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THE DOG WALK IN AGILITY (PART 1) - KEEP, CHANGE, or ELIMINATE?

Writer's picture: Dr. Abigail ShobenDr. Abigail Shoben

Written by: Dr. Abigail Shoben, Associate Professor, Biostatistics, The Ohio State University College of Public Health

Photo credit to Adriana Nottestad.
Photo credit to Adriana Nottestad.

As most of the agility community is aware, there has been a lot of discussion about what to do about the current dog walk. Many are currently advocating for changing the dog walk to be lower and/or wider. Some advocate for keeping it as is (while more data are collected), and still others suggest eliminating it completely. Given these discussions, I wanted to share my perspective as a statistician who typically thinks about risk and benefits from a big picture, public health perspective and as an agility enthusiast not currently training or competing with a dog.


The three main options are (1) keep the dog walk as is (4 feet tall and 12 inches wide), (2) change the dog walk to make it shorter and wider (3 feet tall and 18 inches wide), or (3) eliminate it completely.


I am aware that there are different proposals for how to change the dog walk; I will discuss these briefly at the end.


The majority of arguments for changing the dog walk involve dog safety. In particular, the risk of sudden, catastrophic injury due to falling. For the sake of simplicity in the following, I termed this risk an “annual severe fall risk,” which is the probability that a dog training and competing in agility would experience a large negative event due to the dog walk obstacle specifically.


These estimates throughout are hypothetical - we do not know what percentage of dogs currently experience such an event every year and we certainly do not know what this would be with a changed dog walk. In each of the five scenarios, I present different assumptions about the annual risk of severe fall with the current dog walk and what this same annual risk would be with a changed (lower and wider) dog walk. I assume that these risks are “known” - a discussion of the challenge of estimating these numbers is left for future blog posts.


For the sake of playing within these hypotheticals, let’s assume that choosing to “keep” the dog walk involves no additional cost. Choosing to “change” the dog walk involves a one time fee of $25 per dog (implemented as increases in trial fees or class / rental costs). And choosing to “eliminate” the dog walk has no additional cost. This estimated cost per dog for “change” is again hypothetical, and it may be worth considering how this value affects your decision.

Photo credit to Adriana Nottestad.
Photo credit to Adriana Nottestad.

Scenario 1


Current dog walk annual severe fall risk: 5% (1 out of 20 dogs)

Proposed changed dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.5% (1 out of 200 dogs)


Keep? Change? Eliminate?


This scenario includes a large reduction in the annual severe fall risk - going from 1 in 20 dogs to 1 in 200 while generally keeping the “flavor” of the obstacle as intended (more tall than narrow).


For context on these risks, an annual risk of 1 in 20 dogs suggests that among dogs you regularly see locally trialing, at least one of them would experience a “severe fall” from the dog walk. (Most people likely regularly see 40-50 dogs when trialing locally, so if the risk were this high, you would likely know multiple dogs locally who had experienced this event, particularly over a couple of years.)


Reducing this risk to 1 in 200 means that instead of knowing people locally who it happened to each year, you are likely to know of one or two people on Facebook (e.g., be facebook friends with) someone that it happened to each year (assuming that each person “knows of” 200-300 agility dogs on Facebook)


I think most people, presented with these numbers, would opt to “change” the dog walk for $25 a dog – it’s a large reduction in risk for relatively low cost.


Scenario 2


Current dog walk annual severe fall risk: 5% (1 out of 20 dogs)

Proposed changed dog walk annual severe fall risk: 4.8% (1 out of 21 dogs)


Keep? Change? Eliminate?


This scenario is the same as scenario 1, except that the reduction in risk from changing the dog walk is much less dramatic. Going from 1 in 20 to 1 in 21 still would mean you likely would know 1-2 local dogs who experienced a severe fall each year – the reduction in risk from the change would only be noticed when considering larger numbers of dogs. For example, out of 1000 dogs at the U.S. Open, instead of 50 of them experiencing a severe fall each year, only 48 would.


I think most people, presented with this high of a risk of the current dog walk, and this small a reduction in this risk, would opt to “eliminate” the dog walk, given the severe fall risk and that this risk would stay high even with the change.


Scenario 3


Current dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.2% (1 out of 500 dogs)

Proposed changed dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.2% (1 out of 500 dogs)


Keep? Change? Eliminate?


In this scenario, the existing risk is much smaller than in the first two scenarios – 1 out of 500 dogs experiences a severe fall. For context, this corresponds to you would hear about 1 dog experiencing the event every other year (if you “know of” approximately 200-300 dogs on Facebook). And changing the dog walk does not change this risk.


I think most people, presented with these numbers, would elect to “keep” the dog walk – accepting a relatively small risk of a severe fall in exchange for all the benefits of the dog walk in agility.


Scenario 4


Current dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.2% (1 out of 500 dogs)

Proposed changed dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.1% (1 out of 1000 dogs)


Keep? Change? Eliminate?


This scenario is the same as scenario 3, except that changing the dog walk does lower the risk (by 50%). However, the absolute reduction in risk is small – going from 2 out of 1000 dogs experiencing the event each year to 1 out of 1000 dogs.


Here I think that rational people would disagree about what to do. It is very reasonable to argue for “keep” here because the actual risk is the same as in scenario 3 – most people would accept this level of risk in exchange for the benefits of the dog walk in agility.


It is not unreasonable to argue to “change” in this scenario as the lower dog walk is associated with a modest improvement in safety (affecting 1 out of 1000 dogs per year). The question to evaluate is if this modest improvement in safety is worth the “cost” of the change (both financial and other costs of the change).


Scenario 5


Current dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.2% (1 out of 500 dogs)

Proposed changed dog walk annual severe fall risk: 0.01% (1 out of 10,000 dogs)


Keep? Change? Eliminate?


This scenario is the same as scenario 4 except that the improvement in risk with the changed dog walk is larger. Reducing the risk to 1 out of 10,000 dogs annually would mean that most individuals would hear about it happening (via a friend of a friend on social media) only once or twice every five years or so – it would truly be a noteworthy occurrence.


Here, I think most people would opt for “change” for similar reasons to scenario 1, it offers substantial improvements in safety for relatively modest cost.


However, unlike scenario 1, I think “keep” is still a rational choice here as the risk associated with the current dog walk is already small and likely acceptable given the benefits of the dog walk in agility (as discussed in scenarios 3 and 4).

Photo credit to Adriana Nottestad.
Photo credit to Adriana Nottestad.

Additional considerations


In scenarios 4 and 5, you might also consider how your answer would change given different financial costs of a change (e.g., $1 or $250 per dog). Would changing the financial cost affect your decision in scenario 4 or 5 given the improvement in safety?


Likewise, you might also consider how the dimensions of the changed dog walk affect your decision. What if the changed dog walk was only 2 feet tall? What if it was 24 inches wide? What if these shorter / wider dimensions were the only way to accomplish the safety improvement? Would that change your answer?


Conclusions


What is the point of this thought experiment with fake numbers for the risk of severe fall? I wanted to illustrate that there are scenarios under which nearly everyone would agree to each of the three options (keep, change, and eliminate), as well as scenarios under which reasonable people would disagree.


I also wanted to illustrate that in the absence of data, we are all internally making assumptions about all of these factors – the existing risk of the current dog walk, the risk that would be true if the dog walk were changed, the financial cost, and the costs (and potential benefits) of a changed obstacle design. People arguing for “change” undoubtedly feel like we are closer to scenario 1 currently, while those advocating for “keep” (or “keep but investigate”) likely feel like we are closer to scenario 3 currently.


The key questions throughout these scenarios are: (1) what is the actual current risk? (2) how much safer would a changed dog walk be? and (3) what are the costs of a change? Discussing all three of these questions is critical – the question is not just “would a changed dog walk be safer?”


Stay tuned for the next blog post in this series where we discuss the current data regarding falls, obstacle incidents and injury rates, and what data we still need for better decision making


About the Author


Dr. Abigail Shoben is a biostatistician in the College of Public Health at Ohio State. She has particular expertise in the design and analysis of clinical trials, particularly for clinical trials of behavioral interventions and trials with correlated data. She was appointed as a member of the FDA advisory committee on anesthetic and analgesic drug products in 2015 and served on that committee until 2024, taking part in more than 20 advisory committee meetings.


For the past several years, she has enjoyed combining her out-of-work interest in dog sports, particularly dog agility, with her statistical expertise, lending biostatistical support to multiple projects, including those organized by the Agility Dog Health Network and AGility Innovations Leveraging Electronics (AGILE).


AGILE - AGility Innovations Leveraging Electronics


Agility handlers and trainers need a reliable, accurate way to measure and monitor athlete activity. Advances in human- and canine-wearable sensors provide new ways of accurately recognizing and measuring movement, and machine learning techniques can find patterns in movement data to perform activity recognition. Our goal is to develop a canine-wearable system to recognize agility activity so that we can measure canine training workload, speed, fatigue and other parameters to optimize performance, to evaluate the relation of training parameters and injury risk, and to study injury prevention strategies. Initial funding was provided by the American Kennel Club Canine Health Foundation.


The AGILE research team

Dr. Arielle Pechette Markley - Sports Medicine Veterinarian

Dr. Melody Moore Jackson - Computer scientist

Dr. Rachel Olson - Kinesiologist

Dr. Abigail Shoben - Biostatistician




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2 Comments


kayloma
Jan 26

I personally would like to see the dog walk lowered and widened. I owned a dog that had a fall which resulted in a permanent change in her health and retiring from agility. I have had dogs large and small fall off the dogwalk in training. In addition, have had to retrain the dogwalk recently with a 24 inch dog that came off in training.

The video recently done with a wider shorter dogwalk shows the dogs moving more comfortably across the obstacle. A fall from 36 inches, while still a fall is less significant than a fall from 48.

With the sport becoming faster it is time to make this change and increase the safety of this obstacle

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lmwaitkus
Jan 25

As someone whose dog has fallen off the dogwalk multiple times i very much have an opinion on this. The first being that all falls are concerning, not just ones that result in an injury. I am currently struggling with this issue. My 2 year old has been in classes for over a year and we are going back to the beginning with the dogwalk as he has fallen enough to spook him. I thank God he has not been seriously injured. I am working on hind end awareness, core stregnth, and doing everything every trainer/instructor can come up with. I dont want to quit agility because he truly loves it, but i will if i dont find a solution.…

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