You’re an athlete on a team of two. Imagine stepping onto a court for a game where only you know the rules but only your partner can touch the ball. Now imagine that the two of you don’t speak the same language. Now that your partner won’t stop eating stuff off the ground.
Good Boy is set in the world of canine agility. You likely know it to see it. The obstacle courses with the bar jumps and the tunnels and dogs absolutely boosting through it all? That’s the one. What you probably don’t know is the level of teamwork and communication going on between dog and handler. It’s very much a team sport.
The basic premise is this: teams of one dog and one human each are presented with a series of physical obstacles. Their goal is to navigate these obstacles in a designated order as quickly as they can. The course has a par completion time based on its length, and points are deducted from a team’s score for each second they are above par as well as for faults such as hesitation and wrong turns. More severe faults, such as knocking over or skipping obstacles, disqualify the team’s entire run.
All that is to say it’s not only about going fast. A clean run at par will beat a sloppy one under. Qualifying scores earn teams titles and unlock higher levels of competition — all the way to champion!
But dogs come in a lot of sizes, don’t they? A daschund might struggle to clear jumps that a mastiff can walk over, which hardly seems fair. That’s where height divisions come into play. Teams compete within groups based on the dog’s height as measured at the shoulders, from 11″ and under all the way to 22″ plus. Jumps are set to different heights (and distances where applicable) for each division. Importantly, each division also has a par course time calculated just for them. Tall dogs cover more ground with each stride, after all.
Creating a course is an art in itself, drafted on a canvas around 100′ a side. Each must contain a certain number and variety of obstacles spaced some minimum distance apart within the ring. Certain obstacles like A-frames and seesaws can’t be placed in sequence with one another or positioned as the first or last of the course, and there are additional limits on obstacles’ approach angles, basically how tight turns can get and how twisty the course ends up. It’s all in the interests of both fairness and safety.
The courses featured in Good Boy are all original. It was a welcome challenge to craft interesting runs with these restrictions in mind. The finale includes an A-frame that challenges duos to clear it twice, each time leading toward a different obstacle!
But the most mindblowing facet of agility is this: dogs know nothing about the course until they start running it.
What.
I know! This brings us back to the team aspect. Before anyone runs, the humans get to examine a map and walk the course to learn it themselves. They imagine how their dog will move from one to the next and… do you see the catch coming? How can a handler guide their dog without slowing them down?
They use cues, words and gestures, to communicate from a distance. With this ability, handlers can take shortcuts to keep up. You could math it out as: (slow human) x (shorter route) = (fast dog) x (longer route). When handlers walk the course prior to their run, they’re actually plotting two separate routes that will allow their team to stay connected throughout while keeping very different paces.
The stunts are cool, but they’re only half the sport.
The habits I built doing nonfiction work carried over to this graphic novel: you’ve gotta do your research. I attended Dallas Agility Working Group meets and consulted with local super-handler Adrienne McLean. She and her dogs have a list of achievements so long it’ll make your head spin.
Agility is the most popular, but it’s just one of many canine sports. Snooker assigns point values to obstacles and challenges teams to create their own sequences for high scores. Flyball is a blisteringly fast relay race over hurdles to fetch and return the ultimate prize: a ball. Treibball is herding sport involving a field of large balls for dogs to score goals with.
There are oodles of videos out there of all of the above and more being performed at the highest levels. Should you have the opportunity, though, I encourage you to watch some beginners. You’ll see dogs gain confidence with each step and handlers glow with pride at every attempt. It’s a relentlessly positive scene. Most folks will even let you pet their dog if you ask.
If you’re looking for a story about how that journey impacts a mismatched boy and dog, my graphic novel Good Boy hits shelves 5/20. Folks in the Dallas area are welcome to join me and my friends in the Richardson Humane Society for a launch event on 5/31 at Interabang Books.
Until then, stay good!