Clean Run Magazine - January 2007 - 12

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SACHS / AGILITY IMAGES On Course with... Robin Kletke By Brenna Fender
Robin Kletke has had ongoing success with a variety of dog breeds. His
Papillon, Tigger, has won the 8 class at the AKC Nationals three times,
was the number one dog for all breeds in AKC for 2004 and 2005, and was
the #1 AKC Papillon from 2003 to 2005. He also owns the #1 AKC Border
Collie Vixen for 2004 and 2005 and the #1 AKC Afghan Hound Keno for 2004
and 2005. Kletke has achieved more success than most of us can imagine
with dogs from three different AKC groups. BF: You have been competing in
agility for many years with many dogs. What is your most memorable moment?
RK: That’s kind of difﬁcult. I’ve probably been in the ring several
thousand times and picking one is kind of hard. The Finals rounds with
Tigger were pretty memorable, as were the Challenger rounds in 2003 and
2004 to get to Finals. There have been many runs with Vixen and Keno that
were good. The most memorable run, however, was with my Afghan Coco. He
and his sister Star were the ﬁrst dogs we did agility with. Coco was
also being shown in the breed ring, and one weekend in Enumclaw,
Washington, he got back from being shown and we went into the agility
ring. He looked sharp, smelled good, and the ring surface was sand and
about 3 of dust. Did I mention that Coco didn’t really like the breed
ring? Or, that paybacks are tough? Anyway, he went jump, jump,
tunnel—and the tunnel started to move from the inside out. Coco was
scratching his back on the inside of the tunnel. When he came out, he took
a step or two and then dove into the dust. Nose ﬁrst, shoulders on the
ground, with the hind legs pushing him through dirt like a plow! After a
few feet he ﬂipped over and started scratching the breed ring smell and
grooming off him by wriggling back and forth with his legs straight up in
the air. I think that it was Jo Ann Mather’s ﬁrst judging assignment.
What a way to start! Everybody was in stitches on the sidelines, so when I
got him back on course, he really got excited at all the applause and
hollering, so when he came out of the chute and dove into the dirt again,
we had to just pick up and slink off. It might not have been the best run
in the history of agility, but I’d wager a bundle that everybody at that
trial remembers it. BF: How did you get started in agility? jumping up on
the bathroom counter and walking around without knocking anything over.
She ﬁgured that such energy should be put to good use or it might turn
against us! We ran Coco and Star for several years and then got Tigger. He
was supposed to be the little “sit in our lap,” foofy dog. People said
that Paps were okay at agility, I guess they were right. It’s been a
wild ride ever since. BF: How does training an Afghan Hound and a Papillon
differ? RK: Night and day. They have totally different personalities,
strengths, weaknesses, and desires. It took us a long time to ﬁgure out
what made an Afghan Hound tick. The people that we were training with when
we started had herding breeds and the things that worked for them certainly
didn’t work for our Afghans. The Paps are also different in a lot of
ways. They are small Tigger is about ﬁve pounds but can run at big-dog
speeds. That makes for some interesting challenges that I don’t ﬁnd
with my midsized BC. BF: What difﬁculties do you associate with training
large dogs? Small dogs? Sighthounds? RK: A large dog like my Afghan Keno
has some real difﬁculties in things like the up contacts. His natural
stride can take him from a standstill to over the contact zone with no
effort. He actually has to break stride to get in a USDAA contact zone and
that can sometimes be hard to do. When big dogs really get moving, it can
be challenging to redirect them. Keno can be difﬁcult partly because he
isn’t quite as responsive as a like-sized Collie. Many people think that
running a small dog is so much easier than a big dog. I think they have
equal but different challenges, especially if both dogs are running at
about the same speed. A little dog might take more strides to the next
obstacle and people think that means they are easier to direct and less
prone to go off Clean Run | January 07 RK: We got started in agility when
Robin my wife who is also named Robin noticed that one of our Afghan
Hounds Star was 12 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Clean Run Magazine - January 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - January 2007