Chaos Crew

Chaos Crew

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

DOCNA at Paws 4 Friendship, Sept 6-7 2008 and random thoughts.

Our club hosted its 3rd annual September DOCNA show this past weekend. Its a lot of work but seemed to go off very smoothly this time.
Skye and I got 9 Q's in 11 runs. We missed our first run of the weekend with a jumped contact in the gamble, and our second run with an offcourse (Skye just cant resist a dogwalk. "But dad, it was right there, so close to that tunnel you wanted me to go in"). After we worked out those kinks, it was smooth sailing the rest of the weekend. Yea to team Skysydgeon for a blazing first place Intern Trigility run. Go Team! We were only 1 second behind the "dream team" in Specialist.
We Q'd the North America Challenge with a blazing time, but placed behind Leslie & Pirate due to a 5pt fault.
Along the way, we finished our Intern Jumpers title and Intern Standard title. Now we get to play in Specialist for everything except Gamblers.

Some thoughts about the trial - we were not completely full, probably around 3/4ths full, but each day still went fairly long. I think what we are seeing more of is people running dogs that really aren't ready to run. When you have a novice dog with attention/focus issues, and you get them wandering around the course, a typical 40 second run then turns into a minute 40 seconds. Repeat this behavior for 10 dogs, over 5 or 6 runs a day, and you just wasted an hour. We also saw dogs pee on course, and then the handler continue their run afterward. I wish they would have been immediately whistled off. Dog potties on course and you are done! Sheesh.

3 comments:

kiwichick said...

We put a time limit on runs when it ends up being a "training" run. Judge should of done this and let people know up front.

Nicki said...

sometimes it's painful to watch the novice dogs run!

Elayne said...

Well, you read my post on the matter so you know I agree. I timed one handlers run at 4-5 minutes! I'm all for cutting the novice teams a break but that's a bit excessive. Standard course time is plenty for training in the ring.

I thought the course changes went very quickly and efficiently though, there were an awful lot of classes to get through in a day and I thought that part ran very smoothly.