"Too Tall" Tex

Tex was my first agility dog. Not the family's first - that was Maya. I watched my wife and a friend of ours train and run Maya all the way to MACH2 and I thought "that looks both easy and fun." So I found Tex and designated him as my first agility dog.

He was born in March 2003, and we brought him home a couple of months later. Here is some rare archived footage of Tex as a puppy:

Aw, isn't he cute? The other dog in the clip is our old (and now departed) poodle mix Scooter, who Tex learned was a great deal of fun to torment.

So Tex and I started training for agility, which proved to not be any where near as easy as I anticipated. To make a long story short, I made every training mistake in the book, and some other mistakes that had not been published yet. But we forged ahead and tried our best. Here is some more rare footage, this of our first ever run at an AKC trial:

Nothing like a well trained dog being run by a skilled handler, eh? The AKC World Team tryouts are going on this weekend, and I bet alot of runs there looked just like this one.

We improved some after this, but not a whole lot - I should put together a blooper reel in fact. Tex is a great dog - smart, loyal, fun, energetic, kind to man and beast, and relatively clean. But he would rather stick his head in a bucket of live snakes than run agility, so I don't ask him to run (or do the snake thing either). We go for walks at Eisenhower Park instead.