Rotties and agility?

Considering doing agility with the Rotties, as a way of engaging their brains more.


If you've done / do it, what age was the dog when you started? Any tips or suggestions?


A friend has suggested I take ours along with her two big dogs (roughly same age as mine, ten months), and her trainer. I've been reading up, but there's not a lot, that I've found anyway, on t'internet, so am looking for experienced bods views.


Both pups are good with others (dogs and humans), reasonable recall, heel, sit, stay. Both walked for an hour-ish a day, majority off lead.

I did some, quite a few years ago. I had a medium sized dog, rescue, so was something like 6 years old when we started. She was very trainable, and we were doing obedience classes at the same time, so all tied in nicely. Due to her age and size/build we had no worries health-wise when introducing her to it.
The other dog, was about a year old, but much bigger - great dane cross - so we took it very slowly with him. Our trainer believed pups shouldn't do any jumping as such to begin with due to the strain on young growth plates etc, but they would walk over poles between wings, and do low walk overs etc. Obviously the bigger the dog, the longer they take to mature, so should be taken slowly - cannot remember what age they allowed them to start higher jumps etc.

Both of mine loved it despite not being 'typical' breeds used for it, unfortunately despite loving it, my bigger dog didn't understand the concept of leaving the jumps up :D and as he managed to knock proper wooden pole horse jumps down too (don't ask, he was solid, shall we say!) he was never going to have much respect for light plastic poles! But they had fun, and that's all that mattered :)

Any breed can do agility. In 18 years I have seen most dogs do some. I have known a couple of rotties in agility.
The only thing I would say is be aware of the impact on a large dogs joints, landing from a full height jump, they can get injured more easily then a smaller dog.
But there's absolutely no reason why you can't go and do some classes. The Jumps will stay low for quite a while anyway

Eta regarding age. We always started dogs at 12 months. But in recent years people have started taking dogs at younger ages to do poles on the floor between wings. To teach left and right commands etc.
I strongly suggest that you do not let your dog jump over anything before 12 months. It's not good for smaller dogs with growing bodies but it could be very damaging for a big dog. They need to be fully developed first