Our Blog - Agility Friendly Winter 2025

A couple times a year, Lucy's puppy school organizes a "friendly" competition for the Agility competitors. Sometimes Lucy does great and other times, she has her own course in mind and doesn't listen to our directions. But she always has a great time. These are pictures that were mostly taken by one of the organizers, who took pictures of all of the dogs. I pulled Lucy's out for this blog.

Up and over the "chapeau", which in French means "hat", is an A-frame. While Lucy doesn't have a problem with this, larger/faster dogs like to jump off too early, as it is a requirement that the dog touches the blue part at the bottom both going up and coming back down. You can see how she comes off at a full sprint!

She does the jumps at 15 cm high, which is normal for the shorter dogs.

And the "passerelle", which in French means "foot bridge", and in English is called just a "dog walk". Similar to the A-frame, the dog must tough the blue parts going up and coming back down.

We use the term "pneau" (literally "tire") for the "tire jump". This one took Lucy a bit of time to get right, since she wanted to just go through the right-and-left parts instead of jumping through the hoop. She isn't the only dog to do that, either ... that is the most common problem with the tire.

Then it was my turn for the 2nd part of the course. The "seesaw" is always funny to watch Lucy on ... she goes up to the mid-point like normal but then she shimmies slowly down with her head down and her but in the air. She is one of the few dogs that does it that way, and everybody watching gets a nice chuckle out of it.

The slalom, or weave poles, is something that we work on all of the time with Lucy. Some days, she is rock-solid and does it perfectly. Other days, she doesn't want to enter correctly and likes to skip the last pole to get out a little early. They were positioned really well for these pictures, getting her going in-and-out perfectly.

And the group ...