Tried a new exercise for the orange ones. - clock or waggon wheel. I am reading a couple of books at the moment that have prompted a few thoughts. ' The Pershore Way - training retrievers' said something along the lines - 'repetition is the greatest tool for a dogs understanding'; the other, which I have only just started and bodes well is by Temple Grandin - Animals in Transition. (about using an understanding of autism to understand animal behaviour) here she related a story about 20% of air line pilots in flight simulators not seeing a plane parked on thier approach runway. Highlighting the fact that in a lot of cases we 'see' what we expect to see and the corollary we don't see what we don't expect.

It was this idea of a dog seeing what it expected to see linked with the idea of repetition as a training tool that seemed so powerful.

Back to the waggon wheels - they were both 'pants' we were in a grass field so no natural 'paths' to line them on. Catja wanted to go where she could smell one and Topaz just kept drifting off line or taking his own line. Instead of the 10 yard blind retrieves (the grass is long and hiding the dummies) with arrow like precision I had thought would be nice we ended up doing five yard runs to ensure success each time. I might have to go to a park or somewhere like that to get short grass for seen retrieves.

Otherwise it has been a good doggy day. I won some bob white quail eggs on eBay and have a keeper lined up to hatch them for me; and I have a meeting with another keeper for a tour of his ground for a new FT venue.