My So-Called Off-Campus Life: Tina Hardin
Show Dog Handler and Motorcycle Safety Instructor
Sprawled in the corner of Tina Hardin’s office is her dog Norton, an award-winning Beauceron, a rare herding breed from France. Norton has competed in dog shows with Hardin by his side as handler.
Hardin, who’s been the program coordinator in the School of Art+Design since 2014, wants to get one thing straight. “I’m not a very good dog handler. The handlers on TV make it look easy; it’s actually pretty difficult.”
She and her partner were not in the market for a show dog, but Norton’s breeder pressured them to compete—Norton was the best looking dog in the litter and two of his siblings competed at The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Hardin took a couple of handling classes, “so we didn’t completely embarrass ourselves,” and entered the American Beauceron Club’s National D’Elevagein 2017, the national competition for the breed. Judges flew in from France and liked what they saw—Norton placed first in his age group.
Hardin is now training with Norton for another type of competition called lure coursing, which taps into the dog’s natural instincts to run, hunt, and chase. A Coursing Ability Test, or
CAT race, is essentially a 600yard dash for dogs as they chase an artificial rabbit. And he’s also training for scentwork, where dogs must locate by odor cotton swabs doused in essential oils, hidden from both dog and handler.
If that weren’t interesting enough…
Hardin is also an expert motorcycle rider certified to teach rider safety classes. Shortly after moving to New York City, the Austin, TX native began riding around town on the back of her partner’s bike. She grew to love it and soon decided to get her own. It was a great way to get out of the city—they even rode so far as Maine and Nova Scotia.
In 2009, she got certified to teach rider safety. “Getting certified was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says of the six-day course she took in Atlanta, GA. “It’s intense. You have to teach a major motor skill to adults.”
Hardin continues to teach sporadically and rides frequently with a group she met through an online motorcycle forum—people from all walks of life she would never have met otherwise. They rode together all the way to Ohio for the annual Bug Bash, a group ride through the southwestern part of the state.
Her riding even landed her a spot in the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum series. In documentary style reenactments, Hardin plays one of the Van Buren sisters, who made history in 1918–19 as the first women to ride across the United States on motorcycles. In full period costume, Hardin rides a 1917 Indian motorcycle with a suicide shifter, aptly named as it forces the rider to remove a hand from the handlebars to shift. The bike was on loan from the Newburgh’s Motorcyclepedia Motorcycle Museum, whose surly and unobliging mechanic taught her how to ride the antique motorcycle, while reminding her it was worth $40,000.
—Kristi McKee