IPO tracking

[AdrianneIsabel]

Backup is too fast on the track and has subsequently blown past and had to circle back on corners. Slowing them down to a steady pace is ideal for clean work per the sport.

[release the hounds]

Originally Posted by Pops2

so it's mostly stressing the artificial environment like most trials do. still it's work & that is better than most.

yes and no. WHile in real life the end is what is really important, find what you're supposed to find, doesn't really matter how you get there and life is good.

In a trial, though it is a sport you can still evaluate the dogs. Usually crazy and frantic trackers are a bit crazy and frantic in other places too. usually tracking ground is at a premium and most clubs don't have hundreds of acres to choose from. so what you get is a shorter track with added stresses of obedience and we see how the dog responds. It is in now way real, but it can still be a pretty decent test.

But it is a sport and there has to be criteria to judge against. You can tell a lot in tracking, though I hate doing it. Just after the 4th we had a trial, hotter than crap and dry as hell. tracking conditions were less than desirable.

You could see which dogs were tough mentally and had decent training and which ones didn't. one dog was so stressed when it lost the track and didn't have a handler to show it where it was again it quit. Another one was force tracked in Germany before he was sent over here. Dog lost the track on a corner and kept his nose deep to the ground and kept right on going. Looked good too, but I layed the track and knew he was not tracking anything at this point, just lying to avoid the beating he probably had to endure in Germany for losing the track. So you can see how stress affects the dogs.

a couple others when they had difficulty worked it though and worked through it well. Not surprisingly they were my favorite dogs to work in the bitework as well.