11-8-23

 Crump Park. 48degrees, clear, no wind, light dew. Track laid @7:35 $ aged 45 minutes.

Goal was to work on turns for both dog & handler. First leg 100yd. 90degree turn to right. Second leg food @ 30, article @ 50, 45 degree turn to right after 65yds. Third leg food @ 25, article @ 45, 45degree turn to left after 60 yards. Fourth leg 65 yards to 90degree left turn, then 65 yards to end article.

At both 90 degree turns I stopped watching Seren & looked just at my feet ~ 20 yards from the turn, to see if I could detect loss of scent & regaining scent just by the feel of the line, without using my eyes. At the 1st turn (to the right), I never felt any slack in the line, it just veered to the left for about 10 feet, then arced back to the right 180 degrees & went forward there. When I looked up after letting the line out to 30’, she was on the track. At the first acute turn, she again checked left briefly, then arced back around to the right to pick up track & went. At 2nd acute turn, she just turned left on the track. Final turn I didn’t look again, never felt slack, she just went left & was on the track when I looked.

All articles were great. Total length 295yd

This was a fun exercise, but I think I would have learned more about feeling the line with a dog like Vickie who routinely overshot turns & lifted her head when she lost the scent







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

12-8-24 Article Games with Dylan

 I’m cocky enough to think that Seren’s articles are pretty good (at least at the moment). I can think of a couple of games we could have fun with, but they would involve finding appropriate spaces outside, figuring out how to set up the tripod out there, yada, yada, yada. So I took the easy way out to complete the assignment & cheated by using the dog who actually needs this exercise & used Dylan, even though he isn’t in the class. So that he can start generalizing his indication behavior,  I used 2 articles, each stuffed with food. One is the slipper that I use for his little starter tracks, the other a glove he found at the park last week. He isn’t real fluent with his verbal lie down cue yet, so I stayed pretty close to him. That worked out well as my food tossing skills are not to be bragged about either. In retrospect, I probably should have set the articles up ahead of time, as I’m not sure if the movement or the scent made him go to them. But he was definitely ...
Read more

3-20-25

Image
 Klehr Field. partly cloudy, 68 degrees, wind 12 mph & gusty, 43% humidity  Seren did a 4 turn track, each leg ~50 yd. Scuffed out of turns 1,2,&4. Food @35 on legs 2&3. Article @25 on leg 4 with food @35. Track laid @9:05 & aged 3 hrs Start & articles were fine. Overshot 1st turn by 12 steps but turned to the left & came back on her own & found 2nd leg. Same with 2nd turn, but by only 10 steps. Before the food on leg 3 got distracted by something off to the right & I had to tell her to get back to work. The food was fortuitously placed so she got rewarded for just a few steps back on the track. Cut the corner at turn 3 by ~5 ft. 4th turn was right on. I will aim for Seren’s next track to be 2.5-3 hrs old Dylan did a 4 turn track, laid @11:15& aged 20 min.  Scuffed start & out of turns. Food every 30yds. First leg paralleled chain link fence maybe 5 feet away & went between fence & goal post. There was some trash on the fiel...
Read more

2-5-25

Image
 Courthouse Park. Overcast, 40 degrees, 6mph, 60%. Track laid @8:40&aged 100min. This was a cover change with turns track. At least 1 food drop per leg, sometimes more. All turns except 5th one scuffed, & there was a fair bit of scuffing on the straightaways in the woods, too - not necessarily intentional. Numbers on map indicate my steps, which are considerably less than a yard, especially in the woods. I estimate total length 450-500 yards. We did pretty well with this one. Seren’s tracking wasn’t her best but I felt like I was reading her well so we didn’t go wrong. I recovered all my flags & clothespins🙂. Start was good. Parallelling the hedgerow was more challenging than it usually is for Seren, but she worked it out. Turn into the woods was good. Hard to say if she indicated metal article in the woods, as there was a pile of animal poop about 18” from it that she tried to roll in. So she did lie down, but… Very nice tracking in the woods. Indicated fabric article...
Read more