When Dr. Donna Chester steps onto the dog agility obstacle course with Penny, her 3-year-old papillon, she brings a team approach to the task ahead.
It's them against the course timer.
That sense of alliance isn't lost on Penny, either, said Dr. Chester, an ob.gyn. who practices in Anchorage, Alaska. "We're a team out there, and she knows it. It's giving her a job and it's giving me something to release my energy and have fun with."
To date, Penny has earned three "double Qs," meaning that she has run three agility courses perfectly and under the time allotted. She's also earned 350 points toward her first Master Agility Champion (MACH), which is the ultimate American Kennel Club agility title. (A MACH designation is earned when a dog runs 20 courses perfectly and runs them under the time allotted.)
Seven years ago, after watching her husband, Michael, guide dogs through agility tunnels, over teeter totters, and between weave poles in competitions as a hobby, Dr. Chester decided to follow suit. Her first experience came with Mysti, the family's wheaten terrier, who is now 9 years old and is the retired house dog. Dr. Chester worked with the terrier for 3 years on agility, and during the time she also learned a little about herself. During one competition a fellow trainer approached her and said, "You're too tense when you're out there. Mysti feels your tenseness. So if you don't relax, she's not going to."
Dr. Chester took the advice to heart and incorporated relaxation exercises into her precompetition regimen, a fix that led to positive results. "After that, I had 2 really good years of agility with her," Dr. Chester recalled. "When you connect like that with your dog, it's awesome. There is not a better feeling; there really isn't."
These days, she spends 1 hour 2 days per week and 1015 minutes per day the rest of the week in training sessions with Penny "to keep things going." She and Michael and their daughter, Krystin, who is currently a high school senior, devote 10 weekends between May and September to attending dog agility competitions in Eugene and Portland, Ore., and in other Northwest locales.
"We're one of the few families that are doing this," Dr. Chester observed. "You might see a husband and a wife out there, but usually it's the husband or the wife, and there are very few kids out there, which is a shame because you can get college scholarships from this."
A family highlight came in 2006, when Teller, a papillon trained by Krystin, earned a MACH title. Teller "was an abused dog that we rescued; we'd had a lot of anger issues with him and tried to get him past those," Dr. Chester said. "Krystin became the first teenager in Alaska to get a MACH title, which is the highest title you can get with a dog. It was awesome to watch her do that and to also watch her bloom doing it, because she was always a reserved child. This helped bring her out."
The Alaska climate poses certain challenges to a consistent agility training routine. During the winter months, the family trains its dogs in an 80-by-60-foot building owned by friends. "You need a 100-by-100-foot space to have a really good training center, but this is good to keep them remembering what they are supposed to be doing," Dr. Chester said.
In the near future, she and her husband intend to build a training center on their own property that would serve as a competition site during the harsh winter months. For now, "all of our competitions are compacted into 3 months during the summer," she said. "It's frustrating because we spend almost every weekend during the summer doing dog agility. We'd like to fish, camp, hike, and do other things, but the dogs are taking so much of our time. We're hoping that if we put up this facility, we'll be able to spread out the competitions more."
But Dr. Chester isn't complaining too much. After all, she said, the magic that comes in the connection between dog and trainer is beyond measure. "It's a wonderful feeling to be out there training your dog, seeing that your dog 'gets it,' and to learn how smart dogs are," she said. "It's amazing how a little flick of the finger will send them one direction or another and that they understand these subtle commands."
A Whole Different Ball Game