Saturday May 12th
Container search video - Naturally Gimme was quite excited to see a lovely long row of boxes. I did remind her she was working for chickie nuggies before I let her start. She raced off the start line and went the whole length and then slowed down. Their boxes had folding tops, so her stepping on them didn't crush them. I guess it wasn't as much fun, so she didn't bother doing it again. Gimme finished her search in 11.1 seconds, putting her just out of the placements, and earning the Novice Container (NC) title.
Vehicle search - Gimme went across the front of the vehicles (only the front bumper is in play for UKC novice) and quickly came back to the blue vehicle. She detailed and indicated to the right of license plate and I called alert. The judge said "where?" and when I indicated the area, she said "no". When she showed me where, after going back and forth trying to decide/remember where it actually was, it was 6-8 inches from where I pointed.
In fact, when I showed it to Gimme so I could reward at source, she acted uninterested. With the breeze coming from the right, I believe odor was channeling to where Gimme originally indicated. This picture shows the car - green arrow is where the judge said the odor was and red arrow is where Gimme indicated.Interestingly, there were twice as many qualifying dogs in containers as there were in vehicles. Statistically, there are usually many more failures in containers than any other element. NOTE: The show chair, who is a friend of mine, struck up a conversation with the judges later and found out UKC has more exact requirements on vehicles than any other venue. While other venues have the lowest Q rate on containers, for UKC the lowest Q rate is in vehicles. If they are going to be so exacting, I think it's unfair to set up a channeling hide in novice.