In my last couple of posts and comments, I have been somewhat critical of the NAFA board and the rules committee and I would like to step back for a minute and reevaluate my stance on the box issue. In the heat of discussion sometimes, we can lose some of our perspective by letting one vision cloud our judgment.
In all fairness to the people on the board and rules committee, I think they deserve the benefit of a second look into their position. I think that many people, myself included, looking at the box in my post, Technically Legal, for the first time thought “My god, how can this be legal?” I know that I did.
Looking back at the minutes and reading them a second and third time, I find that everyone on the board wanted to do something but could not agree on the wording for a new rule. I think the last paragraph of this discussion tells it all:
There was further discussion about whether possible alternative language could be created. Several Board members had concerns about the inability to draft language that would prohibit this type of box, but would not inhibit future innovative box design.
At this point in my post, I had to leave to attend church and now that I am back, I see that Chris VanWert wrote a small book in the comment section of the post, Technically Legal. I knew that she had attended the meeting because I read it in the minutes. I wonder why we are only just now finding out details of the meeting through Chris. I broke this story a couple days before the minutes were posted. Regardless of that, I would like to take Chris up on her suggestion. She says that, “Larry presumes that certain Board members voted against fixing the problem. Maybe, what they actually voted against was a BAD fix. How do we know what the reasons were for their vote until we ASK them? “
Well, how do we do this? I have been reading transcripts of chat sessions and meeting minutes since I started in flyball and I can probably count on one hand the number of times that any board member has explained his or her vote on any issue. Every so often, you will find one of them commenting on the Flyball List, but it is not very common. So I invite any one of the board members to come forward and tell why they voted the way they did.
As for me, I am finding that it is hard to be in the middle of something and remain neutral and objective. I will try to do a better job of that in the future.
Larry
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2 comments ↓
Just happened across this blog entry and in the spirit of transparency thought i’d tell you all why i voted the way i did — can’t speak for anybody else on the board of course.
Larry, you found the magic paragraph in the minutes… personally, i felt that all the wording we came up with in the meeting was a threat to future box innovation. I did feel that the particular box in question was training in the ring (using the definition in the back of the NAFA rulebook as my guide — of course, by that token lots of other things could be called training in the ring, like tape used on the front of the box, or food in the runback area, etc. etc. ).
There’s really no easy way to say that certain attachments or obstructions aren’t allowed, without inhibiting future box design. What exactly constitutes an attachment or obstruction? Is tape an attachment? What if somebody designed a box where the front had a lip on the bottom, or the sides had slight wings, and they were all the same material as the rest of the box (just the way the wood was cut or something). (And assuming all that stuff fit into the legal box measurements of course.)
Look how far boxes have evolved in the past 20 years. I like to think that new box designs are adopted b/c they make dogs turn better and faster, which generally means that they turn safer as well. I just don’t want to see NAFA inadvertently curtail that sort of development.
Lisa
Thank you for your comment Lisa!
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