Urban Tracking (13)

Turned out to be unlucky 13.  We had a really cool exercise for the two more advanced and talented girls, Skookum and Gimme, and neither did very well at it.  Skookum did better by a little bit.  Gimme was just in lala-land.  It had been six weeks since they'd done urban, so perhaps their skills were rusty.  Gimme was in season and it just may have been "THE day".  Weather could also be a factor, since the conditions are pretty dry and there would have been more damp in early April.

We are going to do a similar exercise next time, just reversing the plot so the turn is away from the curb out into the open.  Gimme had done one of these at the Basic Tracking seminar and she was brilliant.  Hard Surface Turn Against the Curb video  So I was surprised to see her have so much trouble this time.

The tracks were 20 yards from open concrete up to a curb with a turn and then 10 yards to the article.  The spacing between the tracks was greater than I've shown here.  The dogs ran the youngest track first and then the next youngest, through to the oldest track.  So each track was a few minutes older than the one before.  The first track was 24 minutes old and the last track 32.

Multiple turns against a curb video  Gimme's first run was the best.  The second was okay.  By the third run it seemed she was pattern trained and wanting to just go to where she thought the glove was.  The fourth segment of the video is her 4th/last run of the right turns.

We'll just have to see how it goes next time, which may be as soon as next week.  We are trying to schedule it so we are there on Thursday, so we miss the parking lot sweeper and all the 18-wheelers running over our stuff and smashing it to bits.  Of course it may be a moot point, since Nadine found a place with some sports fields we can use.  So we'll be switching gears and doing the sports field tracks to get caught up.

In any case, even if it wasn't Gimme's best effort, she still had fun and was happy afterward.