Many dog owners will place their pooches in obedience school to learn basic manners, and maybe teach them a few tricks just for fun.
And then, there is 15-year-old Nadia Acosta, who connects with her dog on a completely different level.
Acosta has been competing around the country for two-and-one-half years and has built up quite an impressive résumé. Attending 12 to 15 events per year, she has racked up 10 first-place finishes and has placed 25 times.
She and her main competition dog, a Belgian malinois named Hemus, have even developed a signature Frisbee trick together — the “Back Vault.”
“It took a long time to learn it,” Acosta says. “It was a lot of trial-and-error.”
When Acosta explains the step-by-step protocol for this trick, she makes it sound easy. That’s probably unintentional, but the girl-and-dog duo really does make it look easy.
After having Hemus run under her leg and catch a Frisbee, Acosta quickly kneels down and holds another one over her head. The malinois sees this in the middle of his turn and picks up a ton of speed, before hitting her back like a gymnast on a vault. In one fell swoop, he’ll bite the Frisbee and stick the landing.
“I have scars,” Acosta laughs.
If scars serve as reminders of the past, then hers are of the good kind — badges of honor she earned from hard work and determination. And there’s another set of scars, on her mother, that remind her of how she even got here in the first place.
TRYING TO HELP
Five years ago, the Acostas weren’t buying dogs for competition — they just wanted a dog as a companion and family pet. That all changed on one day, though, when Betty Acosta was attacked.
“Two surgeries and a tooth embedded in my bone,” Betty says. “It was pretty serious.”
Another dog was attacking their puppy, and Betty tried to intervene. When she tried to pull the puppy out of the bigger dog’s mouth, it latched onto her arm.
“It was a mutt, a mix of a ton of different things,” Nadia remembers.
Rather than let the dog bite affect her in a negative way, Betty saw it as an opportunity to learn how to train dogs herself. That’s when Nadia started, and they began training a Siberian husky named Jada.
Jada was eventually given away, but Hemus came along later. That was the time when Nadia decided to fully commit herself to training.
“The breeder, he does every litter by the letter,” Nadia says. “And (Hemus) was the ‘H’ letter, and I had no idea what to name him. And he told me that Hemus was, like the name of some mountain peak in Bulgaria, so I just went with it.”
GOING WITH THE FLOW
By that time, the Acostas realized Nadia had a knack for working with dogs.
“When I first started training, I was seeing the methods I was using would work,” Nadia says. “I would get them from my mom’s school … or people that would help me as trainers. And, when I saw that these things were working, I started putting them into tricks.
“It was a ‘go-with-the-flow’ kind of thing,” she says.
And everything flowed — quickly. In her first competition, a Toss-and-Fetch event in Auburndale, she took home second place. She won first place for the first time just last year, at a Canis Major event, in Plant City. Nadia has competed in states like Texas and Tennessee, but she does most of her work in Florida.
Her cousins have since started competing, but they mostly do it for fun. They normally use a smaller dog, named Flyte but have worked with Hemus before.
“I’m just trying to get someone to work with Nadia’s dog when she leaves for college,” Betty says.
There still are a few years left between now and then, but it’s still a challenge that’s looming ahead. Hemus is a good dog, but he’s got a little more gusto than Betty wants to handle on her own.
“He’s a little too high-energy for my mom,” Nadia says.
But Nadia doesn’t plan on letting her cousins handle Hemus full-time. She says she’ll find a way to do it herself, because she’s too passionate about training and competing to let something like college get in the way.
“Whether I have to take my dog with me somehow or if I have to come back every so often, I’m not going to stop,” she says.
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.
