Clean Run Magazine - April 2008 - 5

Editorializing… Dog Friends Are the Best Friends By Kristine Gunter One of my best friends in the sport of agility has never even seen my dog run a course. She lives 2,500 miles away from me and although we’ve emailed each other regularly for almost three years now, we’ve never spoken to one another face to face. Kim and I met via an email chat group made up of devoted Corgi owners who participate in performance sports. We bonded when we realized we were both struggling to overcome nearly identical training problems with our dogs. We began corresponding with each other and sharing stories about our overzealous Corgi girls and eventually formed our own two-person, owners-of-out-ofcontrol-Corgis cyber support group. Kim is the one friend I can count on to truly understand the frustration of failing in the agility ring, time and time again. Although we measure each of our dog’s performance records in slightly different ways, the results are essentially the same: Kim and Libby have run in the Open Standard class 23 times so far and have yet to earn a passing score; Zoey and I have entered so many Standard and Jumpers classes over the past two and a half years, I’ve lost count of the actual number of runs we’ve had. I do know we’ve earned just one qualifying score out of all of them. Both of us have acquaintances who question our decision to continue to compete with our dogs. They wonder why we would continue to spend money on dogs that obviously seem incapable of performing in a trial situation. Kim and I have discussed this but we always try to put a positive spin on the situation by reminding ourselves of all the small victories our Corgi girls have achieved over the past couple of years. Kim reminds me that Zoey has a much better start-line stay than she used to and I tell her that Libby doesn’t bail off contact obstacles nearly as frequently as she once did. After so many months of corresponding with each other, Kim and I have even developed a special system of letting each other know how a trial weekend went simply by the subject line of the email we send on the day following a trial. An email on the Monday morning after a trial that has the subject line “sigh” means we didn’t bring home any of those precious Q ribbons, but at least there were some runs with positive aspects to them—perhaps all the bars stayed up or maybe it took only a single try to get through the weave poles. A “Woo-hoo!” in the subject line can only mean that we actually achieved a qualifying score. Not surprisingly, over the years, our friendship has grown beyond just the bounds of agility. Kim and I discuss our families, our jobs, and many other subjects as they come up. We talk about the happy non-dog events in our lives such as her son’s graduation from high school and my nephew’s bar mitzvah. We’ve also shared times of grief: the loss of her beloved dog Henry and the death of my father. At times like that, the distance between us and the fact that we’ve never met in person doesn’t seem to matter; human emotions seem to transmit just fine via keyboards and the Internet. There are certainly times when I wish Kim didn’t live clear across the country from me. I wish we could actually travel to trials together and be there at the exit gate to console one another or, better yet, be there to celebrate those oh-so-rare victories. Still, I feel fortunate to have such a good friend and confidante who is just a few keystrokes and a send button away. Dog friends, no matter where they live, are the best friends. Kristine Gunter lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Eric and three Cardigan Welsh Corgis. She has put 40 performance titles on her dogs in agility, obedience, rally, freestyle, and herding. Contact her via her website, www.cardigan-corgis.com. April 08 | Clean Run 5

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Clean Run Magazine - April 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - April 2008