Tracking!

Our obedience/rally-o teacher also teaches tracking so I thought it would be fun to learn something new. It's really neat and different! Different in that you aren't telling the dog to do anything, they are just using their natural sense of smell and following a trail, that is all. It felt very low pressure and easy. I'm going to try to do it a few times a week at the park and see how far we go with it. There are no tracking tests being held in Idaho at this time so we'll probably never enter one but you never know.
Things you need to get started:

A leather glove, some sort of marker, like these flags from Home Depot, and lots of treats that are easily seen by the dog, like string cheese torn into little strips.

You will also need a harness for your dog. Amber is modeling my homemade fleece lined harness.

Find a big open grassy area with not a lot of people to start with. Your yard doesn't work well since it's already covered in your tracks. To begin with, either have your dog in a sit stay, in a kennel or tied up somewhere that they can watch what you are doing. Pick a landmark like a tree to make a straight line from where you start. Put a flag in the ground at the start line. Place a piece of string cheese at the start. Taking normal steps walk in a straight line toward your landmark placing a piece of cheese in every footstep. Don't make it too long at first, maybe 20 or 30 feet. Put the leather glove at the end of your track and put some pieces of cheese in the glove. Place another flag at the end. Then walk straight another 10 feet or so and make a wide turn to come back to where you left your dog, making sure you are well away from your track.

Hopefully your dog has been watching you, wondering what you are doing with Her cheese and wants to find that cheese now. Take the leash and point to the first piece of cheese and say READY??? TRACK!
You are supposed to be well behind your dog, and in a test I believe my teacher said you use a 30 foot lead, but I just used my 6 foot leash to start with. Amber immediately followed the track, vacuuming up cheese.

They are not supposed to lift their noses from the ground and the leash is supposed to have a little tension in it. If they start following your track right away, eating the cheese, don't say anything to them, just let them work. If they get off the track or become distracted, just point at the ground and the next piece of cheese and say TRACK!

When they get to the glove at the end, throw a party! Give them treats out of the glove, make the glove very exciting. In a test they have to indicate to you in some way that they have found the glove, by looking at it or they can even pick it up and give it to you.

Apparently some dogs like the tracking so much that they don't stop at the end of the cheese trail, they keep on sniffing past the glove, so don't encourage that since you want finding the glove to be the rewarding part.
Don't put any turns in your track for a little while and start with cheese in every footstep, slowly working your way up to every other footstep, every third step and so on.

I got very excited about this! Can you tell? It sounds so simple but it was a lot of fun watching her sniffing the ground and wondering what she was smelling. I know in the beginning she is just sniffing for the cheese but just imagine your dog tracking a 400 yard track that has been aged for an hour in the rain and wind with who knows what else having crossed that track and you are just holding the leash, trusting your dog...

Doggy doors and Easter

We've had a lovely weekend, full of gardening and yard work. My husband and I put in a new arbor at the garden gate, and he tore out some very old and ugly junipers that used to be by the street.

The dogs got a present a few weeks ago, a dog door! Amber is still having to pee a lot so we needed it. They learned it fairly fast. The first week or so though, they would both go out it on their own but then would come to the door and wait to be let back in like they used to have to do. It was pretty cute. I have always thought Amber was a genius of a dog so it was a little surprising that she didn't get it right away. Obviously it wasn't because she is not intelligent, just that it was a habit she'd known all her life.

I wonder how a dog door changes the way a dog thinks. If she'd been raised with one, would she have been just a little more independent? Rye seemed to get it just a tiny bit faster than her and he is the more independent of the two, though not by much. They are both dogs that like to be close and want to make us happy for sure. I also wonder about the next puppy or dog of the house, someday in the distant future. What does it do for their view of the human in the house if they don't have to rely on us to let them in, let them out? Or does that not change anything at all? Have you read "Merle's Door" by Ted Kerasote? Great book.

They have it down now though! They love it. Amber is a sunbather and will lie out in it all day when it's warm enough. And squirrel patrol is so much easier now.

Hope you all have a wonderful day today! Happy Easter from the creatures at Barks and Recreation.

 

I think they look more like angel wings on Rivet the cat (and he would like you to think that's what they are).

happy

 

and now it's time to GARDEN! 

MACH Amber

Amber got that one last double Q yesterday. So very exciting! That's my dad commenting from the stands while my husband filmed. I am so proud of my dog.

Now what are we going to do? I think we'll try a little Rally-O in May and I think I'll still run her in agility but probably start over in Novice Preferred at the 20" height since she's an old lady dog at 8 years old.

In other news, my vet decided to run a test on her urine last week. It's a bladder tumor antigen test that specifically tests for Transitional Cell Carcinoma, the most common cancer of the urinary tract and the one he was worried it could be. All we did was send in a urine sample to the lab. We got the call yesterday from the lab that it was NEGATIVE!!!! I think my vet was pretty sure it would come back positive. So there's still a small chance that it is some other kind of cancer but highly unlikely according to my vet. That made my entire day, week, month, year! So he says we don't have to worry about doing a biopsy right away, which is good since the tool is still not fixed and we still haven't ordered a new one.

Ahhh, life is good :)

I call this "Champion of my heart".

bird dog in the snow

We had one beautiful hike in it and now it's mud again and un hike-able. 
There are a lot of quail in these foothills and the dogs love it.

We don't hunt. We are all a little gun shy around here. I once took them both to a practice held by the german shorthair pointer club where they had live pigeons and live guns. Both dogs very much wanted that pigeon in the beginning. The man holding it plucked some feathers and then tossed it out for each dog to chase, separately. They did. Then another man shot a gun. Both dogs immediately turned around and came back to me, quivering. I don't know what I expected, they were 6 and 9 years old at the time and had never heard gun shot before! The men with the club weren't much interested in helping us through it, they were mainly there for serious hunter folk to practice I think.
That's ok, I don't like guns either! I do find it really interesting watching a gun dog do what it's bred to do though. I wish I had started them out younger so they weren't afraid, maybe I'd have done some hunt tests with them but also, just for their well being when we happen to hear gunfire in the hills which we do occasionally.
Rye will point more often than Amber.

They don't catch them, they just want to find them.