75 Percent Club

Gimme and I did not title today, still she did very well and I’m very happy with her.   We ended the day with 75 points (out of 100 possible) and 2 faults (assessed for a false alert).

Our first element was the container search and Gimme was not well focused – my fault, which I’ll explain. She alerted on the wrong box, fringing on the one next to the correct box. It was a definite alert, she stood both front feet on the box and pivoted on it as I walked around her. She really thought it was right – she certainly had me convinced. This happened in 19.43 seconds. The judge’s comment was: "Slow down, take a deep breath. Good try." I have noticed that I sometimes get a little rushed, matching Gimme’s speed on containers – then I catch myself and slow down and she slows down with me. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, I was just starting to slow down when she alerted. On a positive note, she didn’t do any extra indications. Woohoo…

From there we went on to the exterior element, which was on grass. Gimme did a great job on this, finishing in 47.69 seconds and without marking. The judge’s comment was: "Rewarding quickly – literally at the source – every time in training will build more ‘stick to it’ and ‘don’t leave’ in your dog. Well run search – good patience." Those are things we do in training all the time.

Gimme has a consistent pattern to 90 percent of her searches. She blasts into the area, moving around quickly air-scenting for odor. She’ll go right by the odor with a quick nose tilt in the direction of it. After she has scanned the search area, then she’ll come back to spend some time detailing, trying to find source. More often than not she will break off detailing and go briefly check out some other interesting spot. Then she’ll return directly to the odor and usually indicates without hesitation. I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, or just is what it is. While it eats up time now, when she gets to level 2 and 3, I think it may actually work to our advantage. I talked with Joyce briefly about it and I’m sure we’ll talk about it more. Keep in mind that <48 seconds is a very respectable time.

In the afternoon we started with the interior element. Gimme had it in 1:00.52 – again, a very respectable time. She followed the pattern I described above. I talked briefly with the judge after we alerted and he definitely noticed the nose tilt as she entered the room, blasting by the threshold hide. His verbal comment was that her hunting pattern might be a product of too many multiple hide searches, but we haven’t been doing that for awhile. I mentioned to Joyce that I wanted to expand on the no-multiples theme by actually removing Gimme from the search area for just a moment as Joyce sets a new hide and picks up the old one. I think that might make it clearer to Gimme, about them being single hides. The judge’s comment on the sheet was: "Obedience to odor! You had fun and got the find. Good job."

Our last search was the vehicle element. It was very hot out and the search was on asphalt, which was hot on the dog’s feet. As I gave Gimme the search cue, "wherezit", she took off along the near side of the three vehicles, appearing to be heading to our car! The breeze was blowing away from us and just as I was about to call Gimme to cut short her flight, she caught the odor and turned on a thin dime herself. Those were very trying conditions and she cared more about finding odor than her comfort. Good girl! She made a quick pass around the near vehicle, detailed a spot briefly, moved away and sniffed an area nearby where I’m sure the odor was pooling. Then quickly returned to the detail area, sniffed once and paw touched right where her nose had been. Her attitude was, "This is it, pay up and lets get the heck off this hot stuff." She did that in 27.98 seconds – a very nice time. The judge’s comment was: "Nice odor recognition! Was worried that you were both going to leave odor, but dog stayed true. J "

So, the thing I learned that really sticks out is to never again let the club officials rush me and my dog. They told us in the letter to exhibitors not to arrive early, so I didn’t. Which meant that by the time I got the car set up for the heat, I had just enough time to check-in and then the briefing was supposed to start in five minutes. Of course it didn’t start for another half hour. Then the club sent out a person to give us "pre-briefing entertainment" while the judges got ready – it was implied that the judges would be out in a few minutes – in reality it was 25 minutes. So that was essentially an hour wasted that I could have used familiarizing Gimme with the area, getting her walked and relaxed, as well as walking Meaggi and relaxing myself.

Once the real briefing started… it was another 55 minutes. First we heard from Ron Gaunt, the sport originator and then the judges. Then we had a walk-through familiarization with the pattern and the search areas. That was followed by the post walk-through question and answer period. Then we were told the first three dogs of both groups need to be ready to go in five minutes and we were number three of the A group!

Naturally I felt rushed and that traveled down the leash. It was not sufficient time to get a good potty walk, much less get either of us mentally prepared and relaxed. Gimme didn’t even make any effort to pee. I almost had her interested in a spot where I’d just seen another dog pee, when I hear them yelling across the parking lot that they are "looking for the Dalmatian". So I hurried up to the staging area and they were going to rush us inside without letting us use the practice boxes. I said we needed to and they held another team back so we could. When we moved inside – we ended up sitting and waiting for FIFTEEN MINUTES!

Needless to say I was annoyed – all that rushing for freaking nothing. I was trying to breathe and relax and help Gimme to relax, but she wasn’t falling for it. The first few minutes she was okay, but then the waiting was starting to annoy her and I saw her repeatedly turn her head to air-snap at what was a loose leash. That is her way of telling me its time to get the show moving. So by the time we did get taken in, she was not focused, which I saw at the start line. Thus, the false alert.

I don’t blame Gimme – managing our time and protecting the team from interference is my job. I vowed right then and there to never let it happen again. It’s a good thing too, because they tried to rush us again for the afternoon searches and I just told them they had to wait. In the afternoon they wanted us stacked up and waiting on them and I just said "no"… not gonna happen with two reactive dogs among the first three dogs. Even taking my time and making them wait, we still went inside, waited five minutes each at stations 1, 2 and 3, before starting the interior search. Again a fifteen minute wait, but at least since we were moving from one station to the next Gimme didn’t find it annoying, though she was very eager to get on with searching.

BTW the point of the stations is to keep teams separated visually from each other. The sport really is intended to accommodate reactive dogs of all types and Ron gave everyone a reminder of just how important it is to respect other teams’ space. It doesn’t take a dog having a reaction to impact their (and your) experience in a negative way.

Unfortunately, this club seems to think that separation only applies in and around the search areas, they wanted to stack teams up waiting outside in close proximity. That’s what they tried to get me to do in the afternoon and I didn’t fall for it. After we were done, I saw they had four teams lined up, some of the dogs had red bandanas, too close for comfort and people were body blocking to keep the dogs from getting visuals on each other. Shouldn’t be done that way.

And if a club tells me not to come early, I’m coming early anyway, by at least an hour more than I need for physical set-up. If they won’t let us on the grounds, then we’ll stop up the road and spend some time walking and relaxing and connecting. Naturally the first time I do that – you know we’ll be the number 24 dog in our group!

I did find out that the group that puts on these trials is notorious for their poor time management and that chaos is the norm. Unfortunately there aren’t many groups putting on trials, so I may have to put up with it again.

Another issue that was bad was that after I’d gotten parked and my car set up for the girls’ comfort, a car came to park on one side and a truck on the other. They proceeded to run their engines all day to keep their dogs in air conditioning. So we were getting exhaust and hot air off the engine from one or the other all day long and, of course, by then the parking was all full and there was no place to move to. In the future I’ll use the reactive dog parking, which is more spaced out.

Others were complaining about this issue and talking to club leaders fell on unconcerned ears. I’m going to write a letter to NACSW and suggest some changes. I certainly don’t want to say that people can’t run their air-conditioning if their dogs need it to stay comfortable. But I do think they should identify those who will be doing so and make them park together, so those of us (the majority) who are relying on air flow as part of our comfort measures aren’t subjected to toxic fumes and heated air when its already hot. I also plan to mention that they need to firm up their guidelines to the clubs about how they manage staging areas outside the search grid. People shouldn’t be encouraged to place their dogs too close for comfort to other teams – if they are using body blocking, that’s too close. It’s the nature of this sport that there is a lot of hurry up and wait, but it shouldn’t be done in such a way that it negatively impacts the teams – especially not while the organization is trying to promote themselves as user-friendly for teams with challenges.

To end on a positive note. While I didn’t do a good enough job managing our team at the start of the day, I learned from my mistake and I feel I did well in the afternoon. And I also felt I did a good job handling on the actual searches all four times. I managed to keep moving and not put any social pressure on Gimme while she was working.

I’m very proud of Gimme and I think she did very well, despite trying conditions. I feel confident we’ll get it next time – whenever that is.