Field Tracking (63)

Nadine and I met at Flaming Geyser on Thursday, Feb 20th. I had a different plan, but when I got there after being held up in traffic, Nadine had already laid a track in the fields I planned to use. So we set this up in the spur of the moment. The black is the track I laid for Gimme, with an article-reward-point after every crosstrack. The red is a crosstrack laid by Nadine, which she ran with Ember.

Gimme started out okay, but found the crosstracks more and more attractive as we went along. She's done better with them. After watching how Ember "tracked" and the result with Gimme - I think it was far too attractive. Ember is largely all over the place, using her whole 15' line to check out everything. Plus her articles all contained food. So, while they were all gone (except one glove), the smell of food just a bit away lingered.

I didn't think Gimme did as well with this as she has in past exercises; it was just too much. On a positive note, she was very willing to give up the crosstrack contamination. She was very persistent about the extra glove - got the food in it and thought I should give her more. In her mind I'm sure she thought it smelled like Nadine, who most often lays her tracks, so she should get paid for finding it. I urged her to leave it and soon she found a better article, one with Mom-smell on it and she got paid for it.

Not a bad exercise, just not what I had planned. Next time we'll do my plan, which should be contaminated, but not too much. I say, "should" because we can't really control the environment, so you never know what you'll get.