AlmaguinNews.com - The lady and her dogs: a labour of love

POWASSAN – It’s a dog’s life for Sandy Briggs who has spent years working with canines of all shapes and sizes. The Powassan dog trainer, handler, breeder, judge and boarding kennel owner admits she won’t make a fortune from her canine passion, “but I do it because it’s a lot of fun,” she said.

Briggs, who immigrated to Canada from Britain in 1954, says dogs and other animals have always played a key role in her life.

“I worked for a kennel in England when I was in public school,” she said, “and later for a veterinarian when I came to Ontario. I actually thought I wanted to be a vet at one point, but then I learned I really didn't like working with sick animals.”

Before settling in Powassan almost 25 years ago, Briggs worked on two different ranches in Western Canada. “I really like horses too,” she said, “but they’re expensive to keep. Dogs are much easier. The kennel here actually started out as a hobby, but Revenue Canada thought it was be a businesses and it seemed to grow accordingly.”

Brigg’s 55-acre Wimberay Farm, named after her favourite Girl Guide song, has been transformed into a dog training centre complete with a fenced 100 by 107 foot agility course and obedience training area, and two large ponds for both canine recreation and water retrieval training.

In addition to hosting courses for dogs and owners in obedience, retriever training, introduction to decoys, rallying, agility and tracking, the farm is also the home of pure bred Border Terriers, Border Collies and Golden Labs.

Providing temporary homes for both dogs and cats whose owners are off on vacation, Wimberay Farm is an active boarding kennel. Cats are afforded the luxury of staying in one of the second floor bedrooms in the house. The dogs get daily walks and have the options of summer swimming in the two large ponds, a recreation resource they share with the farm’s fowl populations of chickens, geese and two female swans.

“I was reading the other day about a kennel in the city that charges $125 a day and offers your dog a room with a chesterfield, television, chandelier and pool view,” Briggs laughed. “Now does the dog really care if it has a pool view?”

Briggs charges only $12 a day for her boarding facilities and has a steady flow of itinerant canines, many of whom are regular guests.

“We have one dog that comes here quite a bit, and loves to swim. The owners say the dog is happier here than it is at home,” she said. “The boarding fees pay some of the bills and buys dog food for our own animals, so I guess there is some income from that part of the farm.”

Pure bred puppies are sold for an average of $950 and have found homes all across Canada. A playful little Border Terrier runs around the kitchen floor tugging at anything it can find to chew on.

“This little terror is heading off to British Columbia today,” Briggs said. A long trip for such a tiny dog, but a regular occurrence for canines born at Wimberay. In the living room, a Golden Lab suckles seven week-old pups who have already received enquiries for adoption.

The Briggs household is an active menagerie of dogs, cats and several cages of colourful and highly-vocal birds. The phone rings frequently with kennel bookings, puppy requests and reports of lost or found dogs.

In addition to running the farm, which includes 20 beef cows and a small goat herd, Briggs is the animal control officer for the municipalities of Chisholm, Powassan, Nipissing and Callander. The kennel and other outbuildings act as the holding facility for a variety of lost critters while a former ice hut is in the process of being converted to house stray cats.

“Of all the municipalities that I work for, only Callander currently has a cat bylaw,” Briggs said. “I didn’t sign on to do cats, and I told them I couldn’t put them in the kennels. So they brought me this ice hut that had been confiscated after last year’s season ended and that is going to be the new cat house.”

Her success as a dog catcher comes from her years of dog training, perhaps the favourite of her many husbandry occupations. “I’m the only obedience trainer in this area of the north,” Briggs said, “in addition to being a qualified judge in several different trial venues.”

She has also written a book on training dogs of all breeds, and another on the history of the Labrador Retriever.

Although she keeps up on all current training methods, “I guess I’m still training in the stone age,” she said, “but it works. Today people are using noise-making clickers and food as training incentives. These are new fangled ideas, instead of just praising your dog verbally for work well done. I still believe in the original training method of ‘jerk and nag’ where you nag your dog along with the training collar and correct it with a quick harmless jerk.”

This is the same method, she says, that was used by dog trainers who worked with the canine stars of The Incredible Journey and Swiss Family Robinson.

“When the dog has a lead role in a move, it has to be well-trained and able to do the required action on the first take. A movie company isn’t going to wait around for the dog to get it right,” she said.

“Today’s dog owners (were) the kids raised under a discipline system that said you couldn’t correct your children. Now they don’t want to correct their dogs either. Then they wonder why they won’t come when they’re called,” said Briggs.

Not responding to calls is the main reason most people bring their dogs to her obedience classes, although she feels all dogs should be obedience trained, either at home or in a class setting.

“Getting the dog to watch you is the first step,” said Briggs. “When your dog is at home, they can hear you, they know where you are by sound and what you’re doing. In obedience, they have to learn to rely on their sight and watch you for direction.”

Surprisingly, Briggs says that dogs also have to be taught to smell. “In tracking, dogs have to learn to keep their noses to the ground or just above the ground to follow the scent. If you watch, you’ll see that most dogs don’t naturally walk with their heads down.”

Though obedience and agility training, where dogs have to run through a maize of obstacles, are mostly taught at Wimberay Farm, tracking is taught at various field locations around the Powassan area. For standard tracking trials, Briggs will walk a pattern covering 400 metres including three to five turns.

“The track has to be laid by someone other than the owner or handler, and it has to be walked 30 minutes before the trial starts,” she said.

Using a long lead, the owner, who, like the dog, has no idea where the path meanders, follows the dog along the trail towards the finish line where the canine joyfully retrieves a glove.

“In advanced tracking the object is to try and outsmart the dog,” Briggs said. “For these trials the trail is 1,000 metres long, with eight turns. This track has to be laid three hours before the event, and then one hour before the dogs are brought in, someone else has to walk across the track in two different locations. The object is for the dog to remain on the original path and not get sidelined by other scents.”

Although it might be assumed tracking competitors would be limited to hunting dogs, Briggs says she has worked “with just about every breed there is, though you can run into some problems with the terrier types who are bred to chase after things. If a butterfly crosses their path, they’re often off and running and the trail be darned.”

Working with other volunteers from the local dog club called Enthusiasm with Perseverance Equals Success (EPS), which has also helped with supplying equipment for the training compound, Briggs hosts a number of dog training events every year, but for the enjoyment and not a financial profit.

“There’s not really any money in it, but the events bring people into Powassan from across Ontario,” said Briggs. Agility fees are $17.50 per dog per run and Continental Kennel Club events are $25.

Judges, however run up charges of up to $150 a day, plus travel expenses, meals and accommodation. That might not be so hard on the budget if there were local judges to draw from but “judges are hard to get,” she said. “There are only 22 tracking judges in all of Canada, and we’ve had to bring them in from as far away as British Columbia. There are a list of judges for agility, but on an average weekend there can be as many as three agility trials in Ontario and that soon takes care of those on the list.”

Briggs is working toward her certification as a tracking judge, and is already qualified in obedience and rally, a tracking event where dogs and owners are required to stop and perform specific obedience tasks along the marked trail.

Organizing canine meets is time consuming and during the events Wimberay Farms is turned into a weekend campsite and parking lot.

“It may not be lucrative, but it’s fun,” said Briggs, “and as a judge, it helps keep me up to date on new training methods as I see them put into action.”

Several events are planned for the upcoming training season and visitors are always welcome to drop by and see the dogs in actions. For details of classes and trials, Sandy Briggs can be contacted at 705-724-2676.