Chapter 1: What is Daisy Peel's background in dog agility?
There's a lot of tension in the community at the moment to solve these problems that we've created, and I think we're kind of right on the cusp of that next step. The agility world's a little behind bite sports, I think, because 20 plus years ago, we all got introduced to the miracle of clicker training and thought, oh my God, we can accomplish all this stuff without using harsh punishment.
Let's do it. You can get really far without any aversives, but there's going to come a point where you're going to have to employ their use. A lot of people don't have any strategy to keep the dog from acting like an idiot on the end of the leash because there's not been any strategy to institute any consequences.
All right, guys, welcome to Training Without Conflict podcast. Today I have as my guest Daisy Peel. Daisy is very, very into agility. She's been nine times, I believe, in the world teams from the United States.
Chapter 2: How does Daisy compare agility with other dog sports?
She's been doing it for a while. Daisy, welcome to the podcast. And just a little bit about yourself as I need to kind of get to know you a little bit better, not just from social media. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for inviting me. It's cold and disgusting outside here in Ohio, so this is the perfect way to spend the afternoon. I have been on the American Kennel Club World Championship team nine times, but I got started in agility way back in 1998. I was a high school chemistry teacher.
And I remember when I took the classes to learn how to be a teacher, there were these classes that, I didn't have a dog yet, but there were these classes that introduced me to this guy named B.F. Skinner. And I thought it was pretty cool. I thought that the pigeons in boxes stuff was pretty cool. And at the time, the teachers were all about, well, we need to teach these kids how to think. So B.F.
Skinner, he's not real cool anymore. And I remember thinking, well, I don't really care what these kids think. I don't care how they think. I just want to teach them the behavior. Skinner sounds like a pretty cool dude. So that was kind of my very first introduction to dog training.
Chapter 3: What strategies does Daisy use for training dogs at the world stage?
I didn't even have a dog. I was just learning to be a teacher. And then I really wanted a dog and I didn't. I didn't know what I was going to do with the dog, but I knew I wanted to do something. I went to the library because the internet was just a baby. I started reading books about different breeds. Then I saw this little show about agility on Animal Planet. That was in 1998.
So then I adopted a dog from the local shelter and I started teaching it to do agility. I took some classes and then it was kind of off to the races. So I kind of came to agility backwards from pretty much everybody else. Most people in agility have a dog and it's naughty. and it's jumping on their furniture and jumping over fences. And somebody says, oh, you should do agility.
Your dog will be great at it. Like who, you know, you don't need to be a dog trainer. Just go to, just go do it. Your dog's jumping. It's fine. That's all it needs to know.
Chapter 4: What are the cultural differences in dog sports training?
So I kind of came at it backwards and that's how I got into agility initially.
So did you, did you start right away with the, with the Border Collies or did you go a different route?
I started with the Border Collies, but it was an accident. It was accidental because when I went to the library, there was a book on Border Collies and there was a book on Australian Shepherds. And in the Border Collie book, they were all black and white. And the Border Collie book, basically the whole book was telling you about how you should not own a Border Collie.
They were for serious people only. And you were not good enough to read one or to own one. They were not for the casual pet owner. And the Australian Shepherd book had all these dogs that were different colors. And they went on and on about how it's just like a Border Collie, only it's easier to live with. which is bullshit.
But anyways, so I went to the shelter and the dog that I found was red and white. Now it had a tail. So I thought, well, well, that's kind of weird. I know that Australian Shepherds don't have tails, but it's red and white and Border Collies only come in black and white. So it must be an Australian Shepherd. So I'll take it. So that's how much I knew.
Well, but I mean, that was not, it wasn't easy at all back then. And as you say, books really, I mean, that's, that's how the knowledge, you know, that's, you read it in a book and it's like, yeah. And you never, you never even ask yourself, well, who is the person behind the bull? Like, who is the outer? Like how, how much that person knows?
Nope, not at all. No question. I mean, it was a book. Someone, they got it to, someone to print it. So it was probably true.
Yes.
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Chapter 5: How does Daisy address the use of aversives in dog training?
Yes, exactly. Oh, my God.
Yeah. So it became apparent pretty quickly that it was a Border Collie, not an Aussie because of its behavior. But whatever, I wanted to do agility and Border Collies and Aussies, I knew they all said they were the best at agility. So that was what I was going for.
I guess, you know, I think it's normal every time anybody starts into something and kind of opens the door, so to speak. It's all excitement. But when did you realize that it's a serious, challenging sport? Or how long did it take for that to kind of sink in and
I was pretty serious about it right away and much more serious than the people around me because again most people they just wanted their dog to not chew on their furniture for at least one day a week and that was kind of the deal and I was I mean I was a super nerdy kid I never played sports I was in the marching band and just something about dog agility in particular really tickled me.
And I from the get go, I was serious. And I think within the first, yeah, it was within the first couple of years, because I remember in 2001, there's an agility magazine called clean run. And of course, I subscribed to it. And I read it religiously. I yeah, yeah. And that still exists. Digital only they don't print anymore. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What common challenges do agility trainers face?
And so in 2001, In the fall of 2001, there was an issue that came out and it was the USA World Team issue and they had gone to Portugal that year and they'd won gold. And it was a really weird year because they had all the…and I found all this out later but it was a pretty interesting year because it was…9-11 happened.
And then they went over to Portugal and they won the gold medal, which was pretty tough for the USA to do because we didn't have YouTube. We couldn't look at the courses from overseas. We really didn't know what was going on over there. So the team would go over blind and hope they had the skills to compete with the Europeans.
So that magazine cover came out and it had all these cool pictures of world championships. And I mean, mind you, I'd gotten my first dog to do agility in 98 and this was 2001. So by then I had another dog and I saw that magazine. I was like, that's it. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be on the world team. That's me. So I was pretty serious from the beginning.
How was it? Were the rules different from what you were doing in the States compared to the world or the Europe?
The rules, I don't know that it was the rules that were so much different, but the course design was very different. And yes, the rules were different and they're still pretty different in the sense that in the United States, you can get a championship title without ever winning a class. And that's true in all the organizations, I think.
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Chapter 7: What is the importance of mental preparation in dog agility?
I think in USDA, you have to win a couple classes in a couple games. And in UKI, the same is true. But in the American Kennel Club, you can get an agility championship without ever winning. And you can advance from the novice up to the highest levels without ever winning. And in Europe and the rest of the world, you only can advance to the next level.
If you win or place, you have to win a few classes or place in more classes to advance. So it's a pretty, it, it ends up creating a pretty different end result, higher levels. And it, it places a different emphasis on, um, speed versus consistency and accuracy and those sorts of things.
Were you all the time in Ohio or were you somewhere else at the time?
No, when I started, I lived in Oregon and it was pretty isolated. So I didn't, I kind of had to, I had a couple of good instructors, but I had to figure a lot of stuff out on my own. There wasn't online, online education just didn't exist. There was a little bit later, I latched onto a really good instructor who lived in Ohio or still lives in Ohio. Her name's Linda Mecklenburg.
And one summer before school started, and I was still on summer break, I drove out to attend a summer camp that she held. And by the end of the summer camp, I was just begging her to take me on as a student, a long distance student, which involved me recording my training, burning it onto a DVD, mailing her the DVD, and then getting email feedback. I was pretty committed.
Very different. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Yes. Those were very different times. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. And okay. I was still in California back then. They had a few groups, like I was in Northern California.
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Chapter 8: How can trainers effectively evaluate their training methods?
There was like a few pretty good groups back then. I used to have... The Bay team was probably one of them. Yeah. I'm so bad with names, but like sometimes when I hear the name, I kind of like, yes, but... A lot of times I just horrible with names and faces. Dog training is different, but
yeah i have a lot of the bay area was a pretty big hot spot i would drive down there for competitions nancy guys nancy guys yeah see this is what uh yeah she was a world team coach for a long long time and before she was the world team coach she was a very successful competitor in her own right um and she was one she's still doing do you know she's still she's still competing she's not coaching anymore but she still competes um and she still teaches yeah
And I remember, I'm almost 100% sure that it was her. She would come because we would do, well, it was called Schutzhund at the time, not IGP.
Yeah, because she had something German.
And she used to come to my club sometimes just to give a few bites to the border collie, just to kind of take the, you know, just to do something else, you know.
Yeah.
And that was how I found out about, you know, fast forward to just a few years ago, that was how you popped up on my radar because I started looking into Michael Ellis' content and I started getting really interested in bite sport stuff and so I started watching people like Michael Ellis and watching people like you because I had a couple of, my dogs were pretty young at the time, my current dogs, they were
too and i really liked the um i really liked the commitment to toy play that the bite sport people have where um there seems to be a much more much more committed to building motivation and engagement and and structured toy play and the structure yeah yeah before you start teaching behaviors and in the agility world there's this big rush to kind of one-up
everybody by showing off all of the behaviors that your little itty bitty puppy has learned, all the tricks.
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