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Thread: My Bad

  1. #1
    Senior Dog
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    My Bad

    I ran my sister's dog in a qual this past weekend and was a bad girl. The first land test was a big one. A triple with a retired gun. The left mark was about 350.yds, the centre mark was almost 400 yds and the retired gun was about 200yds thrown in shadow and deep cover. The only bird the dogs saw to the ground was the centre one. Levy did a good job on both the stand outs but he backsided the retired. I let him have a hunt and figure it out but I never saw him pick the bird up until he was on his way in. His land blind was very good but again it was almost 400 yd on an extremely hot day. We then ran the water blind and he simply refused to respond to the whistle. he wasn't that far off line but being a field trial you better touch the line at some point. Anyway after three blatant whistle refusals I thought he was finished so we left. The next morning when we get to the junior stake the judge comes over and asks where we had gone they had called Levy back .I guess you should never judge your dog's performance but I certainly wouldn't have called him back. next time we will wait to hear it from the judge.

    I ran M in her second junior (derby). She did a great job on the first test. The second series was much longer and tighter. The long gun station was hard to pick out because of the angle of the sun. She hammered the first bird which most dogs were having problems with and then little beast decided because it had been so easy that she would check that station out again. She went back to the first gun then got over her brain cramp and went right over and picked up the long gun. Of course it was too late and she was dropped for going back to the old fall.

    They are allowing junior dogs to run out of contention for the following series but it was so hot I decided to opt out. The judges were great but I didn't think it was fair to them or the others competitors for a bunch of dogs not in contention to eat up valuable time.

  2. #2
    Senior Dog TuMicks's Avatar
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    Wow. I think you're right. If you run a dog 300 and 400 yards on marks and blinds in the course of a tough series, that begins to approach to a mile. These hard-chargers don't know how to pace themselves. So you do this in the heat... geeze. That's scary. Then if the cover is high it can be even hotter close to the ground.

    Evan, of course, is on hiatus while he does work for his church. If he were on this thread he would bust my chops on this. But I am am really ambivalent about the correlation between distance and retriever competence. I really appreciate a good set of judges who can use the factors (terrain, wind, cover, etc...) to set up a ball-buster test all within 250 yards of the line.

    But you have to make decisions that are best for your dog. You probably made the best call given the conditions.

 



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