I like my vet

I do like my vets - I admire their honesty. The conclusion about his hot ears was 'my best guess is ...... ' The best guess was an allergy of some sort, but as he had no other hot spots nor anything about his paws then the problem could be extremely difficult to trace. Before going to the vets I had tried a variety of ointments and unctions, 'cornucresin', 'canaural', another dog skin ointment whose name is unknown because 'he' had 'retrieved' the bottle at one time and the label was obliterated and aloe vera gel. Of them all the aloe Vera seemed the best but not as good as the salt water. It could however be that the change of environment was the reason for the improvement rather than the salt.

Training wise I am starting again in the sit to fall of dummy. I had left off this for a while as he was running in more often than I expected. This time he rapidly got the idea but became very 'sticky' whenever he saw I was carrying a dummy. I have to be very careful to keep it hidden until the last minute. I did manage a throw late last week where his bottom came to the deck before I hit the stop whistle - a most pleasing result, but one that was not repeated on our next outing Mad
The next problem I can see developing is his speed - I fear he is outpacing his nose. On dummies his nose is quite startling - he winded a three inch long canvas dummy on choppy waves from about 20 paces yet he can literally run over a dummy in his determination to get to it before it runs off.

I saw a partridge get up from the roadside ahead of us the other day and land in the adjacent field. There was a back wind but I was very pleased to work him out and back behind it on hand signals alone however the bird got up as he worked back up wind - about a yard in front of him; to his surprise. He did sit to his whistle rather than chase it so some good came from the exercise and with luck he got such a good whiff of the fleeing bird he will know for next time (I don't think he has seen a partridge before).

Monday night was HGS night - we did sit to fall with the dogs there, I think i will have to look on that exercise as a 'this is the way to introduce a new command' exercise rather than getting a result as most dogs were still really poor on their sit to whistle - so hard to progress; also hard to encourage the handlers to work on the basic problem. The highlight of the evening was the GSP bogging off - a side of the dog I had never seen before, it lives with three labradors and behaves very much as a sedate labrador so to see it run with some speed was great. Her retrieves have also improved markedly since the handler has been encouraging her to run in for them.

A problem I encounter with my own dogs was also highlighted that evening - the dogs marked well the dummies thrown from alongside but varied widely in the ability to mark those that were thrown from a distance away, mis marking range and also not relating the throw to a retrieve.