Urban Tracking (113)

Nadine and I met at Game Farm on November 9th. It was a cool 57º, dew on everything and no breeze. Nadine laid this simple track for Gimme and we aged it 45 minutes. I wanted it simple because of Gimme's false pregnancy. She does pretty good with nose-related stuff, but tracking is a little challenging because it requires focusing for a longer time than something like nosework.

Gimme did a good job and found all her articles.  She was a little distracted on the second turn with a bit of crittering.  Lucky for me, she's not critter obsessed.  Nadine made the final path crossing on a long diagonal.  It's human to want to square up our crossings; Gimme had no problem with the diagonal.

There were a lot of dropped leaves and Nadine buried the last glove (orange) in a bunch of yellow and orange leaves.  Gimme was going pretty fast and almost over shot the glove, but caught the scent of it and turned back on a thin dime. 

When we were able to track at Medline, I used to bury small articles in the beauty bark all the time.  So Gimme is really attuned to finding them whether she can see them or not.  The only time she had any challenge with buried hides was when they'd refreshed their beauty bark and it was particularly strong smelling.  Even then she still found it and then for the other two articles (also buried) she had no trouble at all.  I think she had to tune her nose to the challenge.

Wish she could apply this straight across to buried hides in AKC nosework.  I'm sure she could do it if I'd just set up some boxes to actually train it.