Kris & Joanne's Great Tracking Adventrue - 12/14/08
Sunday, December 14th 2008. I've been looking forward to this date for years! Today was the tracking seminar at the Capital Dog Training Club in Silver Spring, MD which is the ticket into the actual tracking class that begins in January, 2009.
I picked up my friend Kris and her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Lilly, at the Kennel Club Training Center at Oh-Dark-Thirty and we were off. We had a great trade off, I drove & Kris brought our lunch! Perfect trade off in my book! I'm willing to drive for anybody that will feed me......
The class is small, only 11 dogs (of various breeds) with handlers - that's why it's hard to get into the class. We arrived early (that's Kris' influence) and had time to partake of the coffee & donuts that were provided before the class started. We covered a lot of material in a pretty comprehensive manner and I think it would have been pretty overwhelming if I hadn't learned so much from Kris last year and done as much reading as I've done on the subject. I did learn how to daisy chain my long lead to keep it from getting tied into knots, and we heard that the AKC is proposing a new tracking title for Urban Tracking that will be similar to the VST, but more comparable in difficulty to the TD. I think that will be great for folks that live in big cities and don't have access to fields to practice tracking in!
About noon we drove over to Sligo Creek Park which was about 10 minutes from the Capital DTC building and proceeded to put in short tracks for each of our dogs. I had done some very beginner tracking with Zuli about 18 months ago, but she did so much better on her track than I expected that I was very pleased and encouraged. There is a Standard Poodle in the class with us. They had one of the first tracks and didn't do very well at all, but at the end they did a second track for her and the difference was AMAZING. You could almost see the light bulb going on! Way cool.
Our first actual tracking session is January 4th, and our homework is to do one or two short straight (or gently curved) tracks that have not aged more than 15 minutes and do this once a week. Kris and I are checking our schedules to see when we're going to get together to do our homework. I'm excited about this!!
~~Joanne
I picked up my friend Kris and her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Lilly, at the Kennel Club Training Center at Oh-Dark-Thirty and we were off. We had a great trade off, I drove & Kris brought our lunch! Perfect trade off in my book! I'm willing to drive for anybody that will feed me......
The class is small, only 11 dogs (of various breeds) with handlers - that's why it's hard to get into the class. We arrived early (that's Kris' influence) and had time to partake of the coffee & donuts that were provided before the class started. We covered a lot of material in a pretty comprehensive manner and I think it would have been pretty overwhelming if I hadn't learned so much from Kris last year and done as much reading as I've done on the subject. I did learn how to daisy chain my long lead to keep it from getting tied into knots, and we heard that the AKC is proposing a new tracking title for Urban Tracking that will be similar to the VST, but more comparable in difficulty to the TD. I think that will be great for folks that live in big cities and don't have access to fields to practice tracking in!
About noon we drove over to Sligo Creek Park which was about 10 minutes from the Capital DTC building and proceeded to put in short tracks for each of our dogs. I had done some very beginner tracking with Zuli about 18 months ago, but she did so much better on her track than I expected that I was very pleased and encouraged. There is a Standard Poodle in the class with us. They had one of the first tracks and didn't do very well at all, but at the end they did a second track for her and the difference was AMAZING. You could almost see the light bulb going on! Way cool.
Our first actual tracking session is January 4th, and our homework is to do one or two short straight (or gently curved) tracks that have not aged more than 15 minutes and do this once a week. Kris and I are checking our schedules to see when we're going to get together to do our homework. I'm excited about this!!
~~Joanne
2008-12-16 18:50:26 GMT
