We held our first AKC Fast CAT event last Fall at the Dian Jacob Lakeside Equestrian Center in San Diego. It was a long 3-day event that ran 6 total trials.
If you’re unfamiliar with AKC Coursing Ability Tests, it’s basically a time trail for your dog to see how fast they can chase a lure through a static course. The Fast CAT version is a safer version that does not include any turns. You hold on to your dog at one end of a 100-yard fenced-in corridor, and let them go when the lure starts to move down the course. If you’re dog goes after the lure, they pass through an electronic start gate timer and then through the end gate timer at the other side where someone catches them. The timing equipment is advanced and can make for a lot of fun chasing fractions of a second. Fast times on soft dirt are around 7 seconds, but dogs are broken out into different handicaps based on height.
It’s a lot of fun and a great outlet for your dog to express their innate prey drive.
Here’s Robin’s summary of the event posted to the SoCal Dog Events Facebook group:
Thank you to all who came to the DPCSC Inaugural FastCat events this past weekend in Lakeside, CA and to all my volunteers! I hope you all had a blast. It was a pretty successful event overall – covered venue, wait line in the shade, close level parking. 540 total entries including newbies of about 20-30. 471 Qualifying runs. Titles earned – 22 BCATs, 2 DCATs, 2 FCATs and one FCAT4!! Lots of folks telling us it was a great event and asking when we will hold it again. We will let you know once the dust has settled.
On Friday, we had some significant challenges including significant timer issues. Also half of our volunteers didn’t show on Friday and those that did, most had never seen or worked a FastCat before but they worked hard to learn! We couldn’t even fill all of the positions we needed to fill the first day. Throughout the weekend we just kept changing and adding procedures up each day making it more and more efficient with less lure/timer operation issues each day and we have made notes for the next time around.
We hope to see you all again the next time we hold an event. And please volunteer! It seems everyone had a good time volunteering. We can’t hold our dog events without the wonderful folks willing to volunteer.
The professional photographer at this event was Agiledogs Photography. You can find the photos for the events on his SmugMug page:
- Day 1, trials 1 & 2, 2024-10-25 (Friday)
- Day 2, trials 3 & 4, 2024-10-26 (Saturday)
- Day 3, trials 4 & 5, 2024-10-27 (Sunday)
Here’s some candids from Facebook:
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