12-12-23

 Pole Green Park. Sunny, lite wind, 37degrees, short grass. Tracklaying began at 10:10, tracks aged 1 hour.

Four start tracks. Used tall, test-type flags at the start of #1 & #3

#1 100yd 1st leg, right turn, 50yd 2nd leg with food at 25

#2 50yd 1st leg, right turn, 75yd 2nd leg. Food midway on both legs

#3 50yd 1st leg, left turn, 100yd 2nd leg. Food midway on both legs

#4 100yd 1st leg with food at 50, left turn, 50yd 2nd leg

Seren did well today. A few cars came by while we were on 1st track & she stopped briefly as if trying to decide if she needed to react to them. Got back to work promptly when reminded. Throughout the exercise, there was some weaving back & forth, but it was easy to tell when she returned to the track. Did not overshoot turns or try to go the wrong direction. Made it obvious when she got to an article, but several times had to be reminded to lie down. During track #3, I thought she was walking oddly at times, & on #4 she actually stopped to chew on a foot. I went up the line to check her out, & all 4 feet had thorns in them. After I removed the thorns she went right back to work. Total tracking distance = 575.

Next session my plan is to do a 6 turn stairstep with legs as long as I can make them wherever we end up & a generous number of food drops on the last 3 legs.

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