Dealing With Disappointment

If you do any kind of dog sport for any length of time, you soon learn that there is a lot of disappointment that goes along with playing the dog game. No matter how prepared you are, no matter how much you practice, on some days things just don’t go your way. How you deal with that disappointment can have a major impact on your attitude towards your hobby and your future success in the sport of dogs.

Let’s say that you’re going for an excellent leg. You’ve had a serious weave pole problem, a problem you’ve struggled with throughout your dog’s agility career. You have sought out advice from other people, read books and articles, watched videos, and studied how other competitors handle weave poles. You have pulled your dog from competition in order to work on the problem. After months of carefully re-teaching the weave poles, you enter a local show. As you watch the course being built, you are a little nervous to see that the weave poles are the third obstacle. When you walk the course, you carefully strategize how you will handle the poles, and you are determined to let your dog demonstrate to you that he can find the entrance on his own. As you walk up to the start line, you again visualize your dog successfully completely the weave poles. And then, you and your dog are off. Your heart is in your throat as he heads for the poles, and you resist the urge to “help”. Your spirits soar as you watch your dog find the entrance on his own and then quickly and confidently fly through the poles. It is poetry in motion. That is, until you stand rooted to the spot near the last pole, and watch in horror as your dog goes around the next jump, to earn a refusal and a flunk.

How about the same scenario in obedience? Perhaps you have a dog who has had difficulty maintaining attitude in the obedience ring in the past. You have worked on his motivation, and the two of you have become a team. You have taken him to many different locations to practice the Open routine, and at last you are ready to take your show on the road. As you and your partner work your way through heeling, the drop on recall, the retrieve exercises and the broad jump, you are totally in sync with one another. His heeling is beautiful, and he nails his fronts and finishes. Your friends cheer as you leave the ring. The only thing between you and your first CDX leg is the sits and downs, which he’s never had a problem with. You chatter excitedly with your fellow competitors during the out-ofsight stays, only to return and find your partner stretched out on his side, sound asleep, during the long sit.

Or, you run a fabulous Excellent JWW course with your dog, a dog that often has trouble making time. You are in just the right place at just the right time throughout the course, and you and your dog have a flawless run. As you cross the finish line, you are sure that the Double Q is yours. Except, there was a stopwatch malfunction, and now you have to run again for time. And, when you re-run the course, your dog is hot and not as motivated, and this time you’re two seconds over course time. No qualifying score, no Double Q.

I’ve been showing dogs for 23 years. Many, many scenarios like the above examples have happened to me. I can still remember every detail of what I consider to be one of my biggest disappointments in the dog game. It happened in 1989, the year that my first Papillon “Zipper” earned his OTCH. My dream was for Zipper to be the first CH OTCH TDX Toy Dog. The ink was hardly dry on his OTCH certificate before we were out in the tracking fields, preparing for the very difficult TDX title. A TDX track can be a daunting experience for a ten inch, five pound dog, but Zipper had the nose of a bloodhound. At a local TDX test on a cold, windy day, Zipper and I persevered together through 900 yards and 45 minutes of a TDX track, only to flunk the last turn. Zipper followed the judge’s path of the day before. The judges had started  into a very weedy, rough ravine, decided it was just too hard to get through, and then backtracked to easier cover, and put in the last turn. Zipper took the track from the day before and never made it back to the last turn. One of the judges was so attuned to how upset I was going to be, that he came up to tell me that we had flunked rather than blow the whistle. Thank goodness I did not know on that day that it would be several more heartbreaks and near misses before Zipper would pass his TDX one year later to the day in the exact same field.

I believe that disappointment and failure have made me a better dog trainer. If Zipper had passed that first TDX track, I would have missed out on many, many learning experiences in the next year in our tracking training. If I had given up on the MXJ on my two older Papillons when they struggled to make the excellent jumpers times, I would not have discovered how to find the extra two or three seconds that they needed in order to make time, which in turn made me a better instructor for my students with slower dogs. Way back in the early 1980’s when I earned my first UD on a Basset Hound, I learned what it was like to train and show and struggle with a dog that would rather be sleeping on the couch, which helps me relate to many of the people I work with now who train some of the less traditional obedience breeds.

Failure also helps us learn how to accept losing AND winning gracefully. I still struggle with sportsmanship issues, especially when I feel a judge’s call is wrong. I’d much rather screw up myself, or have my dog screw up, then to feel that somebody else has been responsible for my success or lack thereof. Conversely, when I do win, it should be done quietly and gracefully (except of course on those glorious days of finishing a long sought after title!).

Whatever dog game you are playing at the time, if you transmit to the dog how disappointed or upset you are, even if you’re mad at yourself and not the dog, you can set yourself and your partner up for more problems than the one that just happened. Your dog only has to take one look at your face to say “uh oh, I don’t think we’re having fun anymore”, and if the mistake happens early in the routine, the bad feelings and poor attitude can snowball into a terrible experience for both of you. I learned this the hard way twenty years ago while showing a very sensitive Border Collie in obedience. When he would make a mistake on signals and I would express my disappointment and displeasure, even if it was just a look on my face, he would literally melt into the mat. By the time we got to directed jumping, he would often run out on the go out and then lay down (the default position for a Border Collie), as if he were saying, I just CAN’T make you happy, so I don’t think I want to try. I had to learn to ignore his mistakes in the ring and try to stay focused on one exercise at a time.

I have watched a novice agility handler give her dog an ambiguous or late command or signal, the dog goes off course or has a refusal, and the handler then yells “No!” and acts disgusted. The dog hangs his head and slowly comes to the handler and then continues on the course with no joy whatsoever. What does this do for the working relationship between dog and handler? I’m certainly not saying that verbal corrections are never, ever used in training or showing, but the handler has to keep the “big picture” in mind at all times, and always give the dog the benefit of the doubt that the mistake was more than likely the handler’s and not the dog’s.

So, how do you deal with your disappointment? First of all, as you come out of the ring tell your dog how appreciative you are of his efforts while you give him a treat and then either sit quietly with him for a bit or put him back in his crate. Concentrate on what HE needs, not you. Then try very hard to keep your mouth shut either about how badly your dog screwed up or how you were robbed by the judge, except of course privately to friends. (Hopefully your friends won’t mind listening to a bit of whining.) Allow yourself five minutes to be upset and disappointed (preferably in private), and then look for the positive in that particular run and begin to think about what you can do to work on your problems. Did you and your dog do a new maneuver well that you have been practicing? Was your dog up and happy? Did the run end on a good note? Were YOU happy with the run, regardless of what the judge may have thought? It is a rare experience in the ring that I can’t find something positive; perhaps it will even be that I will decide that we really have some problems, and that we need to skip some of the upcoming shows and stay home and practice. I’ll save some money, and that will make my husband happy! (Hey, I told you sometimes you have to really look for the positive!) Congratulate the winners, tomorrow maybe it will be you.

The nice thing about obedience and agility is there is always another trial around the corner, and a wealth of information out there to deal with your problems. I can 99% of the time trace back any problems I have had in the ring to ME: either I screwed up in the ring by not giving a timely command or the correct information to the dog, or my training has lacked in whatever area my dog just messed up. If I come back into the Open obedience ring after a 199 performance to find my dog laying down on the long sit, then somehow I either haven’t practiced stays enough, or haven’t gotten across to him that he must SIT and stay. If my dog refuses an obstacle in agility, either my command was not timely, or for some reason my dog needs some more work either on that particular obstacle, or sequences with strange equipment. I also need to be sure that my dog does not have some type of physical problem that is preventing him from succeeding.

When you watch the successful people in your chosen dog sport, don’t just assume that the road has always been smooth for that person. There may have been a lot of training problems, or physical problems, or personal problems, that you know absolutely nothing about. I don’t know very many successful people that have never failed, in fact, most have had some downright shattering disappointments. The difference between successful people and those who are not, is the successful ones have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and figured out what they need to do to take that one small step down the road to success.

Dogs do not fill out entry forms. Dogs do not lay awake at night counting up points/legs, and wondering if they will qualify . Dogs do this stuff because WE want to do it, and hopefully we have made it worth their while along the way. Dogs are not sinister creatures waiting to break our hearts at every turn. Ob v i o u s l y , some breeds and some individual dogs of some breeds are easier to train and show. But I have  always firmly believed that the very best trainer and handler for any dog is the person who feeds him, and loves him, and worries about him, and curls up with him at night. I could not be a better trainer for your dog than YOU are, because I don’t know him as well as you do.

Rejoice and share in the successes of those around you, and next time it will be your turn! My traveling partner and I always have a great time when we go to the dog shows: we go out to eat, we go to movies, we go shopping, we gossip and meet with friends, we talk endlessly about our dogs and dog training. Don’t get me wrong, I love to win, and I work hard to do it, and it IS easier to have fun when you’ve had a good day at the trial. But going to the dog show has to be about more than winning. Sometimes it’s also about life, and how we feel about it. Your attitude is one thing you DO have control over.