Friday, December 7, 2007

Laddie Test 1.6

Test: Three singles:

  1. 80 yards (dummy)
  2. 160 yards (dummy)
  3. 240 yards (dummy)
Configuration:
  • #2 thrown 30° to the right of #1
  • #1 and #3 thrown as an in-line
Marks thrown by training partner Barbara Wood, who used a duck call and also called "hey-hey" while throwing

Lawn covered with snow

Overcast, negligible wind, temperature 30°F

Location: Lake Needwood Park

Pass:
No

Blind: 210 yard pinball drill, no retrieval article, with poles set up in advance between the line for #1/#3 and the line for #2

Notes: Laddie ran #1 nicely, but he fell apart running back on #2 when he was running past one of the blind poles. I realize now it was a mistake to place the blind poles in the middle of the course.

He was even worse on #3. The line for #3 was along a treeline, which had not presented a problem for Lumi. I set it up that way so that the mark for #3 could be thrown into the high cover along the edge of the field, satisfying the requirement for a cover change on #3. But as Laddie ran toward the fall, he ran straight and then scalloped into the cover three times to look for the dummy, of course not finding it until the third time. To his credit, he didn't waste time looking too long when he made the wrong entries, and came out again to run the correct direction each time.

When he made the correct entry into the cover, he picked up the dummy with great enthusiasm and raced back toward the start line, but as he ran, he became distracted by the woods and ran in and out of them repeatedly.

It's difficult finding a nearby location to run Test 1.6, but I can see now that trying to use a woodsy area next to a field, so that the dog runs along the treeline and then enters the woods at the end of the run, is nothing like a real mark and is clearly not the way to run this test.

This was Laddie's longest target blind ever, and he ran it reasonably well. His whistle sits at each pole were excellent, but instead of sitting on the whistle when he got offline between poles 3 and 4, he spotted pole 4 and veered back on course. Both he and Lumi do not yet always respond with a sit on the whistle, and in some situations will ignore the whistle or will seem to use it as information that they are off course. That needs to be repaired.

Lumi and Laddie have both been showing since the snowfall that they have difficulty picking articles up promptly when the articles are lying in snow. This would seem to be a good thing for us to work on in a separate drill. If they can develop high reliability for pick-ups that are currently difficult, that may enhance their pick-ups of ducks later.

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