More on Equipment Safety

AgilityNerd's recent blog is titled Ban Metal Jumps Now!  I recommend reading it (and the other equipment safety blog posts on Steve's site).  Also check out the stories of incidents that people are writing in response to Steve's blog post and on his facebook page.  Steve said that recently a top dog in agility went to an eye specialist after hitting a jump cup.  The dog came close to losing an eye.   This is very scary.   There is a picture of an eye injury on bcagility's blog. 

As well as eye injuries I personally know of at least one dog that hit a metal jump standard which resulted in a soft tissue injury.  When Nessa was young she misjudged when going over a metal jump and I remember her crying after hitting it.  I didn't have it on video so not sure exactly what happened but I am sure that if it had been a PVC jump it would not have hurt so much.  

My friend's dog's tail got caught in a PVC jump standard that had bolts to hold up the bars.  He ended up dragged it around.  Luckily the dog was not spooked by the experience but other dogs may have been.    

I am willing to pay extra for safer equipment.  In fact if it was allowed I would bring my own safer jumps to events.  

I don't want to see any dogs injured when it could have been prevented if the equipment had been safer.  I definitely don't want to see a career ending injury occur. 

 

Equipment safety

I believe that we should do what we can to make agility safer especially when it comes to the equipment. 

Recently Daisy Peel put up a podcast on equipment safety. Linda Mecklenburg wrote a blog post as well.  Both Daisy and Linda talk about things that I hadn't considered as well as things that I had.  Guy Blancke also has some pictures of some questionable equipment on one of his webpages.  Some of the equipment is so bad that I think that I would have pulled my dog from the event.

I started out with what I now consider to be unsafe practice equipment.  My jumps were the equivalent of stick in the ground weave poles with bolts holding up the bars.  At that time though I had a steady dog and we were not doing tight turns.   We expected the dog to jump near the center of the bar.  Things have dramatically changed since then.  My dogs are running faster and they are turning tightly and slicing jumps.

This is Taari's Mom Angel posing with some of her ribbons.  Note the bolts on the vertical post as well as the horizontal bar holding the ribbons.  This bar was really one of the vertical ones for a jump. 

Nessa has received a cut under the eye from to a metal jump cup.  She was lucky.

Currently most of my jumps have the jump cup strips on them.  I am in the process of buying a couple of jumps that I think will be even safer than the ones that I have.  Once I get them I will post some pictures.

I feel that I should not have to make handling decisions based on whether or not I think that the jump is safe for a tight turn or for that matter because of any equipment safety concerns. 

Before I forget I am very happy that years ago the AAC implemented a rule that weave poll stripes were to be painted on and tape was not to be used.  Dogs were rubbing against the tape and this was also causing cuts on their faces under their eyes. Organizations are making positive changes and I hope that this continues.

I hope to find more time this winter to post more about equipment safety.