites]

God(s)(ess)(esses) bless the doggos, farts and all. Where would humanity be without the dummies?
posted by drewbage1847 at 6:12 PM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone know of competitions good for nap loving farting chihuahuas?

I'm just gonna put on my "doing fun stuff with dogs" evangelist hat: most sports you can do on a for fun basis with just about any dog, and pretty much any dog will enjoy finding some kind of sport to dig into. There's a whole agility division for toy breeds, and it's not all Papillons! And in fact, the itty bitties often have an easier time with classes taught out of smaller facilities--which is nearly all of them in my admittedly rather urban experience--than anything retriever size or up. They have more room for stride control and tighter turning radiuses, for one thing.

Playing sports is really good for tiny dogs especially because it gives them confidence in their ability to navigate unfamiliar spaces, activities, and environments. Really it's good for any dog, but the world can be much scarier in general when you're very aware that you're little and easily squished.

The young dog is, by mutual agreement, my spouse's dog (we both love dog training but my old lady is an Extremely one person dog, so Benton is their chance to get to play after a very long dry spell). So my eleven year old Boston terrier/Boxer/misc mutt out of a Georgia country pound and I have been dabbling in lots of for fun classes lately in cheerful defiance of all breed expectations: urban herding/Treibball, nose work, barn hunt... and generally speaking we're both having tons of fun picking up new experiences and activities.

Anyway here's a little video of a friend of mine doing (appropriately sized) weight pull with his Chihuahua Fae, because it's a fun game and she wanted to play every bit as much as his 100+ pound Swissie did. More links to itty bitty toys playing sports of various kinds may follow; there's this gorgeous video of a Chi at Crufts competing at heelwork to music/musical freestyle I bet I can find when I'm off mobile, and I have thoughts on what else I can turn up. Having grown up going to JRTCA trials and met more than a few Chis, I bet you most of them would fucking love Barn Hunt.
posted by sciatrix at 7:16 AM on September 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

More links to itty bitty toys playing sports of various kinds may follow;

Don't threaten us with a good time!!!
posted by praemunire at 7:33 AM on September 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

I had never watched agility before but the night before last, poor Harvey, who is a very scaredy dog, had a huge panic attack triggered by some jet planes overhead. He leapt up into my bed, which he knows is not allowed and he never does, and shivered and shook until in desperation, I started playing Westminster agility trials on my ipad. We had a nice time watching it together while I hugged him and petted him and asked questions like, "That good dog is really fast! Look at him go! Do you think you are as fast as that good dog?" and slowly the shivering stopped and he was okay. I think he almost enjoyed himself! We are going to try watching more of it soon - without the panic attack. And maybe we'll even try some of the stunts although he doesn't really need any encouragement to leap fences: we both know it's only the honor system that's keeping him in the yard as it is.
posted by mygothlaundry at 12:34 PM on September 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Because the Crufts Heelwork to Music/Musical Freestyle is all filmed and has been for a long time, there are quite a few videos of Chihuahuas performing available! New to me was this 2022 Swan Lake act, but there's also this 2020 Pokemon run that is very very well done. (Crufts has a ton of very high quality videos up, so they tend to be well represented on youtube.) There is also a competitive synchronized team Obedience routine with four handlers and four Chihuahuas here.

You really do see a lot more "off breeds" in the height classes that are both quite large and quite small in agility. Here's a WKC 2022 agility championship 8inch class, where you'll see only dogs less than 11inches at the shoulders: there's Corgis of both Pembroke and Cardigan varieties, a Scottie, a Bichon Frise with a bright pink tail (12:23), Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Pomeranians, at least one Dachshund, Papillons, Japanese Chin, and of course the Chihuahua run I've linked to directly. On the other hand, Kaboom was running in the 24" class at the other end of the spectrum--he's really tall for a Border Collie! But if you look at the runners-up in that class, Kaboom is actually the only BC in the top 10.

It's really interesting to watch 8" and 24" classes back to back, because you can really see how the dog's size influences the challenge that handlers and dogs have to manage as they try to navigate the courses. The little dogs have so much more space in terms of stride lengths between the obstacles, which is both useful (they are generally quite good at making comparatively tight turns) and also challenging (they get tired a lot faster, and they take longer because again: SO many more strides). The most successful smallest dogs often have handlers who don't themselves run very quickly, but who think very carefully about how they send the dog through the course to maximize efficiency and speed; by contrast, if you're running a faster, larger dog, you have to be thinking and moving through the course fast enough to meet that dog. It's very common especially in training for dogs to outrun their handlers and, finding that there's no direction to the next obstacle, get frustrated and pull off to bark at the handler!

Also, because I loved it, here is a fucking impressive 2021 agility run with a Pomeranian. Look at that.

(There is also a sport I'm beginning to see more about from folks whose dogs aren't physically sound to do the jumps in agility called Hoopers--demonstrated here, of course, by a chihuahua.)

Here's an older Chihuahua playing Barn Hunt. The goal of Barn Hunt is to find the rat (safely enclosed in an aerated tube that the dog can't access; I have personally watched rats snooze with impunity during these games) in a maze of hay bales or a barn-like setting as quickly as possible.

Relatedly, here's a Chihuahua practicing scentwork: trying to find the lure in one of the many hides available. The handler has a ton of fun videos practicing with her dogs.

Here's a lovely little Chi playing Treibball/Urban Herding: shoving a ball where he's asked to go by a stationary handler, choosing which of several balls to place, and generally bouncing cheerfully around in a field while he solves problems. (My favorite is the thoughtful sneezes he lets out while marching from ball to ball.)

Another chihuahua in weight pull. There have actually been quite a few chihuahuas competing in weight pull at fairly high levels; this video is neat because it walks you through some of the training and conditioning you engage in to play the sport.

Here's a Chihuahua playing dock diving. Dock diving is a sport in which you toss a toy for the dog and compete on how far your dog can jump to get it.

A Chihuahua playing flyball. (I took flyball courses a few years ago with a min pin who was very good and very motivated, actually.)

Here's a delighted little Chi chasing a lure. More recently, here's a Biewer Terrier (essentially a spotted Yorkie) winning a FAST CAT event, which is a modified straightaway form of lure coursing. Both lure coursing and barn hunt tend to be the kinds of things you can just show up and play with a dog--very little training required at the beginning, and dogs tend to immediately get the point of FIND and CHASE the prey-thing.... especially terriery sorts of dogs, which Chihuahuas basically are.

At the end of the day, these kinds of things are all about dicking around with your dog and finding fun games that involve practicing communicating with one another. That's not a thing that's specific to any particular breed of dog--and it's not something that only dogs of a certain age or physical fitness can do together. The trick is to find some way of structured messing around with your dog that's fun for you both, whether it's just throwing a ball back and forth or something with more rules and setup. There's so many more options out there now than there used to be! You might not, like, win a national championship right away, but let's face it: no one is ever going to win a national championship with their first dog in any sport. Makes much more sense to find things you like doing with the dogs you already like living with, you know?
posted by sciatrix at 1:11 PM on September 16, 2022 [10 favorites]

I'm shocked by Rudy's performance due to my personal experiences with a bulldog named Sam...

Our English bulldogs were surprisingly strong swimmers who could swim out to fetch big sticks thrown out in small rivers and fight over them on the way back. As a breed they can be dumb as post -- ours could come into the kitchen to freak out and bark hysterically at an empty paper sack standing in the middle of the floor -- but, man, they come with heart in over supply.

All the same, count me in the very impressed at depth of Rudy's training.
posted by y2karl at 8:23 AM on September 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone know of competitions good for nap loving farting chihuahuas?

It's not quite as physical, but the American Rescue Dog Show has categories like "Best in Ears" and "Best in Couch Potato."
posted by rhizome at 11:13 AM on September 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Speaking from experience, were they English bulldogs rather than chihuahuas, the category would be either Best in Clearing the Room or Worst Canine Violation of the Geneva Convention Against Biological Warfare.
posted by y2karl at 12:52 PM on September 20, 2022