brookcove
Posted : 3/11/2008 9:53:49 PM
For veteran's they would never be any higher, no matter how tall the dogs on the team. For other teams, they are set based on the height of the shortest dog on the team. That means that the strategy for putting teams together usually involves three of the fastest dogs possible, and one short dog that is also as fast as possible - but short dogs are generally not as fast as, say, an Aussie, lab, or BC - because they are jumping at close to their maximum height as well as not being built for max speed.
The jump heights are usually around eight or nine inches for most teams. When I first started, we had no short dogs and all our dogs had to jump 14 inches. That became exhausting over the course of the weekend for most of the dogs. My dogs started out not as fast as the other dogs on the team (well, Ben was just not anywhere near as fast), but the nice thing about them was that they could "go the distance" - their times stayed the same from the first race to the last race they ran.