THE BALLSPORT DOGS
the trueball ballsport dogs
the ‘invisable-ball’ ballsport dogs
Trueball – the ball sports that use a ball in any way,
or who use anything the dog carries in his mouth.
various sports using different kinds of balls,
dumbbells, disc, or other small objects,
either in teams or singly.
The dogs may herd balls, carry balls in their mouths,
push balls, drop balls, walk on top of a ball, etc.
The ball is often a rope with a knot or knots tied in it,
or a saucer shaped plastic disc.
Despite dogs loving to play ball, and the fact that
people have played ball with their dogs for as long as
there have been balls, this is still mostly an unorganized sport.
Invisaball –
This includes dog sports that don’t use a ball,
and the dog doesn’t carry anything in his mouth.
But it excludes all bloodsports. It excludes any hunting event using live or dead animals. It excludes any event using any animal except dogs and people, for example, it excludes herding sheep. It excludes conformation events.
Invisaball group includes lure coursing, obedience, and agility type events.
Think of these events like decathalons.
Each club could have it’s own sport.
But an umbrella club could host all multiple sport clubs, and determine best overall score.
This will be important if ballsport with dogs catches on, because dogs that only do one thing, get way too focused on that one thing.
By having overall winners, whose scores from different events are merged, or whose ranks are tallied together (lowest number wins), we nip in the bud, specialization at a task that has no use.
If you are breeding dogs that guide blind people, you want a dog that is a specialist.
But if you are breeding dogs for a sport that has no use in the real world, what happens to the losers? They are often too fast, athletic, and driven for pet homes.
I think it would be better to have single sports for those who want that specialization, but to have tracking, drill, tricks, lure, dancing, etc as parts of various triathons, pentathon, decathons. This will produce a dog who is very trainable.
Dogs that are easily trained for multiple differing events are useful, and more apt to produce useful puppies.
Because all of these events would be off-leash (for point shows) and none of them would be based on appearence, the dogs selected for broodstock would have to be socialable or well trained enough to participate in performing off leash under voice and hand signal control.
Participants will quickly figure out the value of a good dog, that trains easily, and is co-operative, which is what pet puppy buyers are most likely to be happiest with too.
Dogs whose owners invest the time to train their dogs for multiple tasks, don’t move on to another dog, they keep the one they’ve trained and are proud of.
Dogs who are good at different things are less extreme than dogs that focus on one thing. One note dogs don’t fit in to any slot but the one they specialize in.
Of course, all of this just goes right out the window if we are talking about having this in America, where the people who are already into exhibiting dogs, don’t have a system of ear tattoos, or even a microchip screening before showing.
They’d have to abandon the old system, or ignore it and get the pet people into a new organization.