Since then I’ve been blogging about it and I’ve defined TACT a bit wider than it might actually be. I’m truly sorry about that, I didn’t mean to mislead anyone. My purpose with heading the things I’ve been doing “TACT” has been dual:

1. According to Swedish manners and ethics that is the right thing to do. If you are really inspired by someone else’s method you indicate the source of the information you get the best way you possible can. Otherwise someone could blame you for trying to steel their ideas.
2. Sara and Hanna told me that the people that invented TACT will come back to Sweden to give some classes and certificate people in their method. I thought that they could need some advertising while only a handful of people in Sweden seem to know about the methods existence.

When I first heard about the method I googled to try to find out more, to learn more, and to be able to state quotations correctly. The only thing I found was that there had been a registered trademark in the US (not in the EU), but it expired in 2010, and I didn’t find any homepage of the owner Julia Robitalle. So I decided that the proper thing to do was to refer to the name of the method it self. Obviously that was the wrong decision.

From now on, and dating back, I will use the heading Doggie-Zen for this type of training. Actually that’s also a more proper heading when most of the things I’ve been telling about under the heading TACT are much wider than TACT.

Doggie-Zen is not only the name of the Swedish company where I take classes’ whit Rasken. Doggie Zen is about self-control and that really is the big issue I and Rasken are dealing with. Doggie Zen is inspired (that word again…) by Zen-Buddhism where the faith state that humans should give up something in their lifes on earth to get a greater reward in heaven. With dogs the time span is shorter – the dog should just take it a bit easy and wait for us to say that it’s ok before it’s on it’s way to the thing it badly wants right now.

Another “trademark” (I have not found any registered trademark) is Greg Derretts wonderful handling system from which I have been taken I great deal of inspiration and which I also teach. Of course I would never say that I teach Greg Derretts’ system of handling, only he could know exactly what that is.

Most of the classes I give (and it’s not many I only do this as a sideline) are about the subject “agility” and of course handling is just part of it and not everyone wants to do Gregs’ system. But I also, every semester, try to give a class based on Greg Derrett´s DVD “Great Dog… Shame about the Handler!” on the subject “double box”. That’s not my sexiest class, I suppose, because that’s the only one I have a hard time to fill up. I do not make any profit from this class. So, why am I doing it? It’s actually quit simple – I want Greg back to Malmö every year and I would love to get him to Stockholm. So I want to get people interested in his system of handling.

If I’m doing something wrong or questionable, please do tell me.

It occurs a lot of culture clashes when dog people all over the world try to exchange ideas, concepts and services and I think this is one of those clashes.

In Sweden, all of the dog clubs are nonprofit and the idea of commercializing knowledge about dogs are for many Swedes a controversial question(!), as strange as it might seem.

We are far from the culture of suing each other that, to me, seem the case in the United States. Some dog people in Sweden actually are publishing books and DVDs whish obviously and mainly are based on somebody else’s idea or concept, and are getting away with it(!).

Sometimes doing the best you can, based of what you know, simply isn’t good enough. Personally I’m happy to learn more if somebody is willing to teach me something about the ethics of trademarks, world wide.

/Mija Jansson

I’m not really happy with his contacts and I’ve done som thinking about it and a friend got an idea that worked very well after improving the first prototype:

/Mija

All dog breeds are unique and should therefore be conserved. The traditional approach in dog breeding is selective breeding. Selective breeding decreases genetic variation which is the foundation for adaptation. Mother Nature doesn’t do it this way. In nature the ones that are fit enough survive and have descendants. Selective breeding favors a certain kind of animal and thereby decreases the variation.

Genetic variation is the foundation of all biological diversity. Diversity is the only thing that really matters, if the environment of a wild animal (or the customer demand of buyers of domestic animals) changes, as genetic variation is necessary for adaptation. Of course, there is no goal in itself to conserve breeds, as there are, that have no use today or that are not healthy. And all breeds, regardless of original use, need to adapt mentally to the society of today.

The Convention on Biological Diversity implies that every country should conserve old breeds that make a cultural and biological contribution. Our traditional Swedish dog breeds are a cultural heritage. But why do we not make these breeds better? Why just conserve when we can improve the breeds? It all comes back to the genetic variation. Of course, we might want to change or improve some characters. But we can never afford losing the genetic variation; if we do, we have no basis for future development.

To lose a lot of genetic variation might be a short process; to get it back is almost impossible. The only way of getting new variation, without crossbreeding, is to sit and wait for the mutations. An argument against conservation of dog breeds is that small populations are unavoidably inbred. But the goal in conservation genetic management is always to increase the size of the populations as large population sizes are beneficial for genetic variation.

Without this variation, there is nothing left to adapt when things change. If we do not keep in mind that we need to conserve the variation within and between different dog breeds, we might lose the foundation for adaptation.

/Mija Jansson

This weekend Råttan competed in the Swedish Championships. We ended up in 17th place.

/Mija

Earlier this week Rasken did his first run in class II, and won!

Happy Regards Mija

I have got some theoretical issues with the tunnels.

ISSUE ONE is about the Lead Out Pivot. My first question is wheter it would be inconsistant to do a LOP att the end of a U-tunnel. Example:

I understand that there are other ways to do it but I wonder if the LOP at the end of the tunnel are ok or not?

ISSUE TWO is about the tunnels in general, I have a problem with us not caring about positional ques of the frontcrosses when handling tunnels. For example in the AKC Invitational Final Course I quess everyone would handle 13 dog on right, rear cross 14 and then pick the dog up at right to the A-frame?

I feel like the “picking the dog up” is a front cross and it´s positional que should be at the A-frame, shouldn´t it?

One could argue that the dog dosn´t know because it is in the tunnel but we wouldn´t take that for an argument to blindcross for example, would we?

Help me I´m confused!

/Mija

Rasken:

/Mija