12/27/2024
I and the entire Clean Run staff were extremely sorry to hear of the passing of Clean Run magazine co-founder and agility pioneer Bud Houston. He and I started corresponding in the summer of 1994 and met in person at the USDAA Nationals that year. It was his vision to connect the small but growing group of agility instructors across the country and share knowledge. He began documenting weekly training sets for Advanced and Intermediate classes; weekly because instructors need to have a new plan for their classes every week.
Bud declared that the Clean Run was in the public domain so we could share everything we were learning about agility. He circulated the newsletter free of charge and encouraged people to copy and share. He solicited training plans from the clubs where he had judging assignments and through people he met on the original agility email list. Often they were published just as he received them, handwritten and drawn. He solicited artwork for the covers and even created his own agility drawings to publish.
He soon realized that people wanted more than training exercises. People wanted to improve their agility skills, but they didn’t know what to do; they wanted information on how to handle the training sets: “The original purpose of this publication was to record what we do in training each week and allow us to do empirical learning from observed behavior. In that role, it has been effective. It has always been an editorial philosophy of the Clean Run to set up the training without dictating how a set must be handled. However, I recognize fires that burn for specific performance problems and issues. Consequently, whenever possible I will publish tips and techniques on specific performance issues.”
Competitors who Bud described as serious students of the game were also interested in Clean Run. It was growing beyond lesson plans for instructors. Agility enthusiasts wanted subscriptions to Clean Run because they were located all over the country and eventually the world. They couldn’t rely on going to the same trials as Bud where they could pick up copies for free; they needed it mailed to them. And enough people wanted copies that Bud couldn’t keep photocopying the newsletter at his workplace. He realized that he needed help producing the magazine. I had a writing and publishing background and had just left corporate America to pursue teaching agility and making equipment full-time. So we teamed up and went on an adventure together. We didn’t collect a paycheck for our work for almost a year because we wanted to keep putting money back into the business. As the newsletter grew into a magazine and we started accepting ads, Bud insisted that the revenue from the ads go into adding pages to the magazine and into new projects like publishing books of training plans. The goal was to keep putting state-of-the-art information out there for people.
He was never interested in the retail portion of the business that we branched into. Bud always wanted to find new ways to share agility information and new agility projects. He was passionate about Gamblers (though he always referred to distance challenges by the original name from England – Jokers) and published many sets of distance training exercises after he left Clean Run to pursue teaching agility on a smaller basis. He always had lots of ideas in his head and could churn out pages and pages of exercises and information.
Bud was never afraid to express his opinion about any agility matter, big or small. While I didn’t always agree with him, it was a trait I admired. He wasn’t afraid to rattle cages; he always said what was on his mind. He taught me a lot of things about being yourself and speaking out regardless of what discomfort it causes, although I didn’t fully understand these lessons until much later in life. He could make me mad one minute and leave me laughing until it hurt the next.
His desire to support others in agility and foster good experiences with their dogs followed Bud through his life. At his time of death, he had two year-long courses sharing in-depth knowledge in the Clean Run Learning Center. We were looking forward to the next round of his course, "Jokers Notebook," in particular because he decided to lower the price and change to an "everyone works" format to make it more accessible to all. It also seemed like he was ready to embark on some other new projects. He wrote me at the beginning of December posing this question: “Imagine an agility trial, like a typical CPE or AKC trial, that awards NO RIBBONS. Instead, the trial is run like a sweepstakes (horserace) and cash money is awarded to the top placements. [So the money typically spent by the host club on ribbons becomes prize money.]”
We spoke about the idea several times, in the final email I received from him he said, “I feel that a trial giving money for placement can fill a niche in the agility world. ALL OF THAT BEING SAID, this is a job beyond my ambition and capabilities. When I was younger and wits were sharp and muscles strong it would have been an engaging project. But at this point, I’ll content myself with being a spectator to this moment in history.”
Bud never stopped being an agility pioneer.
--Monica Percival
Advances In Animal Behavior Where Education and Positive Reinforcement are the Key Ingredients in Pe 
