- Motorboat. (growling)
Motorboat. (growling)
Motorboat. (growling continues)
Oh, motorboat.
She has the most nicknames of all of our dogs.
Fun, Funamunna, Monkadunk, Black Beauty,
Shiny Black Beauty, Funkadelic,
Deli, Delic.
(barking)
Beebop was a border staffie that I had.
She was the next mix breed dog that I got
after having Ping Pong.
She was half border collie,
half Staffordshire bull terrier.
And she was probably one of the most friendly dogs
I have ever owned.
She was pretty wiggly, and crazy,
and very friendly, loved my mother.
And I know that she had a ton of potential,
but she was a challenge to train because she was sort of
very, very energetic,
so she had a hard time focusing on one thing all the time,
because she was just like a busy bee everywhere.
Unfortunately, though, when she was 11 months old,
or 10 months old I think,
she got hit by a car,
and it was sort of a hard situation,
because it was on our property,
and it was just a really unfortunate accident.
So, at that time, I was pretty devastated.
So devastated, actually, that I stopped training dogs,
I stopped competing.
I still taught classes.
I was still involved with the family business,
but I didn't really do any dogs for myself.
I just didn't feel like it.
Any time I did anything to do with training,
it just made me really upset.
And I did have other dogs at the time
that were really competitive.
I had a couple border collies,
and another mix at the time.
But, eh, I just didn't feel like it.
So, that was a pretty significant thing,
because it was sort of my whole world,
and I dropped it pretty quickly.
So, two years later, after Beebop's death,
a very good friend of mine who bred Beebop
let me know that he was rebreeding
a very similar cross, same dad, different mom.
And the mom happened to be one of the border collies
that he owned that I was really smitten with.
Her name was Busten, or is Busten.
So, he said that I would be, you know,
welcome to get a puppy if I really wanted to,
come and check them out.
And I sort of denied it at the time,
said I wasn't really interested.
But who can resist going to see baby puppies?
So, off I went to see the puppies.
They were about five weeks old
or four weeks old when I saw them,
and I ended up going back, I think,
almost every single week.
So, as I continued going to visit the puppies,
I started to think that I maybe would want them.
They were just a really great litter.
Whenever I'm gonna get a new dog,
I always have my dad come and look at the puppies.
He has like this magical way of
selecting the perfect dog for me.
And actually, the perfect dog for many people.
He has picked many people's heart dogs.
I don't know how he does it or what he does,
but he just can do it.
So I brought him along with me,
and I had it narrowed down to two puppies.
Funkee, who was in that litter,
did not interest me.
A lot of the time when I would go,
she would be off in a corner doing something,
or following Aaron around.
She was obsessed with Aaron.
And so I didn't really think she was anything.
And so we did a bunch of puppy tests,
and my dad said, "You need to take that one,"
and he was referring to Funkee.
And I thought, "I don't really like her.
"She doesn't really do anything for me."
And he said, "That's the best puppy.
"That's the one you need to take."
So, I remember, I'll never forget.
I just trusted him 'cause he's
never steered me wrong before.
And I remember driving home,
and Funkee was sitting on my lap
and I remember thinking to myself,
"This puppy's really cute,
"but I still don't really like her."
I didn't really like her that much,
which is really strange.
And maybe it was because I was still sad, who knows.
But boy did that change.
So, when I finally got Funkee home,
and I started to do, you know,
my normal puppy training routine,
I started to realize that she was a pretty cool dog.
She loved to work, she loved to learn.
I think, because I had a new project or something
to work on, or to distract me,
she sort of became, like, my whole focus.
She also was, like, you'd never know it right now,
'cause she's just sitting so patiently,
but she was really, really busy,
so I had to do a lot of things to kinda
keep her focused.
So, out of all the dogs, oh, hi, miss.
Out of all the dogs I own,
she by far knows the most tricks,
the most ridiculous tricks,
because I just kept thinking of things to do
to kind entertain her to keep her focused.
But what I started to quickly realize
is that she was totally different than Beebop.
And although I loved Beebop,
she was, like, almost a better match for me than Beebop was,
because, if there's anything that people know about Funkee,
especially those who are close to me in my life,
Funkee is 1000% my dog, and no one else's.
And, I mean, she's lived with Ken now
for years, and years, and years,
and although she, you know, listens to him
and she loves him,
when push comes to shove, she is my dog,
and I'm not gonna lie, I love that about her.
So, once we did a lot of our basic training,
I obviously started to do some agility training,
since that was my ultimate goal.
And what a lot of people probably don't realize is that
she was not really initially looking like she was gonna be
my next hotshot agility dog.
There was something about agility
that was very stressful for her,
and now that we've been through it,
and I have more knowledge as a trainer or whatnot,
I think our connection is so close
that she did not do well when I
would be disappointed about something.
And, as some of you may know who participate in agility,
agility is filled with ups and downs.
It is not a sport that anybody can be
perfect at all of the time,
and I never was, you know, upset with her
or anything like that,
but even if I sighed or was frustrated in the slightest bit,
even if it was at myself, Fun would shut down.
And when I first started training her,
although she's a very motivated dog,
she wasn't confident, and if things would go wrong,
or if we did a sequence and she
did something wrong or I cued her the wrong way,
she would totally shut down and almost
was so slow that she would walk.
I actually remember a competition I went to
one time, I had just gotten back from a world championship
she wasn't participating at.
She wasn't old enough yet.
She was just doing her regionals or something
for the first time.
And I had lost Ping Pong, my oldest dog at the time,
and I was just in such a bad way mentally at the competition
that Funkee would go into the tunnels,
and then she would not come out,
because she was so concerned about my feelings.
So, that was really difficult,
because I knew that she had a lot of potential,
but we weren't really putting anything together.
And, you know, a lot of people of my
experience level, we come out with
these new dogs to compete with at two, three years old,
and they usually are doing really well,
and everybody wants to watch to see how they're gonna do,
they wanna follow the training,
they wanna see exactly what's going on.
There is a lot of pressure when you're in a position
that I am in to be perfectly successful
with every single dog that you come out with.
And I was definitely feeling that.
I was much younger at the time,
and I really cared about what people thought,
and I was really sort of stressed
about going out and competing with her,
and her being slow or shutting down,
and having people talk behind my back,
"Oh, look at Kayl's new hotshot dog.
"She sucks, she's slow."
Oh, no, not you.
See, I'm even, she can tell I'm getting emotional right now,
and look at, this is what she does,
is she stress yawns, and then she gets closer.
Due to Funkee's lack of confidence,
I decided to wait another year
before I did any competing with her,
and to show her off at all,
because I knew that I wasn't ready mentally
to compete with her, she wasn't really ready,
she wasn't really reliable with her speed.
She had pretty good skills,
but the speed was just not there.
So I waited a year, and I changed my training plan
completely with her.
I stopped doing all the fancy stuff.
We did lots of straight lines,
tiny little bits of turns,
all things that we could both be really successful at,
and I basically just focused on building her up,
building her up, building her up.
And you may have seen in previous vlogs,
me talk about Baby.
Well, that was a game-changer for us.
Once I could figure out what reward was so powerful
that she could take my emotion out of
her response to the reward,
it really helped.
So, that little silly ball with feet,
she just thinks it is the most
wonderful toy ever created,
and I'm thankful for that, because I'm able to utilize it,
and if I have a bad run or something,
she's off chomping on Baby, you know, getting her high,
and I can do what I need to do
and it doesn't affect her.
So that was a really important change for us.
Waiting all of that time before competing with Funkee,
I think, really paid off,
because I believe she was three or almost four
by the time I entered my first big competition,
which was the Ontario Regional Championships,
and she ended up winning the whole thing,
which was really exciting.
She ran wonderfully.
We ended up winning the steeplechase event as well.
And I believe we ended up winning that
four years in a row.
Steeplechase is her course.
It has lots of straight lines
and not a lot of turning.
(laughing)
But yeah, I think that was one of the best
training decisions I could've made for her.
During that time, though, I was doing lots of other things,
so not just agility.
I played fly ball with her,
and in fly ball, she was like a completely different dog.
She was an animal.
I probably could've set her legs on fire,
and she would've not even noticed,
because she was so crazy about getting the ball,
crazy about getting the tug toy.
So, there was something that was not
stressful, or she didn't feel any pressure
in the sport of agility, which helped her.
I meant to say fly ball.
It helped her agility.
It allowed her to play a sport without
having any stress and sorta learn to, you know,
give it her all and not worry about the results,
and I think that also helped us
improve in the sport of agility as well.
When people see Funkee today, I think they see this
wild beast on the start line.
She is definitely well-known for,
when I leave her on the start line,
she barks her head off.
She just, she just foams at the mouth,
she just looks like a wild woman.
And I have a lot of people say,
"Oh, you must be so crazy to live with her.
"She must be just wild and, you know, loud all the time."
And it's like, Funkee has like an altar-ego
when she's on the start line,
and I think that's partly my fault.
I used to just rev her up
and let her be as crazy as she wanted to be,
so that I could get speed out of her.
But when it comes to the Funkee Monkee
that we know at home,
she is the biggest lump.
Her favorite thing to do is to,
you know, get all the covers and sleep underneath them.
She is a big snuggle-bug.
She just, I can get up and get completely ready for work
or anything in the morning,
and she doesn't even wanna get out of the bed,
because it's warm.
She's very sensitive.
She gets along wonderfully with our other dogs.
Back when I used to teach puppy classes,
I would always teach with her.
She's just such a well-rounded, even-tempered dog.
She could go an play with the rough and tumble puppies
and tell them off when they needed to be disciplined.
Or I could put her in with the tiny little Bichons,
or, you know, the toy poodles that were really bashful,
and she would be very calm and gentle with them.
She just is just a great, well-rounded type of dog,
and yeah, she can be wild and crazy sometimes
when she's playing agility,
but she just has a really nice nature.
This is a pretty good example.
She loves to snuggle, that's for sure.
I would have to say the biggest accomplishment
that we have made was
getting to the world championships in the first place,
because I honestly think that that
wasn't in the cards for her, or for us
together as a team.
The second world championships that we went to was in 2013.
So, she was born in 2007,
so this gives you an idea of how old she was
by the time I took her to a world championship.
So, in 2013, we went to Belgium,
and at that world championship,
she won the gold medal in every event that was there.
So, there's three events to compete in,
and she won the gold for each of them.
And I believe we had a perfect clear round weekend,
so not one fault in any course.
I'm honestly not sure I will ever be able
to replicate that again,
maybe even with her or with any other dog.
Like, that is just, that is like,
that's very, very challenging to do,
and if I do it again, great,
and if not, then that will definitely
probably go down in history for me.
But since then, we've done a lot of competing.
We've done several world championships in different venues,
WAO, and the European Open a couple times.
WAO seems to be her big event.
It stands for World Agility Open.
We were just in Netherlands, actually,
a few months ago, competing at the world championship.
So, she is going to be 10 in September,
which is a couple days away, actually,
and I can't believe it,
but I think she's still got a few more years in her.
She hasn't really slowed down yet.
She hasn't limped a day in her life.
Trust those mutts, they're so reliable.
But yeah, she's definitely a really important member
of our family, and our pack.
She's pack leader.
Small but mighty over here,
keeps everybody in line.
So yeah, she turned out to be probably
one of the best teachers I have ever had,
as far as being a dog trainer,
or a handler, or an instructor.
She has taught me a lot
that I have been able to pass on to other people.
So, pretty lucky to have her.