The class we went to only had 4 people in it. Beagles (especially mine) have a short attention span. They need things to be very fast paced to keep their interest. It was more a case of needing to tailor training sessions specifically to Beanie to keep her stimulated.

There was a little poodle in our agility class. She was a natural. Very good indeed. There’s a picture of her in one of the posts back when beanis started agility. There’s a poodle/cocker spaniel cross in our flyball class and she’s the star of the class. Absolutely fantastic. I think there’s a video clip of her in action at her THIRD flyball class! Take a look at the flyball category and you should find it.

So I’d say either would be fantastic. Agility requires a larger skill set so for a fast to learn poodle it might stretch her more – a good thing!

Beanie is much more focused when doing very high energy activities with lots of excitement and noise. Flyball is perfect – very easy to keep her attention. The more hyper the other dogs get the more she calms down and focuses.

She loves agility too, but only when we can keep it moving fast. We’ve stopped classes temporarily because she was getting bored in a class environment. We’re now working on agility ourselves until we can get her enthusiasm for the activity back. A good ‘reward’ for learning something that’s perhaps a little boring in ability is a game of flyball. And we can add tunnels, tyre jumps etc into the flyball course to make it more interesting and more like agility.

Someone wanting to compete seriously in either sport might see problems with this approach, but we just want our dog engaged in the activities and making progress.