A promising day sees a stunning surprise, but ends with two happy hearts
How my lack of hunt training ambition, made for an interesting day out
When I started training with Nina, the trainers and my fellow handlers assumed I’d have the same ambitions as them: train her to get the diplomas that’d allow us to enter field trials — aka working tests — at the level we’d proven to have.
Because field trials are where the real fun is.
They simulate what you’d encounter in actual hunting. And even when you have no ambitions to actually go hunting, that’s what the whole game is about. Also, they don’t bother with the boring obedience exercises you need to nail at every level when going up for diploma.
I don’t have those ambitions.
Diplomas, certifications, hold no interest for me. Nor do I need working tests to tell me what Nina’s capable of. A trainer that keeps challenging us will do just fine.
Also, working tests are always competitive with everyone ranked from best to worst at the end. And I don’t give a hoot about being better or worse than others.1 Especially when that involves judges.
In working tests, for example, most dogs and handlers execute the exercises just fine from a pragmatic (functional) point of view: working together to bring back whatever needed to be brought back. So the judges need to magnify every tiny, insignificant detail out of all proportion in order to come up with a final ranking.
And that gets up my nose very quickly.
I train for fun.
To give Nina a brain challenge and see her enjoy herself.
While we don’t need to hone our skills for diplomas field trial competitions, I still like to hone them to see how far we can go: what level of difficulty we can conquer.
To be awestruck by what Nina is able to do (often in spite of the errors I make).
Which is one reason I also like to participate in workshops on specific exercises. The other is to let Nina experience work we hardly ever do in our regular training.
Like following a “sleep spoor” (drag track) to retrieve an animal that wasn’t killed outright and walked, stumbled, or dragged itself away from where it was shot.
When we do it in our regular training, the trainer sprinkles duck or rabbit scent from a bottle onto several dummies and drags them a serious distance including corners. It takes a lot of time, even when the track is not refreshed for every dog. And that’s precisely why we don’t do it that often.
So when I heard about a drag track workshop on Texel, one of the islands to the north of the Netherlands, I was game and signed up immediately.
I’d been there a couple of weeks before. For a workshop “fetching in uneven terrain”. The trainers were great, it had been fun, and we used dummies all the way, so I was all set for another fun day out.
When I got out of the car and walked up to the trainers to say hello, my mood took a nose dive, though. In the back of their old Land Rover, I spotted a bag that had feathers and a beak sticking out.
My throat constricted. A shiver ran down my spine. I shuddered silently.
I don’t know exactly why I was so taken aback.
Perhaps because I’m used to the dummy thing.
Perhaps because it had slipped my mind that drag tracks are an A level exercise and that requires dogs to retrieve both feather and hair game.
More likely, though, while I don’t have any qualms about handling dead animals, the thought of using them for fun and recreation never has felt and still doesn’t feel good.
But…
I’d not driven halfway across the country and taken a ferry (and the return trip would not be for at least another hour), to turn around and leave. Instead, I talked with the trainers, telling them Nina so far had only worked with dummies, and asking them to put one down for her in addition to the colme.2
To be ht, I doubted Nina would even pick up a real life dead animal. She’d never done so, never mind retrieved one.
But Nina being Nina, she had different ideas.
On the first track, she sniffed the dummy but determinedly trotted past it, continuing to follow the track.
It puzzled me.
One of the trainers she simply had too good a nose and decided the dummy wasn’t what she was sent to retrieve because it didn’t smell anything like the feathers at the start of the track.
Talk about a dog understanding what’s expected…
Further into the workshop, a surprise: Nina brought back a pigeon.
I was like: “WTF?!”
When the trainer who laid the drag track came back out of the undergrowth, she said she had put it in Nina’s mouth.3 And Nina then diligently carried it back.
That, however, was as far as she’d been prepared to go.
She spat it out right in front of me though — no sitting down and presenting it patiently as she’s supposed to. And after this, she didn’t let any of the trainers come close enough to put another dead critter in her mouth.
Talk about a dog guarding their boundaries…
The last run of the workshop was with a goose. Heavy birds these are.
Nina was interested in it, sniffed it, but she flatly refused to have anything further to do with it.
Pretty comical and very clear, how she did that.
When I pointed her to it again (peer pressure got me to silence my qualms, at least temporarily), she sniffed once, jerked back, and then turned her head emphatically away from the goose (and me!)
Talk about a dog talking loudly and clearly…
For someone without ambitions, I learned a lot.
I love to learn, so that made it a good day. My learning including a few things I hadn’t expected to learn, made it an even better day.
Seeing Nina enjoying herself, complying with a touch of rebellion, and communicating emphatically… made it better still.
All in all, and despite it raining throughout, we had a great day!
What stories do you have about a bad start turning into a great experience?
Please share in the comments!
Sure, I want to do well. But I prefer to judge that against what we’ve accomplished before. In other words: compete against ourselves. And I take our “form of the day” into account. When Nina, myself, or we both have had a bit of stress — eustress from joy or disstress from anxiety — I’m happy and satisfied when we perform at a lower than our usual level.
Cold game: an animal dead long enough to have gone cold. As opposed to a freshly killed animal. Which is another challenge level entirely for hunting dogs.
I hadn’t told them about my qualms, so they thought I’d wanted Nina to eventually get comfortable retrieving dead animals. Because joining a drag track workshop must mean you’re interested in competing at the highest level…