The President’s Award for the best dog publication of 2008 went to The Agility Advantage (Health and Fitness for the Canine Athlete), by Chris Zink.  The book also won the Eukanuba Canine Health Award.

With agility ever more popular, it’s great to see a comprehensive book on dog agility, by an expert, being so recognized.

Here is what’s in the book… quite a range of topics:

Introduction to the Agility Dog
How Dogs Look
How Dogs Move

Getting Started
Picking a Performance Partner
Your Pup and Parvo
Early Spay-Neuter: Considerations for the Canine Athlete
Puppy Exercise

Nutrition Nuggets
Food Facts
Water, Water
What Is an Ideal Weight?

Exercise for Agility Dogs
Exercise: How Much and What Kind?
Indoor Exercises
To Tread or Not to Tread
Cross Training
Front Leg Exercises
Fetch and Tug
Before and After Exercise
I Can’t Run

Musculoskeletal Problems: Diagnosis, Treatment,
and Rehabilitation
Spotting Lameness
Recommended Health Checks
Dogwalk Slips
A-frame Heights
Darn Those Slats!
Cranial Cruciate Ligament Rupture: Prevention and Repair
Cranial Cruciate Ligament Rehabilitation
Flashy Heeler
Carpal Arthritis
Hyperextension of the Hock
Dog Podiatry
Knocked Bars

Diseases and Conditions of Agility Dogs
Travel Stress
Hot, Hot, Hot
Hypothyroidism
Addison’s Disease
Canine Influenza

Agility Seniors
Too Old?
Best Exercise to Promote Longevity

Author Christine Zink is both a veterinarian and a Ph.D. She consults on many aspects of sports medicine for dogs and she is skilled at creating training and conditioning programs for individual dogs. She teaches workshops too. I was impressed that she has won over seventy title in agility, obedience, tracking, and conformation with a wide variety of dogs. She has also written several other books.

Find out more about The Agility Advantage at Dogwise.

Or click here to see it at Amazon: The Agility Advantage Health and Fitness for the Canine Athlete)

The Agility Advantage, by Chris Zink is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Be warned, though, that it may get you interested in doing agility with your puppy or dog. That happened to Jean Donaldson, author of The Culture Clash and other books, who said, “This book made me want to immediately start doing agility! A fabulous weaving of learning theory into the latest agility teaching technology. The games and proofing exercises are truly first-rate.”

Angelica Steinker, author of Click and Play Agility, starts the book out by saying, “If I had the opportunity to live my life as a dog, I’d be a Border Collie.” Why? She explains that “Working and learning are addictive to me.” This thorough book shows that even if she is doomed to remain a human, she did bring boundless, Border Collie-like energy to the task of writing this book. (I’ve written several books myself, and I must be one of those breeds that takes a lot of sofa breaks!)

She describes numerous games, organized in what she calls the click and play pyramid: attention, consistency, attitude and motivation, self-control, and win-win. The back book cover describes this pyramid:

The Click and Play Pyramid is made up of five layers. The bottom layer, which everything else builds on, is attention. The dog gives the handler attention and vice versa. Consistency—the next layer—is critical to the dog’s learning process. Without consistency, the dog’s learning is slowed or stopped. Consistency leads to the next layer, which is attitude and motivation. Are both you and your dog having fun? Fun can be exciting, and excitement can lead to issues with self-control. Self-control is the fourth layer. Both dog and handler’s self-control are critical to an agility team’s success. The pinnacle of the pyramid is the concept of win/win training. Ideally, in all interactions both the handler and the dog win. Use this book and the Click and Play Pyramid concepts to help you and your dog become the best agility team you can be!

People who have actually used the book are very enthusiastic about how it brings clicker training and agility training together, in ways that are great fun. It even has some charts you can use for keeping track of your progress! To read reviews of the book at Dogwise, and to get it if you decide to, click on the image of the book cover… and I promise you won’t find yourself turned into a Border Collie!

(Umm, can I really promise that?)

(Here is a link to Click and Play Agility at Amazon, but when I was there, they didn’t carry the book… just had a used copy.)

Clicker Training Meets Agility is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

It’s a long read, but inspiring in terms of dogs and people connecting, even if you AREN’T planning any agility training yourself.

Here’s a bit I liked:

On the first day after Mum adopted me at 12 weeks, I learned my first foundation skill. I didn’t know it then, because agility wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye. But that foundation skill has been very important in every run and every class and every practice we have done in agility in the past three years.

What was the skill?

I’ll leave that question hanging in the air. If you do go to the blog, the question is answered a little ways down from the top.

By the way, I found this because “Johann the Dog” is one of the people, umm, dogs, I follow at Twitter, an enjoyable social networking site. There’s a link to it on every page of my blog.

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The Foundation of Agility Training is a post from: Training Dogs Blog