Taking Teamwork Seriously

The increasingly popular human-canine team sport of agility is a relatively recent invention in the long history of animals in sports. It was brought to the United States in the early 1980s from England, where it originated as an entertainment at Crufts, one of the largest dog breed competitions in the world. Inspired by steeplechases and similar horse riding events, agility requires a dog to race through a course of jumps and other obstacles under human guidance. Unlike horse racing, however, agility is primarily a sport of amateurs who train and compete with their own companion animals for pleasure rather than profit. Additionally, since dogs compete in agility off leash, they are more readily viewed by their human partners as independent actors freely choosing to collaborate. While much has been written about horses in sport, Michelle Gilbert and James Gillett assert that the argument “that horse and rider is mutually constituted, that this relationship is sustained through the practice of riding, training and competing, is a topic that has not received sufficient attention in studies of interspecies sport. Furthermore, it is primarily the rider as the athlete rather than the horse as athlete that has been the focus of attention” (Gilbert &; Gillett, 2012, p.3). ² If the scholarship on riding has yet to fully tackle the complexities of collaboration and the role of the horse as agent, the scholarship on dogs in sport is even thinner and has focused almost exclusively on greyhound racing and dog fighting. Both of these activities, often associated with the working classes, became targets of early animal welfare activism in the nineteenth century and were ultimately subjected to government regulation designed to mitigate cruelty to animals as well as associated evils. In contrast to the largely exploitive and coercive practices of dog racing and fighting, agility promotes cooperation between humans and canines for mutual benefit, including the strengthening of social bonds.Cross-species communication and collaboration in agility is comparable in some respects to that found in competitive herding, but agility is divorced from any actual or symbolic economic function. Agility is not imagined as a form of work for dogs, but a form of play. Yet despite the exceptional status of agility in the history of dog sports, and its importance as the vanguard of a growing number of new companion-oriented dog sports (flyball, disc dog, etc.), little research has directly addressed the ethical possibilities of this emerging practice.