Life’s Curveballs

There are dog people and non-dog people. Non-dog people can own dogs but that doesn’t mean they are dog people. You are now scratching your head and saying, “What?” How can non-dog people own dogs? Simple, you can own a dog and not do dog stuff with the dog.

Non-Dog People

I was a non-dog person for most of my life. I owned many dogs over my lifetime but really never did anything with them. Sure, we’d take them for walks and play with them in the yard but that was pretty much the extent of it. When growing up, my mother would not have a dog in the house and the only time we brought the dog in was when it was going to snow or get really cold, and even then, the dog was confined to a certain area of the house. This changed after I married because my wife always had dogs and they were allowed in the house.

Our first dog together was a small terrier mix named, Daisy. I was in the military and we traveled all over country, and Daisy went with us everywhere. One time on one of our moves across the country, Daisy was almost left behind on the side of the road. We were traveling from Dover, Delaware to Phoenix, Arizona in the late spring of 1978. We had a small Datsun B210, which was a very small car incase you don’t know or weren’t around in the late 70s. The car was packed to the brim. We had a roof rack that was full of stuff, the trunk was full to over flowing, and there was my wife, two kids, the dog, and me.

I remember it like it was yesterday. We spent the night in a motel somewhere west of Texas on I-10 and there was a restaurant very close by. We checked out of our motel room and drove the short distance to the restaurant for breakfast. It was starting to get warm but it wasn’t hot by any means and the dog would need to stay in the car while we ate. We rolled the windows down about 3 or 4 inches, opened the back vents, and went into the restaurant.

After breakfast, we found one of the worst messes in the car you could ever imagine. Daisy had diarrhea on the back seat and then ran through it and tracked it all over the inside of the car. It was bad, really bad and even the windows were smeared with it. I was definitely a non-dog person right then and that dog was lucky. If my wife wasn’t there with me right at that moment, I’m not sure what would have happened. The dog survived and traveled with us on several more trips. Daisy died at the ripe old age of 20 and it was like loosing a child. We all still miss her to this day.

Dog People

Dog people live with dogs, train dogs, and travel the country with dogs to dog events. My wife and I are official dog people now. Being a dog person is a lot more than just having a dog. My wife and I have 9 dogs and they are highly trained family members. Our dogs are either retired, playing, or training to play a dog sport called Flyball. To find more information about Flyball you can visit my Flyball website at www.i-flyball.com or my Flyball blog at www.flyballblog.com.

We first started playing Flyball back in 1999 when my wife was searching for something to do with our very active Labrador retriever, Paige. She was watching Animal Planet or some such show on TV and saw a game that the dogs were playing called Flyball; she said that we have to do this with Paige. We search the Internet looking for Flyball and found a team that was about 75 miles away in another city. So we traveled weekly for training session for Paige.

Paige learned the game in about a month or so and about a month or two later we traveled to our first Flyball tournament. We both had a blast and even though I didn’t have a dog at the time. We were both hooked and I soon got my first Border collie.

Now, 5 Border collies and 2 Jack Russell terriers later we are still playing. Over the 7 years we’ve been playing we have traveled thousands of miles and been to hundreds of tournaments all over the southeast. From the very south of Florida, the very north of North Carolina, to northwestern Illinois, west to San Antonio, and all points in between.

The photo is my Border collie Dice and me playing Flyball. Dice, Dice, Baby is her name and she loves the game and plays it with great enthusiasm. I’m sure that you can tell by the grin on her face.

I am often asked if the dogs know they are playing a game and I just have to laugh. Dogs are smarter than you know and they positively know what they are doing. You can’t see it in this photo but there is another lane next to this one with dogs running against our team. It doesn’t take too long for them to figure out they are racing the dogs in the other lane. However, I must say that they amaze me every time we play. They are great friends.