What do you think.
Posted: Sat 24 Dec 2011 9:02 pm
While training my youg dog recently I have started to tie a 30cm length of white surveyors tape to both birds and dummies on marks when the background is poor. I tend to do this more when i want to use a particular piece of terrain and there is poor marking conditions such as heavy gum trees. The dogs sure mark those birds much better than ones without a ribbon.
This got me thinking. Could you do this in a trial??? The rules don't cover it...I decided before doing this I would need to justify in my own mind if I as a competitor I would be happy. Without letting the cat out of the bag so to speak, as to where i would stand, I am interested to hear what others think. Below are some pros and cons.
Pros. This would increase the level of equity and remove the complaints on various bird colours. The old "his was a white bird mine was dark" syndrome. The flickering white in the air actually looks similar to the flashing white of teal. Would we infact be adding to the "natural conditions" part of our rules as the birds would have more of a "flutter". It would allow the use of even more varying terrain as it would open up the number of places we could put on marks. Dogs seem to "mark" the flutter much better than a plain old dummy or pidgeon.
Cons. Is this just too far from emulating shooting conditions? We are testing marking in trials. Part of that test should be a dogs ability to see the so called hard marks. Would we be removing that test and not let the great markers show what they are made of? Who would decide if the conditions were appropriate to allow a ribbon to be attached. What happens if one comes off mid flight in a trial.
Let me know what you think.'
Gareth
This got me thinking. Could you do this in a trial??? The rules don't cover it...I decided before doing this I would need to justify in my own mind if I as a competitor I would be happy. Without letting the cat out of the bag so to speak, as to where i would stand, I am interested to hear what others think. Below are some pros and cons.
Pros. This would increase the level of equity and remove the complaints on various bird colours. The old "his was a white bird mine was dark" syndrome. The flickering white in the air actually looks similar to the flashing white of teal. Would we infact be adding to the "natural conditions" part of our rules as the birds would have more of a "flutter". It would allow the use of even more varying terrain as it would open up the number of places we could put on marks. Dogs seem to "mark" the flutter much better than a plain old dummy or pidgeon.
Cons. Is this just too far from emulating shooting conditions? We are testing marking in trials. Part of that test should be a dogs ability to see the so called hard marks. Would we be removing that test and not let the great markers show what they are made of? Who would decide if the conditions were appropriate to allow a ribbon to be attached. What happens if one comes off mid flight in a trial.
Let me know what you think.'
Gareth