Dog beds as trial prizes.

Yesterday and the day before I spent the day trudging round the turnip fields with a young dog on the lead. There were two trials, an Open trial on Monday and a Novice one on Tuesday. My dog was not ready for an open, so I didn’t need to be nervous. There was a low entry number and I was just joining to make up the numbers so that the trial could run. She had been much better off staying at home on her dog beds instead of being walked round and round on the lead. She had a nice run at first, which resulted in a point. The guns moved up and got ready, but when I sent her in, there was nothing there. The judges were very keen on my little dog, but they could not get a result just there. She hunted round in the root crop, but there was no bird. The dog after me put a rabbit up and chased it slightly. It was assumed that Gaia had been pointing that, but we will never know exactly.

She got another run and she was calm because it was now much later in the day. She would normally have spent hours on the waterproof dog beds, so she was not quite so sparkling and fresh anymore. It was a bit tiresome to listen to her whining, a big fault in a dog, but it seemed that not many people had noticed, just me. On her next run I kept her safely away from an electric fence as I didn’t want her to get a shock. I was more in shoot-day mood and didn’t think about the fact that she of course was not covering the area in front of the judges, who walked close to the electric fence. They put a bird up and normally I would have expected the guns to take a shot and I would then use my dog for a safe retrieve, but of course this is a competition and I was now out. In an open trial you can’t afford to miss a bird. I was asked to put the lead back on my dog and practically take it home to its dog beds “to think again”.

On Tuesday I entered a Novice trial, which should be better, but the judges managed to run a novice trial almost the entire day on a back wind, so it was not really for novice dogs. I took my young dog, traveling the “Gollum way”, where we once lost Gollum, flying off the dog beds in the back of my Nissan Navara when the back flap came open without me noticing (see earlier post). I had a good first run, but the other problem with that day was the lack of birds. Hardly any game on the ground!! It is a shame as it was basically boring and not much to base a trial on. It was almost like trialling dogs that were out for a walk….

Anyway, a winner was found both days and as Tuffies are sponsors on these events, we donated some sturdy dog beds for the two winners.