Drill Team

Its official – Reyna and I will not be on the canine drill team next year. After talking for over an hour, Sylvie finally came out and admitted that she didn’t want Reyna on the team. She had several reasons, of course…..
1 – Reyna didn’t seem to be having fun. Well, of course, she isn’t having fun. Any well-trained dog is going to get bored when she has to hold a sit/stay for 20 minutes because the other dogs keep breaking.
2 – I didn’t seem to be having fun. Of course not. My dog and I were being picked on every practice. And the group practiced every week starting in January, and we did a whopping 3 demos all year.
3 – She’s concerned about the liability if Reyna snaps and attacks another dog. Reyna’s never physically gone after another dog without provocation, so maybe we should *all* consider exercising more control over our animals.
4 – She’s sure that I would be stressed because I would be worrying about her nerves if she felt the need to say something to me about Reyna. Her nerves are soooo far down my list of concerns…

We also discussed the fact that she thinks I make excuses for Reyna’s behavior, while I look at it as more pointing out the actual circumstances of the incident. For example, if Reyna barks at Rosie, I’m making excuses for Reyna when I say that Rosie growled at Reyna first. I hate to hurt her feelings, but I’m not going to correct Reyna for barking at a dog that growls at her.

She kept telling me that she can’t control the team members, and that the team should be fun. I agree the team should be fun, but I don’t agree with the control issue. She’s the team leader. If people aren’t doing what she wants them to, she needs to say something immediately. Not let it go for 4 months. And she kept talking about how she loses money at every practice and demo….if that’s the case, why is she doing it?

Several other issues were brought up, and I’m not sure about Sylvie, but I wasn’t exactly happy with how things ended. I felt (and still feel) that an apology is due us, but she didn’t seem to think she should apologize for anything. She also said she wants me on the team, so if I want to bring Duncan, we’d be welcome. That won’t happen. We did agree that Reyna and I would come out to the 4 demos she’s planning this year, and do a Search and Rescue demo for them. Duncan will finish his class with her (we only have two sessions left), and Reyna and I will participate in next year’s SAR class (Donny runs it, not Sylvie), and after that, we really won’t have much contact with her, aside from the SAR demos. I see no reason to stress myself and my dog out because of her concerns.