Dont blame the dog!

I generally track with Steel several days a week. I am a bit spoiled as there are some nice tracking fields down the road from where I work. It is pretty easy to lay a track in the morning, work for a few hours and then go back and run the aged track. Mississippi seems to appeal to Steel and he has been tracking very strongly the past few weeks. This is a big improvement over his tracking towards the end of the summer when "someone" fell into the overtraining trap in order to make a VST (variable surface tracking) test fit into the logistics of her busy moving schedule. Fortunately that unnamed person saw that she was rushing her dog and although he was trying very hard, he was less confident about his abilities. So she decided to actually wait until the dog was both skilled and confident before trialing him, regardless of how long it takes to win the "tracking trial lottery" and get entered.


Anyway....getting back to our recent work. On Tuesday I worked a 3+ hour track, mostly grass with a few changes of surface. It started out great but then about halfway through seemed to be a lot more challenging for Steel. He still had scent but he was doing lots and lots of circling and casting to determine a direction. He has a tendency to charge on ahead when he is out of scent (typical male, if you cant figure it out just give it more muscle <roll eyes>) and I have worked on encouraging him to slow down and be more methodical trying to avoiding cuing him too much. It does happen occasionally and I have to resist the urge to correct him for doing what I call "using his muscles instead of his brain". :-)

However we struggled on through the track, him casting and circling and progressing forward but with a lot of work. Seriously, this was one of those tracks that should have been relatively simple - my goal was age and length rather than difficulty.  I contained my frustration (mostly), Steel found all his beloved scent articles, got rewarded at the end (see below) and headed back to the car.  As I was leaving I looked to the far end of the field and see a convoy of trucks heading back towards me across the field. They had been beyond my track, presumably doing something around the natural gas pipes at the far end of the fields. I know they weren't there when I laid my track, which means they drove through it to get there (relatively short and dry grass so no noticeable tire tracks if you weren't looking for them). Umm....good boy Steel!!! As often as stuff like that happens in training, things turning out to be different than we had thought, why is it such an effort to remember that in the moment?? It is an excellent reminder, when we are tempted to correct the dog (after all he SHOULD know this right?) that things might not be exactly as we thought and the dog might be doing the very best he can.

Here is a video clip from another track.

 It is not the best tracking performance but the ending is pretty typical: