Indoor Dog Lure Coursing Floors - DogLoversDays Lure Course
Date Published: 01-27 - 2020
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Hey! My name is Mark Gross and I have built a wonderful lure course and the name of our company is DogLoversDays, meaning your bring your dog, because we love dogs and he gets to run on a lure course.
Now the history behind this is about six years ago, we set up a track and we wanted to make sure that if your dog came to an event he had something to do.
So we built a little engine and a couple of pulleys and unbeknownst to us the dog jumped on the track and started to chase it.
From that little point of one little show we did another show the same year. From there it just went kind of crazy, so we went from 2 shows that year to 8 shows a year later - in 2014.
In 2020, we should be running approximately 80 events where we’re bringing our fun DogLoversDays lure course to all different kinds of events from Bacon Fest to World Dog Expos and still doing the smaller events where we started.
Wherever there’s dogs, we wanna run ‘em.
We were asked to do a lot of indoor shows back and around 2015 and one of the dilemmas was the flooring. We wanted it to be safe. We did purchase some what I will call black vinyl asphalt flooring and it was relatively good. We found it was just a little hard on the dogs’ paws. We had a lot of success with it, but we kept looking for better and better. It was way too heavy. You’re talking 130 pounds per roll. So one day I saw a small little agility show and they had these blue mats and I went up and I said hey, I wouldn’t mind trying those so I talked to them and I felt them and I said wait a minute. This is a lot better.
The dog will slide a little bit on it, but we won’t fall. His paws will go in, except not that far. So our decision was very simple. All we knew was we had to buy 180 pieces and stick them all together and this is where all of this is born.
Our ratio of injuries has basically gone to zero. It doesn’t get any better than that.
The portability is easy because our flooring that I mentioned previously was 130 pound a roll. These are about a pound and a half each. So all we have to do is stack them up in the trailer and off we go.
We go everywhere from Florida to Colorado to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
It’s a lot lighter. Obviously a lot easier to transport.
The older flooring we were using was just a little too hard. When the paw hit, every once in a while we’d have a dewclaw pop off - nothing serious but it’s just a feeling you don’t want anything to happen. We found after testing this floor - that’s just not happening. We have had no serious injuries since 2013 when we started - but to make sure, I wanted the best flooring possible. We were actually a little bit surprised that we were running some events 600-700 dogs in three days and not one dewclaw, not one anything. They’re just out there having a good time.
The important thing to know is that we’re constantly getting ahead of the curve. We want to make sure, and that’s why we’re working with Greatmats. We want to make sure there are no injuries.
We are totally aware that this industry is all about the family dog and those dogs are their children, and we adore that. So what we have to do is be proactive and make sure that everything is safe - our motors, our pulleys, our engines, even our fencing as you can see the Greatmats banner. If a dog hits that, it just collapses. No injuries.