Rescue Dog, Now an Agility Champion, Saved Her Owner From 'Dead-End' Life

By the time she was a year old, border collie Mae had been rejected by five owners.

Heather Dwyer rescued her, but in many ways it was the other way around, Dwyer says. Mae gave Dwyer the inspiration to leave her dead-end job as a Chicago bartender, a job she hated.

"People say to me all the time, 'Isn't Mae lucky she found you?' but I don't look at it that way. I think, 'Aren't I lucky I found her?'" Dwyer says.

Today, Mae the border collie is a movie star, a cover canine on the latest issue of American Dog Magazine and one of the most decorated agility dogs in the Chicago region. And Dwyer doesn't serve drinks anymore. Since she and Mae teamed up seven years ago, Dwyer completed dog training school and now runs her own training center, Lucky Dog Academy in Plainfield.

In her first year, she's had enough business to add five trainers to her staff, offer more than 20 classes every week and schedule monthly game nights. One day Lucky Dog may hold sanctioned competitions on the lawn of the Pet Supply Outlet store at 23907 Industrial Drive, behind Binny's and Limestone Brewing Company on Route 59.

Mae has come a long way, too, since those five homes found her behavior so intolerable that they took her back to the border collie rescue agency she came from – the one where Heather still volunteers. Mae attacked heat vents. She obsessed on crazy things.

"Working in rescue I see so many dogs fail because their owners don't give them anything to do and the dog reverts to neurotic, destructive behaviors," she said.

Mae, now 8, doesn't run and jump the planks, hurdles and tunnels of the agility course much anymore because of bad back knees, probably the result of being kept in a crate too long as a puppy, Dwyer says. But Mae still fetches the paper every morning. Once in awhile she steps onto the course to show the dogs in Dwyer's classes how it's done.

Resting nose on paws on her dog bed beneath a wall of blue ribbons, Mae is still "top dog" around the academy. She's in a movie, "Shakey," now being filmed in Naperville. Her picture on the back cover American Dog Magazine. She does community service as a certified therapy dog.

This is the kind of change that can happen when you give a dog a job. That is Dwyer's message, a mission that motivates her as she watches her new business flourish.

"Every dog needs something to do," she says. "I've seen dog after dog simply drop bad behaviors once they got involved in agility."

Lacey, a high-energy Irish setter, is one of them. Her owners, Kim and Bruce Kamp of Bolingbrook, took her in when they saw two people dumping her off at the end of their street.

Before Lacey started agility training two years ago, she ate plastic waste cans. She once chewed open a bottle of laundry detergent and dragged it all over the house. Now she competes regularly in agility competitions. She bounds over the jumps and planks fervently, all the while keeping her eyes on Bruce Kamp for a cue on which obstacle to take on next.

The Kamps saw Dwyer giving a dog demonstration at a nearby dog park two years ago.

"I asked her if she could teach my dog to do that," Bruce Kamp said. "She said, 'I can teach any dog to do this.'"

Agility competition is a sport in which a handler guides a dog with hand and body signals through a complicated course of hurdles, catwalks and tunnels as fast as they can. Border collies, Australian herd dogs and shelties tend to dominate the sport.

Dwyer teaches a gentle new "Say Yes" training method pioneered by Canadian dog trainer Susan Garrett. The philosophy is to train dogs without physical or verbal corrections, focusing on positive reinforcement and creative thinking to come up with training solutions. Working closely with your dog builds a stronger bond between dog and owner, Dwyer says.

While Dwyer gives all the credit to her canine counterparts, she looks to the untrained eye like an extraordinarily gifted trainer. Mae took first place in her first trial seven years ago and went on to win 40 championships.

 In the 2008 national event, the standard agility course time was 58 seconds. Dwyer's dog Spirit finished in 20.2 seconds.

"You give a dog a job and you also give him confidence in himself," she says. "You don't have to have a champion. You just need a good companion."

Lucky Dog Academy will be hosting an open house Oct. 3 with agility demonstrations and canine health specialists on hand.