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About a year ago, a YouTube video titled Pepper Dancing to Achy Breaky Heart nearly finished me off: A woman in a cute cowboy outfit cuts a rug in a cavernous arena with her border collie while Billy Ray Cyrus blares in the background. Now, I may be biased here, as someone who doesn't enjoy new country, but I wanted a vet or someone else with authority to say, "Well, it may look harmless, but the problem is that undermining a dog's dignity in that way is hazardous to the pet's health." (As if watching the next YouTube video, a Frenchman in a Cossack outfit jumping around to a Ukrainian folk song with his collie, wasn't hazardous to mine.)

Welcome to the world of canine musical freestyle, an international phenomenon that combines ballroom bravado with dog-show fanaticism. It's a competitive sport that originated in British Columbia in 1989, and to this day still has a foothold there.

Gail Walsh is the president of Paws2Dance, a canine musical freestyle academy in Surrey, B.C., that has 35 members. She got into freestyling about eight years ago, when her dog's obedience instructor, "one of the originators of the sport in North America," mentioned it. She went to see a show and "fell in love with it right away."

In the sport, dogs are required to learn dance routines that they perform with a human partner. The human, usually in a costume themed to the accompanying music, does human dance steps; the dog does dog steps. Common moves include "weaves," in which the dog weaves around its partner's legs, and "backups," in which the dog leaves its partner's side to do moves on its own, sometimes in tandem with the partner.

But it would be a few years before Ms. Walsh could find a canine dance partner to equal her enthusiasm. Her first was "a big kuvasz ... . He went in the ring with me and put up with it, but he wasn't really

enjoying it." Then, she says,

"I ended up getting two Australian shepherds. They were involved for a while but they were kind of spacey." Eventually she found success with her current dog, Pepsi, a border collie. "Now I'm doing Hot

Honey Rag from the end of

the movie Chicago, where the two girls get up on stage in their white dresses and their guns. ..."

"He just loves it," she says.

And this is the sad truth - much as I wish the dogs were thinking, "Oh man, I can't believe I'm dancing with a woman in a sparkly vest," it seems the dogs are really thinking, "Oh man I can't believe I'm dancing with a woman in a sparkly vest"

"Very often my own dogs ... know their songs and they come running up, 'My turn That's my song, let's go' " says Cassandra Hartman of Caledonia, Ont., who was an obedience trainer for 10 years before deciding to combine those skills with her talents as a professional dancer and choreographer.

She now runs Cassandra's Canines, a training academy, and competes internationally with her golden retrievers, who are named for dancers Debbie Reynolds and Vera-Ellen, travelling to four to six competitions a year. In October, she will travel to Holland to teach at the first world canine championships.

Ms. Hartman is currently working on Liza Minnelli's Bye Bye Blackbird with her two pups. She admits that she imposes her musical taste on Debbie and Vera, but says that not all dogs should dance to the same drummer, as it were. "Certain more up-tempo songs would suit some fast-moving terriers," she says, "or a softer, flowy song might suit an Afghan hound.

"Often they do feel the music," she adds. "Sometimes in a performance they improvise on their own, and guess what: You're forced to go with it."

She has every confidence that the sport is not just a passing fancy. "It's going to be huge," she says. "Huge. It's coming."

Lisan Jutras is a writer and editor who lives in Toronto with two cats and a small, sensitive street dog.