Urban Tracking (34 & 35)

On Friday, Nadine and I met at Game Farm Park for tracking. She laid a track for Gimme with lots of changes of surface and transitions. It was more than I really wanted, but none of them were too hard. The biggest problem was track age. If we both lay tracks for the other at the same time, then one of the dogs will get an older track. Since Cricket has more difficulty with urban, she usually goes first which means Gimme's track is older. I think next time I'm going to wait to start laying Cricket's track until I see Nadine coming back, then we can get the timing better for both of them.

This time Gimme's track was 1:05. She can do this age with many surfaces, but she's only done 45 minutes for hard surfaces (there were 3 different kinds), so it made this a very hard track.

Cricket's big challenge on her track was all the squirrels - she is really vermin obsessed. Gimme saw a squirrel on her track and stopped to watch it for a moment and when it scampered off she went on tracking. This week we are going to teach Cricket the Look-at-That game. I'm hoping it will work since the punitive method Nadine is using doesn't seem to be working. Given how soft her dogs are, it's not the right answer for them (not that I think it would be the right answer for any dog).

On Saturday, I laid more straight tracks in the Shopko and Burlington parking lots. The temperature was right at 60º and I aged them to exactly 45 minutes. The tracks were 70, 100 and 125 yards. I set food drops every 5 yards. She really motored down these tracks nicely. I saw she was more distractible about halfway through the third track. She could either have been tired or someone may have driven over her track (maybe more than once).  I could have adjusted some factors, but since her last two tracks were frustrating, I wanted to make sure this one was motivating for her.

We meet Nadine on Thursday for urban tracking at the Auburn Cinema and on Saturday we're meeting Jon and Stella at Flaming Geyser for some field tracking. It's supposed to be drizzling and cool both days, so it should be ideal tracking weather.