The Drop

People following my career know that I am a frisbee dog.

Fans have asked: "What is the hardest part of Frisbee?"

Most fans imagine that the leaping feet into the air to snag the Frisbee from the blue skies must be really hard.

The truth is that much of the spectacle of fetch is instinctual. In Frisbee, the dog hurls itself with abandon at a flying disc and becomes one with the Frisbee.

The spectacular part of Frisbee is not the hard part of Frisbee.

The really hard part is the drop.

And the drop is really hard.

After fetching the Frisbee, the dog is asked to run back to the human and drop the Frisbee in set up for the next Frisbee toss.

I find the drop to be emotionally challenging.

The drop involves giving the Frisbee back to the human.

Why should those humans get the Frisbee back? They already have so much and are always grabbing more with those clutchy little hands and opposable thumbs of theirs!

The drop is a struggle.

I know I want to catch the Frisbee again, but I don't want' to give it to the human.

It is an epic mental conflict.

I find that my snout gets all trembly and nervous during the drop. Often I simply want to shake the Frisbee furiously, or run away and drop the Frisbee far, far away from the human.

The funny thing is that when I finally release the frisbee, it is as if the disc was never in my snout.

I occasionally have had spurts where I fell into a rhythm with the human and we did a bunch of frisbee fetches and drops in a row. However, when the human isn't in perfect form (which happens more than I care to recall), I find that I have to shake and rip at the Frisbee.

A few dog years back, I met another Frisbee dog who had her human trained to put out its hand and take the Frisbee between fetches. It is always amazing to watch a well trained human.

My human is somewhat doltish. I doubt I could ever get him trained to reach out his hand; So I just drop the frisbee on the ground. It's a pity. He has to bend down and pick it up out of the dirt. My human's life is harder because he is so untrainable.

A good human is hard to find.

If my human was better trained, perhaps the drop wouldn't be so difficult. But, as it stands, the drop is the hardest part of Frisbee. Each drop takes a deep emotional toll.