Still getting started.

Took Zodi out on 3/22 (last Monday) to do some tracking in the fields behind my agility field. I had just received her tracking harness and line in the mail on Saturday and I couldn't wait to use it. I ordered the harness and line from Paw Mark (www.pawmark.com) and they're pretty brightly colored. I have a habit of losing things so I wanted to be sure I wouldn't overlook them in the field.

The evening was pefect for tracking being cool but not too dry. I had decided that I needed to do a couple of short tracks with a fair amount of food because recently Zodi has been stopping a lot (or what I think is a lot) on her tracks and having to be restarted.

It turned out neither were very short, probably between 50-70 yards but she's such a big dog that if I drop food every other body length or so, the track quickly stretches out. Plus I want to try to curve the track [see back story, next post]and of course I have to remember not to put the flag where I've made a drop so before I know it I've gone about 50 yards.

But I decided to see what happened so I brought her up to the first one when it was about 10 minutes old and she got a pretty good start, pulling out to about 8 feet which is the length of line I'm giving her at this point. She went straight down the track for about 20 feet, missing 2 or 3 food drops and then stopped for the fourth one.

Just before she she gets to a food drop she'll go off track several feet and then stop and turn back and search for the food. She does this almost every time she gets a food drop although I'd say she's missing 3 out of 4 drops. She pulls so hard and she's so fast that we whizz past them before I even realize it. I often see them as I go over them. At this point I'm trying hard to drop the food in a place with less cover so I can see it.

When we got to the first turn I noticed I'd forgotten to put in a flag (there's so much to think about when you're laying a track!) so I was pretty thrilled when she just kept her nose down and followed it around to the drop beyond it. After that she started quartering and missed the next drop and then stopped when I wouldn't let her go off in another direction. She was fairly close to the glove at this point so she re-started herself and then saw the glove and had a good time with that for a minute or two. She wasn't vey interested in playing with it and pretty quickly started following where I'd walked on to lay the next track so I unhooked the line from her harness and attached it to her collar.

Attaching a line to Zodi's collar is a little like clipping a leash on a semi. She is so strong and so big that you just don't have a chance to to stop her before she's barrelling onto the next item of interest. Sometimes I wrap a leash around her waist and then hook it to her collar and then she doesn't pull at all. I had to laugh when Allison Platt [see back story for more on Allison] said in her seminar that it was important not to discourage your dog from pulling on the line when they're tracking. I don't think I'll ever have a problem with that.

When we got to the next starting flag I reattached the line to her harness and allowed her to snarf up the chicken I'd put down. She didn't start off nearly as well on this track which was in a part of the field where the wind was blowing across the track from left to right. She barely made any progress as she kept pulling go off the the left so I'd have to stop at which point she'd just stop and stand there looking at me. I had to re-start her 3 times and she still managed to miss most of the food drops.

Finally we got to a point where a tractor had left a rut in the field and I purposely put a piece of chicken there so I'd be able to tell if she found it. she did and then finished the track nicely.

So I've got a lot of questions for Allison and I'm hoping she really meant it when she said we coule email her :-)