Meet Tracy Middleton - Obedience Instructor

When Diana asked me to join her team at Seattle Agility I was thrilled. I’m very excited to see how the puppies in the Star Puppy class develop throughout their training. I grew up in London, England. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have dogs as part of the family. Throughout my childhood we had a succession of rescue and foster dogs so until I went away to college there was always a dog in my life. Dog training at that time was not at sophisticated as it is now and not so focused on positive reinforcement, Barbara Woodhouse was famous on TV for her dog training shows and all my friends and I who owned dogs tried to emulate her famous English Nanny tone while training our dogs. I was also a keen horse rider and I first saw a version of dog agility at horse shows I was competing at. Some of the dog agility jumps still mimic the jumps you will find in a show jumping course.

Unfortunately as I grew older my busy job in London made it impossible to have any pets so when I moved to Seattle one of the first things I wanted to do was to adopt a dog. We got our first dog Sam from the Bellevue Humane Society and having seen the number of dogs in this one shelter I started to work as a volunteer at the Seattle Animal Shelter. I began by helping to exercise the dogs and working on basic obedience with them to improve their chances of being adopted. After several months I met their senior behavior evaluator and worked as her assistant as she evaluated the dogs to check if they were suitable for adoption and to recognize behaviors to work on to improve their chances of adoption, for example excessive jumping up.. I would also take the dogs out to show perspective adopters and work with them to find the best match for them. The process highlighted for me the need to make sure dogs are well socialized and trained. We have four dogs now, all rescues or strays and it was Mya my little Border collie mix that brought me to Seattle Agility.

When we started agility she was so anxious that she wouldn’t go near the instructor and would jump on me to get reassurance. Now thanks to the patience of Doug and Diana she has blossomed into a much calmer and self confident dog. The success with Mya made me think I should try agility with Tess my Lab mix from the Kent pound. Tess has what Diana calls a Permanent Puppy brain even though she’s nearly seven, a “condition” that means I have become infamous in our neighborhood due to Tess’s exploits. Owning Tess makes me confident that most issues a new owner has with a puppy I’ve probably already experienced. Agility and obedience training has helped Tess become more focused, and I’ve recently started training my Lab Shepherd cross Sam in Rally Obedience.