On Thursday, May 17th, J'Anna and I were supposed to get together for RFE practice, but she called me early to say she'd been sick all night. So I changed gears and headed to Mom's early, with time built in to lay, and later run, a set of well-aged tracks. I took my new Vivitar (GoPro lookalike), but messed up and didn't get a video of her tracking.
These are the three tracks I laid; basically the same format I did last time. It was a start with sock, 50 yards to an article, 35 yards to a corner, then 50 yards to the end glove. My plan was to have Gimme approach the start from an angle and stand facing any direction other than right down the track. The black line is the track, green line is my path when laying tracks from the end of one to the beginning of the next, and pink is Gimme's approach to the start of each track.
The first track is at the bottom of the picture. The second one is up the left side and the third is coming down from the upper right. The grass was about thigh height and wet. Apparently Spittlebugs love wild daisies so by the time I was halfway through laying the tracks, my pants were wet with bug spit (the things a person learns when doing dog sports, eh). The temperature was 66º and I aged the track to 2:45.
Gimme loved these tracks and had a great time. She had no difficulty determining the direction of the starts. She really wanted to trot the whole distance of the three tracks and couldn't understand why I thought fast-walking should be enough on this rough ground.
The only place she had any issue was on the third track, after the first article and before the turn. When I first arrived, I did see a person walking a dog further out and after I laid the tracks and returned to my car, I noticed the car next to me had gone. Thus, they probably walked along the path and if the dog was off leash, it could easily have been all over this area in our track. Still Gimme sorted out the challenge without any help from me.
She's such a good girl.
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