Friday NW Practice

I set these hides just before 10 a.m. and we started running them just after 5 p.m.  Tucker ran all of them first, followed by Gimme.

1st Search Gimme and Tucker ran this one almost exactly the same.  You'll note on this that she finds the hide at the 50 second mark, but doesn't stick it.  That has been a tendency of hers, especially with first searches.  At trials since I've started doing a couple practice runs off site, I haven't been seeing that, but it still happens in practice, especially with the first run.

2nd Search  The big truck you see in this search wasn't there when I set the hides, but we ran it anyway.  It hadn't been there that long (Susan arrived before me and saw it drive in), so I don't think it could have much in the way of pooling odor on it.  Tucker checked it out, but limited his time on it, while Gimme paid more attention to it. Gimme has searched a lot of 18 wheelers and I think she may have believed it was a vehicle search since I placed the start so close to it and didn't make any effort to keep her from searching it.  I wanted her to solve the puzzle of the well-cooked hide on her own.  In the future I'll plan to set these somewhere vehicles aren't likely to show up and become part of the search.

Still I love that she was so persistent in checking, checking and rechecking.  Hard to believe that Joyce thinks she doesn’t have a sense of commitment to vehicles.  You can see her indecision around 1:10 as she considers leaving the vehicle to check the rock wall… and dithering back and forth.  Then she suddenly runs to the wall and speeds up searching – I’m sure she got a whiff of odor.    Once she starts on wall, it only takes her a minute to find the hide. 

I was trying to replicate the search conditions we had at the trial, so that’s why I placed the start where I did.  In hindsight, probably not a good idea, since I’ve now introduced the idea that sometimes she should leave vehicles.  Clearly I need to be more flexible, eh.

 

3rd Search  This search also had an unintended truck in it.  At the beginning, right at 11 seconds Gimme actually veers away from odor – its so obvious, seems it just had to be on purpose.  The stack of pallets behind the truck wasn’t there either, but both dogs spent so much time on it, that I’m sure it was placed pretty early in the day or the truck body formed a channel and that caused the odor to end up there.  On the other hand, I didn’t see Gimme’s tail wag faster there – so perhaps not.  

You’ll see it start to wag really fast around 1:47, right before she finds odor at 2:08.  If you are really observant you will see the wag slow down, speed up, slow down, then get really fast right before she leaps up to where the odor is.  Her tail wags all the time (sometimes even in her sleep), it just wags faster when she’s in/near odor.

Around 2:50 in this video, you will see her show signs that she isn’t committed to searching.  We ran these searches all back to back to back… so she’d already been searching about 6 minutes with very little break between them.  I hadn’t planned it that way, but it was a long walk to where we parked, so we were being lazy and unfair to the dogs. 

Interesting though, when I encouraged her to continue (re-cuing "wherezit"), she went almost straight to the hide she had seemed to veer around as she started this search – which further supports my belief she knew it was there all along.  So I’m not sure why she didn’t just go straight to it.  I was using PB for a reward, so I would have thought she’d be extra motivated to get to it. 

One last interesting note.  The third hide is behind that bush and she starts to sniff around the base near it and then abruptly turns away and wags her tail faster for a few seconds as she turns to check the truck out again.  Once she has finished checking the truck, she goes right to the bush to alert.  Seems too obvious to be a coincidence.

Wish I could see her tail speed in real time.  If I did, I think I could cue her “show me” at the right time and then she’d go straight to it.  I also wish I was privy what goes on her mind.  Methinks there’s a little bit of twit in this kid…

Susan recommended that we do an interior hide with a long cook time.  I have a Home Depot (my home away from home) five minutes from my house and I pass it on the way to each of my accounts, so will set something up there.  I can set hides inside and outside using the sheds for inclement weather. 

BTW, I meant to mention that the other day when we met Mary and Grafton on the fort's training area for an off lead romp.  Gimme was getting in touch with her inner hunter by flushing pheasants.  She has a strong belief that critters that can fly should not be found lounging around on the ground.  One of the pheasants was a bit slow and left without a couple of her feathers.