We had a really good training day on Saturday.  We were a small group.  Some people had other places to be and others may have stayed away due to the cold and windy weather.  Whatever reason, we ending up running a lot of different scenarios so I will split this post up over a few days because otherwise it will be overly long.

Each series built on the other and offered a challenge for the dogs.  First up was a single mark.  Easy.

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Then we ran a blind in combination with the mark.  The blind was run under the arc of the where the mark was thrown.  The dogs pick up the mark first then have to have to pass the area where they had just picked up a bumper to run the blind.  This can be quite a challenge for an inexperienced dog.

This set-up was also difficult because the mark and blind were so close together, (shown by the red line).  This is typical of how close the marks and/or blinds may be in a Master Test.  By contrast, the next diagram is more typical of what the brown dawgs ran at the Senior Level.  Again, I have marked the distance between the mark and blind in red.  You can see that they are spread farther apart.

Since Thunder and Storm are training for Master Level, they ran the first set-up.  They did fine on this.  They required a some handles to the blind to keep them away from the area where the mark fell, but that was to be expected because it is training.

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Next the trainer made it really tough.  The mark was thrown first, but this time it was run as a poison bird.  A poison bird means that the dog is not to pick it up until all the other bumpers are picked up.  In this case, the dogs had to watch the mark fall and then by-pass that area,  (the area where they had picked up marks first in the two previous series), and pick up the blind first.  To make this even harder, the area around where the mark fell was salted with bumpers to make it a bit more tempting.  As I said, this is hard stuff and yes we are attempting to trick the dogs because at a hunt test, with real birds and gun fire, this will be easy in comparison.

Thunder and Storm did fairly well on this.  The ideal would be for them to follow a nice straight line to the blind, (like the blue line in the diagram).  Thunder and Storm required a few handles because they wanted to go to the area of the mark.  They kind of zig-zagged to the blind.  In the end they went and got the blind.  Success!  After retrieving the blind, they were sent for the mark.  Storm forgot where it was and had to be handled.  Thunder remembered and picked it right up.

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Tomorrow, Freighter does a little training.  Thursday, more training and some video of how it messed with Storm’s mind.  🙂