Finding the Right Rescue
Tucson local also supports her club and agility community.
This article was originally published in the June 2024 OVERview digital magazine.
In 2011, Kirsten Lake of Tucson, Arizona, adopted a dog from a local rescue and started agility classes to give her shy dog a fun job. As a handler, she wasn’t hooked on the sport right away. It took her a while to understand the strategy and complexity of the courses and even longer to enjoy trials.
“I was never motivated by the ribbons and titles, but eventually I realized that trials are also a place to compete against yourself and test your skills,” Kirsten said. “They’re the best way to be challenged by new courses and discover new training goals. But while I was figuring it out, it was my dog and my friends that kept me motivated to keep attending classes and trials.”
Kirsten started looking for her third dog for agility in 2018, but she didn’t find a match until a year later when the Sanctuary Project (a no-kill rescue group in Tucson) reached out looking for an active home for a 6-month-old Cattle Dog/Border Collie mix. Adopting Ren helped Kirsten realize how important it is to find the right rescue to work with.
“The Sanctuary Project’s top concern is making sure their dogs are placed in the right home,” Kirsten said. “They asked me lots of questions and provided me with lots of information before I even met Ren. They will always take a dog back, and they provide support to adopters after the adoption.”
Training Ren for agility was fun and relatively easy, but as they started to compete, Kirsten realized he never really relaxed at a trial. His tension often built during multi-day events and negatively affected his performance. She worked on relaxation strategies for a while, until she wondered why she was forcing the issue when they could simply enter a single-day trial.
“Every dog teaches us something. Ren has taught me to be aware of when we are really having fun and when we aren’t,” she said. “By knowing when not to compete, I’ve learned how to maximize the joy we get from the sport.”
Because Kirsten minimizes Ren’s number of runs, she will only compete in the individual tournaments at Cynosport®, which this year takes place in her hometown. “We will have fun with the courses, but I’m mostly excited to watch everyone else run and support the event!”
Supporting the local club
Kirsten lives in a historic neighborhood in downtown Tucson, surrounded by beautiful mountain ranges for hiking but unfortunately a tiny yard. As she continued her agility journey, she built a practice field at her parents’ house outside the city and joined Saguaro Scramblers Agility Club for their practice offerings.
Kirsten is part of the committee that organizes Tucson USDAA trials. She also helps the club manage its equipment and has been redesigning its website, which she says is still a work in progress.
Our old website served us well for many years, providing background information on the club and notices for meetings and trials. But there was a point when we realized it could be improved to make it more user-friendly for both our club members and those interested in us from the community,” she explained. “I used Wix to create our new website because it allow
s me some flexibility in design while still being simple enough that other club members can easily learn how to manage it.
“Another key consideration for me and the club’s leadership was to educate people interested in the sport. We get lots of people who contact us, but they really don’t know what agility is. We have an ‘About Agility’ tab that includes the sport’s history and more about the club, but I also want to create an overview section of what agility looks like with explanations and video links. I hope to add that this summer.”
Outside her agility life, Kirsten works at the University of Arizona providing research support. Even her dogs have participated in research through the Arizona Canine Cognition Center; most recently, Ren participated in an eye-tracking study to assess dogs’ ability to recognize images on a screen.