[SigTau66]

I have a weird one for everybody.

I recently started my male (Kalil) in agility. He's 3.5 yo now and has obedience down to the point where 99% of the time I don't even need to leash him. That 1% only occurs when there is a border collie around. He's had an INTENSE fixation with border collies since he was about a year old. I believe I know where it came from, but not why. Right now, though, neither of those are important.

Luckily the beginning agility class only has a border collie in it sometimes. One of the part time trainers uses her border collie some nights while other nights she uses her dobie. Anyway, last week was the straw that broke the camel's back. She had her border collie there and Kalil would NOT do anything. He just wanted to run after that border collie and play/dominate/chase whatever he does to border collies. The trainers kept telling me to get his attention, but seeing as I'm fairly new at this place they don't understand yet that I CAN'T get his attention. I literally don't know how. I could hold a raw steak (I don't feed him his dinner on agility nights) in front of his face and all he would do was try to look around it like it was a door. Anyway, we ended up leaving about halfway through because it wasn't fun for me, it wasn't fun for Kalil and I was quickly losing my patience.

Another thing I will say is that he's always had an issue (i.e. wants to play and chase) with hyper and active dogs. He'll focus on them, but I can almost always get his attention back to working mode, but border collies take that to another level all together.

Anyway, it was amazing to watch this in action. This place has open agility time during the weekend. So I figured since we didn't get a good workout I'd go to one of these open times and hope nobody was there. We got there and nobody was there. But about 10 minutes in a border collie showed up. They left us alone for 10 more minutes before they wanted to run through some stuff. At that point we went to opposite ends of the area and started working. Of course Kalil would have nothing to do with that. He would just focus on the BC. Anyway they left after 15 minutes and we started again. Next an Airedale Terrier came in. No problem there. We were able to run through our exercises without even being on opposite ends of the course. It was kind of funny to see this in such stark contrast like this.

At this point I'm thinking I just may go to agility without Kalil and just practice on the weekends with him. I don't want a repeat of last week.

So, anybody have suggestions? I've tried new treats. I bought a tug toy that we ONLY use at agility class. He LOVED playing with that...until the border collie came in. I've tried stopping agility and breaking into obedience for 5 minutes to get his mind back into working mode. I just don't know what to do. Anybody ever had this type of problem with any dog before? What did you do if you did?