12/17/2024
Leave it to the series finale of the ridiculously absurd show “What We Do In The Shadows” to get me all emotional about goodbyes. Damn vampires!
On December 6, I said goodbye to probably the best agility dog I’ll ever have. It’s been really hard adjusting to her absence, but I’m also filled with gratitude for what she taught me over her very long career. And I’m thankful her career ended when I decided it should, though I sobbed like a baby in the crating area after her last national event.
On paper, Fran’s agility stats look pretty good, I guess. She earned her first gold medal in 2012, and her last in 2023. There were so many medals and podiums and Qs and ribbons in between. So many that I took two giant boxes of mostly blue ribbons to Austin Creative Reuse before I moved.
She went to Cynosport nine times, the U.S. Open three times (before it was cool), and AKC NAC twice. She brought home ribbons from nearly all of them. She won the UKI National Finals in 2014, so long ago it’s been wiped from their historical results page, haha. She won Steeplechase finals in 2017 at P8 with a time faster than all the 10” championship and 12” performance dogs. She is, I believe, the only dog of her breed to represent the USA on an international team, at IFCS in 2015. She was a Cardigan Welsh Corgi by the way if you didn’t know, and not a Pem with a tail. I stopped having to explain that to most people after a few years as she started winning things.
She has a MACH, ADCH-Bronze, PDCH-Bronze, IAC3 and IWAC3. Eleven titling championships over three organizations is a lot. I actually didn’t even know about the IAC3/IWAC3 till this year, but she earned them in January 2020 (thanks, AgilityNerd's results blender thing!)
And oh yeah, she was on the cover of Clean Run magazine too!
But none of that would have been any fun without Fran being Fran. She didn’t come out of the gate perfect or even remotely good at agility. I mean, I was pretty new, too. One of my first instructors told me, years later, she thought Fran was going to be too distracted to ever even compete at trials.
But eventually we got it together, and she was my first agility dog to do all those big things. And man, how I’d love to tell her to grab her leash and walk in the ring with her again. Because the best thing I learned from Fran is that nothing matters unless your dog is all in. It’s not worth it otherwise. Fran was always all in and ready to go, and we always had a blast together. There was nothing like it.
And that lesson has and will guide all my training now. It’s why dear sweet Walter hasn’t competed in 5 years, though he’s plenty happy to do obstacles for cookies. It’s why tiny Nessa just went to her first national event at age 4. Ness is fun in her own way, though it pretty much makes me laugh out loud how very different from Fran she is. I have to check placements when she runs clean … Fran just always won. I’m impressed every time we play, though, at how far Ness has come in her confidence and resilience, and she has her own kind of enthusiasm at the in gate now.
Fran would want everyone to have nothing but the absolute best time out there. Winning ribbons and standing on boxes really is very very fun, but how you get there is way more important.
Thanks for everything, Fran. You truly were the best.
