IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT!  I saw him standing there, behind the gate, looking at me, he was tall, dark and handsome.  Our eyes met, I could feel the chemistry between us.  I said “Hello Handsome!”.  He promptly kissed my hand.  I suggested a walk in the park.  He asked me to throw him a ball.  Then I tickled him, and he fell over on the ground laughing, showing me his wonderful sense of humor and his gorgeous white teeth.  I told him “You will always be mine!”

That was how I met my Catahoula, Boris, at the Humane Society in the Tampa Bay area, Florida on Memorial Day weekend in 2001.  He was a young adult, approximately 1 ½ years old, and had been thrown over the 6 foot tall fence surrounding the Humane Society one night with no paperwork and no name.  The Humane Society told me he was a “Cattledog”  --someone suggested  to me that he might be a “Catahoula” or “Catahoosie” or “Chatahoosie”.  With a little internet research I was able to determine that he was a Catahoula. 

After two obedience training classes where my instructor told me to “trust your dog” and hundreds of hours at the local off-leash dog park, a friend suggested that we enroll our high energy dogs in a Flyball class. 

Flyball races place two teams of four dogs each, racing side-by-side over a 51 foot long course. Each dog must run, in relay fashion, over  4 jumps, trigger a flyball box which releases a tennis ball, retrieve the ball, and return over the jumps. The next dog is released to run the course but can't cross the start/finish line until the previous dog has returned over all 4 jumps and reached the start/finish line. The first team to have all 4 dogs finish the course without any errors wins the heat.

We quickly saw that in order to have our dogs succeed in Flyball, we would need to set up regular home training sessions in addition to our weekly classes with the team.  At first, I moved all of my furniture into two lines so that we would have one long alleyway in order to teach our dogs to run in straight line over a jump--back and forth between us.  Later, we bought an old Flyball box and a mat to roll out over the floor from the back wall of the living room all the way through the house to the front door.  Our dogs progressed quickly through the 40 plus behaviors they needed to learn.  Finally, we ended our home training with setting up an abbreviated Flyball course in my friend’s back yard.  Neighborhood children would come over to watch us play Flyball when we called our dogs and by the dog’s happy barking.  Boris was ready for his first tournament in 5 months where he did well earning his first Flyball title  Flyball Dog (FD) and his Flyball Dog Excellent (FDX) title one month later.

Boris was quickly recognized by his teammates as being a focused, eager to please dog who was never a threat to another dog in the racing lanes, was a natural athlete, and was a laid-back personality.  Off the racing ring, he was all Catahoula and would respond to any dog in his face.  He was asked repeatedly to run with new dogs because he would always do his job to “get the ball and bring it to Momma”.  On the rare occasions where one of the new, smaller dogs got in Boris’ way in the racing ring, he would just jump over them! 

TITLES:

NAFA titles--FD, FDX, FDCH, FDCH-S, FDCH-G, FM

NAFA #6 Louisiana Catahoula (Lifetime Points Earned)

U-FLI titles—Top Flight, TF-I, TF-II, TF-III

U-FLI #3 La Catahoula Leopard Dog (Lifetime Points Earned)