My name is Maximillian Thompson. I’m currently seventeen years old and am from northeastern Minnesota. I started training for Rally, Agility, and Junior Showmanship back in late 2014, when I got my first dog, an energetic field Golden Retriever named Stella. She was one and a half at the time. Her family had given her up to a friend of theirs who trained service dogs, but Stella was too “needy” and high energy to live in an apartment all day. We had a local dog training school where we trained twice a week for agility and obedience and had a fenced-in Agility area at home that we used. Next, I began by helping a family friend show her Papillons in the conformation ring and assisting her at Agility trials. In late 2015, Stella and I began showing in Junior Showmanship after joining our local AKC club and began Rally the following spring in several venues. We started taking Junior Showmanship classes at another school later in spring. Stella earned her RN in September 2016, and we planned to continue competing towards a RAE. I volunteered during our club’s summer show, and our winter Agility trial. Through these events, I met many breeds I had not been familiar with before, including an Icelandic Sheepdog. That winter we started going to Agility trials to compete. We moved five hours to the North near Canada in spring 2017 but hoped to drive down to the trials and shows to continue competing. Unfortunately, Stella started declining in health, even though she was only four. Sadly, in September 2017 she passed away from lymphoma at four and a half years old.
In October of that year, through the wonderful dog show community, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who bred Icelandic Sheepdogs. I have had a soft spot for the Spitz breeds for many years, thanks to a Samoyed therapy dog I met in the hospital when I was eight. My family traditionally had owned herding breeds. As mentioned earlier, I had met an Icelandic Sheepdog at the summer show our club had put on the previous year.
Long story short, we ended up meeting halfway in Milwaukee, and I ended up getting Perla, a one-and-a-half-year-old Icelandic Sheepdog from Iceland. Going from a high-energy sporting breed to a high-energy herding spitz was a major change. Furthermore, Spitz breeds have somewhat of a reputation for being stubborn and difficult to train for whatever reason, and I was starting with an adult female! A lot of training techniques that worked for my Golden Retriever did not work as well for Perla. She was not inclined to more than 3x repetition on anything, and rather than being food-motivated, she was more praise-motivated. To complicate things further, we now lived in a small town two hours away from the nearest nice training center or AKC training club and did not have any flat land to practice Agility. Winter also usually lasts from mid-October through the end of May. Thankfully, those rumors of being untrainable proved to be myths. While there’s a different technique needed when training Icelandic Sheepdogs, they in no way deserve the label of “impossible to train and disobedient” that they have been given through the years. We started practicing Obedience on walks in the woods, trails, and small exercises in the house. First on-leash, then moving to off-leash when she was a little better.
Most of Rally can be accomplished with standard obedience training. I had lists of all the signs and descriptions from my previous dog, so we practiced those in our driveway, parking lots, and on walks. Something I have found, with both Golden Retrievers and Icelandic Sheepdogs, is that mine tend to do much better off-leash than on-leash for Obedience and Rally. I’ll often start training a new exercise off-leash, then move to on-leash occasionally if applicable. While this may be the reverse of a lot of people, I have found that it seems to keep the dog more interested and happier while working. I would not recommend trying this until your dog likes to stay with you; however, it is best to work inside an enclosed space when starting out, whether it is a fenced-in yard, a ring at your training center, or your living room. It is also important to remember that every dog is going to be a little, or a lot different, so a balanced training system may work best for one, and a 90/10 positive/negative system may work much better for another. My Icelandic Sheepdog is far softer than my Golden Retriever ever was, so it is very rare that she needs any form of aversive other than a verbal “no”. The most useful command I think is “leave it”. Then your dog learns that they are rewarded if they stop sniffing something or quit obsessing over a spot on the floor, rather than a person just snapping the leash to get them to ignore something. This is especially great for the conformation ring with all the dropped bait, and they will usually keep their feet in place with the command since it is not physically moving anything.
Another ability we have been working on is free-stacking and presenting in the Conformation ring. There is a popular myth that a dog cannot do both Performance and Conformation events. People think they will do horribly in the Conformation ring because they will not know how to stand, or that they will refuse to do any Obedience Commands, because they will only want to stand. It is possible to train for both, if you use specific commands for everything, and use different equipment (i.e., only use your show chain and lead for training Conformation/Junior Showmanship, and your buckle and webbing/leather leash for Obedience and Agility training). As with my Golden Retriever, Perla and I started in Rally in another venue before beginning AKC, due to a lack of AKC Rally trials in our state. Last September, Perla earned her RN in Michigan, then her RI in Iowa this February. She finished her AKC Championship this February in Illinois, proving that you can indeed show in multiple sports. For our last show, I decided to try our hand at competition Obedience for fun, since we had never done it. This last weekend, in Louisville, KY, Perla earned her first Obedience title, a Beginner Novice. It is the first Obedience title on any dog I have owned. She also earned a Rally Advanced leg.
We planned to finish our Juniors’ career with Rally Excellent and CD (Novice Obedience) titles, but that will not be the case as our show needed to be closed partway through the weekend, naturally, due to COVID-19, and there will not be any more shows before I age out, but my dog is a working breed, and loves working, so we will continue with Obedience and Rally during spring break from college and summer if possible. I hope to someday be able to compete in Agility again with her as well; she likes it, but we cannot practice a full course here currently. Training with your dog will make your relationship so much stronger and more in-tune than it would ever be otherwise, and I would not trade the years of trials and shows for anything. Keep training even if you cannot show for a while now, and you and your dog will be better for it. Work hard and it will pay off! Best of luck!