reflections and redirections

[Martinp]

I thought you had forgot us again!!! thx wullie a good read as usual!

[trekmoor]

You were correct , I had forgotten again !

Wullie

[trekmoor]

With me now having two labs , a Brittany and a GSP to work and train and trial I now had my work cut out trying to find time to do it all. My job as a postman helped a lot during the weekdays as I was almost always finished working by 1 P.M. This meant I still had daylight hours to train in during the winter. The huge drawback to the postmans job was that I also had to work until about 10 a.m. every Saturday morning . It was a 5 1/2 day week. On shootdays , Saturday mornings in other words, I'd go into my work by about 5 a.m. in the morning in order to be able to get out of the office door early enough to run around my delivery area .... and I do mean run. I did the job at the run with a bag that could weigh as much as 35 lbs. bouncing up and down on my shoulder. By doing that I could sometimes get finished as early as about 8.45 A.M. and have just enough time to get to the nearest shoot with my dogs in the back of the car I now owned and took on delivery with me . This was frowned upon officially by the P.O. but was always tolerated, for every postman with a car did the same thing.
I now look back in amazement that I was ever that fit !

My boss asked me from time to time to work overtime on Saturday mornings but I always refused. He wanted to know why I was turning down the extra money so I told him why . I'd probably have made about £5 -£20 more by working overtime but by going to work as a gundog man/guide/gamekeeper up on the grouse moors I could make £90 as a wage for doing what I enjoyed doing anyway and maybe £50 on top of that as a tip. I easily made more money in one hunting session than I earned in a week as a postman. My boss understood my reasoning and ceased to ask me to work overtime.

I had qualified the Brittany for the Championships but things didn't go too well during those two days. My bitch was working well and her first retrieve was a cracker that a GSP sized dog would not have returned with without human help. She had pointed a covey of partridge in a cabbage field and when she flushed them on command one bird was pricked which flew back over us, back over the fields boundary hedge to land somewhere in the car parking area . One observer noted it running off just as I was told to send my dog.

She went back through the cabbages , found a way through the hedge and began to search. She then went right underneath one of the parked cars and collected the bird from under there with the spectator keeping up a running commentary back to me and the judges. There was nothing I could do to help, I couldn't see her or even the cars because the hedge was in the way. A larger dog would have needed the bird poked out for it with a stick.

My "luck" ran out in the afternoon when a rabbit she pointed was missed by the gun and she had to hunt a roundel on top of a hill instead of retiring after getting the rabbit.
The cover in the roundel was so thick that along with the judge and a gamekeeper I had to go down onto my hands and knees to try to crawl through the huge tangle of brambles under the little fir trees. Not even in the toughest spaniel trial would any dog and handler and judge be required to resort to their hands and knees to get through woodlands.

Vicky vanished from view and the judge, who's nose was almost up my bum as we crawled along , asked me where she was. I think I replied with something like, " How the hell should I know !?? I can't see any more than you can !" I used the recall whistle and heard some noises from the tangle just in front and a bit off to the left. The judge saw her before I did and she was clearly "on" game. Out of the tangle just feet in front of us walked a woodcock , it looked at us , we looked at it and then the bird walked on. It could not fly away the cover overhead and all around was far too thick to allow flight.

Close behind the bird came Vicky and she too looked at us and we looked at her before she continued to crawl after the now vanished woodcock. "Get her to flush it." said the judge but that bird would already have flushed if it had been able to. The guns outside the roundel now called in to us that she had the bird pointed against the roundels boundary fence. The judge wanted it flushed even though we could not see the bird or the dog ... or anything but bloomin' brambles and fir tree branches. I told her to fush while still down on my hands and knees and she did .... and the guns missed the bird !

From there things got even worse. I was to hunt her down a very "bare" field towards a railway line at the bottom of the field. The field looked barren of game and it was barren of game so I stopped my bitch down at the railway lines fence and asked the judges where they wanted to go next. They told me to hunt her up and along the railway embankment as the fence was of single wire strands and easy to get through. I refused. I was not about to hunt any dog of mine's along the side of an in use railway line. I kept on refusing too and after a little discussion I was told to hunt her along my side of the wires "to see if she could get a point." With misgivings I did that because I knew I could control her.

She went on point not far along the fence facing straight towards the rails. I was told to have her make the flush and I refused . No way was I going to send a dog towards a railway lne that was only about 20 feet away up the side of the embankment. We began to argue and I got very angry. The judges said they would eliminate me from the trial for failing to follow judges instructions. I told them I was going to report them to the official steward and then to the K.C. .... Lord Joicey stepped in to calm things down. He asked me to just wait a minute while he had a "word" with the judges. I wanted to know if I was now out of the trial and he said I would still be "in" the trial.

The judges returned and asked if I would send Vicky just through the fence but no further. I felt a man with a stick could do that more safely but I did comply. Vicky went through the fence she was still pointing towards and a hen pheasant got up at once and flew off over the railway line. The guns were "safe" .... they did not shoot at it.
I was still incandescent with anger but by virtue of her good, hunt-point-retrieve in the morning and three good points on feather and on fur plus the steadiness she had shown , she got through to the next day of the trial .... but I didn't fancy my chances after that argument I'd had with the judges. I was still of a mind to report them to the K.C. , no judge should even ask a dog to hunt for game anywhere near an in use railway line. I have been told since then that it is illegal to hunt dogs along railway embankments anyway , I hadn't thought of that at the time.

That incident still angers me to this day and I spent the rest of that entire trial still fuming about it.

The trials second day passed in a bit of a blur for me. Vicky did the water tests blind retrieve fine and managed another point or two but had one very poor retrieve.
She had gone on point down in a long, shallow depression full of very high reeds and weeds. I could not see her at all so I climbed up the bank to try to spot her from there. I saw her then sent her in to flush and up flew a pheasant which was shot to fall maybe 50-60 yards out in front. From where my bitch was down in the cover I knew she could not possibly see the fall but it was her bird so I sent her for it.

She found and pointed another bird partway out to the retrieve and I was in trouble. The judges, probably rightly, wanted me to flush her from where I was thirty yards from her and Vicky chose that moment to go "sticky on point." I had to repeat the flush command ...loudly .... several times before she flushed the unshot bird and could be sent for the shot one. It was not a good or a tidy bit of work.

Almost all of the other dogs had been eliminated or not been " asked back in" by now, It was a damned tough two day trial ! One dog pointed a rabbit out in a field of fairly rough but short grass. When it flushed the rabbit the dog chased it for about twenty feet despite all the handlers shouts and commands. The dog "turned" the rabbit which ran straight back past the dog handler. The dog tried to do the same but was stopped by whistle, another vocal command .... and the handlers own legs for he had jumped right into the pursuing dogs path. That dog was not eliminated from the trial for that very blatant chase.

I'd travelled down to the trial with a friend from Scotland who had qualified his GSP but she had been eliminated during the first day. As we drove off together to hear the judges results and placings my friend said he thought I had won but I didn't think so. Too much had gone wrong between me and the judges and the judges always have the last word. Only two dogs had got through the trial , one of them was Vicky and I won't tell you who the other dog was !
We both received Diplomas of Merit and the man I'd travelled to the trial with was extremely angry . He declared that the trial was "bent" and that he'd never enter for another one and he never did. He continued to rant on about this all the way back up to Scotland.

I was less angry about the result than he was , in fact it had been about what I'd expected but I was still raging mad about the railway line incident . That still rankles to this day. I have heard since then that the judges I argued with disagree with my account of this incident , that's their affair. I know what I saw and heard.
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To be continued
Wullie

[trekmoor]

I had judged a few Retriever tests and trials and I now began to be asked to judge HPR tests and trials too. Retriever trial judging caused me no problems but HPR trial judging did , not because of the dogs but because of the "A" panel judges that I was supposed to be subordinate to. Basically I either thought I knew more than they did or , more frequently, I thought their judging was less than "straight."

At the first HPR trial I judged a dog was hunted and it ran quite well. It missed a snipe but ,as was fairly common then, this was a trial held on a very game starved bit of land so the snipe was shot anyway for the sake of giving a dog a retrieve. The dog had not pointed the snipe and had not seen it fall , I didn't mind that too much, many HPR's do not point snipe and a blind eye was usually turned when a dog bumped or missed snipe.

The dog was called in to the handlers heel to be sent for a very short and very easy blind retrieve on this snipe. The ground was short, "bare" grass with a few bits of rashes here and there and everyone present could clearly see the snipe on the grass just 20 yards away . The dog was sent and did not find the snipe and the dog would not handle onto it either. The handler recalled it and sent it twice more from the heel position. I'd have eliminated the dog but the "A" judge, the judge in charge, did nothing.

I stood watching this dog running about for several minutes as the handler tried in vain to get his dog to take directions onto the clearly visible snipe. The other competitors were watching too and I knew that if I had been one of them I'd have been wondering what the hell was going on. I looked at the "A" judge and made a little signal that meant " Call the dog up, it's had long enough." The judge gave a little shake of the head so the dog carried on for a minute or so more.

I went to the judge this time and very quietly said , " That dog has had more than long enough, we should call it up." The judge replied, "Give it a little while more." A moment after that the dog ran within four feet of the snipe which picked itself up and began to run. The dog saw it run, grabbed it and retrieved it. The snipe was dead when the handler gave it to me but that can happen , injured birds sometimes do "just die."

I felt the bird and it seemed O.K. so the dog was not eliminated. We consulted our judging cards at lunchtime to sort out which dogs would get a second run in the afternoon. I wanted to discard the dog that had made such a mess of the retrieve on the snipe after failing to point it in the first place but the "A" Panel judge would not do that. The dog got another hunt in the afternoon but found nothing, the ground really was game starved , not a very good place to hold a trial.

When the trial ended we again checked through our score cards , as far as I was concerned there was no 1st place , there hadn't been enough game present to see enough of any dogs work. Only 3 dogs had been required to do the water test at the trials end and they had all done that O.K. One of those dogs was the "snipe" dog and to my astonishment my co-judge wanted to give that dog a place !

I said "No!" to that so the "A" judge then said , " We will just give it a C.o.M. then ." I said "No." to that too and we had a mannerly but vehement little argument . I kept on refusing to give that dog any kind of award no matter what my co-judge said . I was told that it was "customary" to give the dogs that had completed the trial and it's water test an award. I still refused to give that dog an award of any kind. After pointing out that I had not been in favour of allowing the "snipe" dog another run in the afternoon in the first place my co-judge then said .... " Well you can hand out the awards then and explain to the handler why he didn't get one !" I agreed to do that and the handler did approach me to ask why his dog had not been given an award.

I was pleasant and polite but I did tell him why..... " No point....no steadiness to flush and fall of game therefor....and an extremely poor retrieve." My co judge was very upset and actually said something like..... " What am I going to tell ****** **********(a very well known "A" panel judge) he told me just last night that this was a very good dog that would surely be placed ?" Words failed me !

There was a sort of "Old School Tie" bunch of judges on the go back then and it often seemed to me and to others who were not "in with the in crowd" that they operated a sort of "I'll scratch your back in this trial if you will scratch mine's in the next one" system. I wanted no part of it and would not play their game.

I had a lot of respect for Lord Joicey both as a man and as a trial judge. I believe he did his best to always "play fair." A Novice grouse trial was the only trial I ever judged with him and he let me "handle" the entire trial. I rather enjoyed that and got on with the job. He criticised me twice during the trial but did it in a way it was hard to take any offence at. He seemed to prefer dogs to go in fast and hard when told to flush. I preferred the dogs to flush just a bit more carefully in order not to always put an entire covey up in one mad flush. We did not fall out over this, he liked a hard flush, I liked a "softer" flush and we agreed to differ.

I think he felt my way was a bit unsporting as , when a more controlled flush is done, birds are sometimes left on the ground that stay tight among the heather even when a shot is fired at flushed birds. A dog can then be worked on following the shots to find and flush any other birds present but done in this way the gun has had time to be reloaded for another shot or two. It would be possible for one man to fire 4 shots at that one covey.... probably it is unsporting , probably Lord Joicey was right ....he often was.

My other mild ticking off from him during the trial was done by him as he tried to stop laughing. A lady handler whom I am pleased to call a friend was hunting her dog in it's second run of the day. The dog was hunting well and it got a well deserved point on a covey. The birds were flushed on command and two shots were fired which brought down one grouse about 40 yards out in front .... the dog at once ran-in. The handler blew stop loud and long and her dog did stop but by then the bird was just 10-15 feet away from the now sitting dog.

As I said in an earlier part of this tale of mine's there used to be a rule that if a dog could be stopped during a run in before it picked up the bird , that dog was still "in" the trial. What often happened...if the dog could be stopped ..... was that having stopped the dog the handler would then tell it from wherever he/she was in relation to the stopped dog , to "fetch" after being instructed to do so by the judge.

I think that was what this handler was expecting to happen next and it was certainly what Lord Joicey was expecting .....but I did not do that. I knew the rule but it stated the dog must make the retrieve to the judges instructions. My instructions to the handler were to recall her dog and then to send it for the bird from beside her. I had a very good idea what would happen next and it did. The handler is a good one but she made a mistake. She used the dogs name before recalling it thinking this would get the dogs attention for the dog was still focused hard on the bird just behind it. The dog, however, expected the next command following it's name to be "Fetch" and that is what it did .

I eliminated the dog for retrieving before being instructed to . I am not sorry I "tricked" that lady or that dog, that rule was nonsensical and all I did was apply it in an unexpected way. Somehow that lady and I have remained friends and most of the credit for that is her's not mine's.

Lord Joicey waited until the handler had left the scene then remonstrated with me, he quietly said...." Bill, that was very,very naughty of you !" .....but he was laughing as he said it !

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to be continued

Wullie

[Martinp]

thanks mate I good read again !! look forward to next instalment

[trekmoor]

Thanks Martin, I will add a little bit more before I forget all about it again !

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I judged one Novice HPR trial where, at the time, I thought the "A" Panel judge was wrong on two counts. One of them I have now partially changed my mind about. The judge felt I was being too helpful to the competitors. That trial seemed to be full of competitors who had never trialed before or, if they had trialed before, were still extremely nervous about the whole thing. Everyone suffers from a bit of "trial nerves" but not everyone falls to bits when under pressure. I am one of those very odd folk that often does better under pressure, it increases my concentration. I even enjoyed taking exams at school.

I did not "help" the competitors as their dogs hunted or pointed or as the birds were flushed to command but once the bird had fallen I did help out if the handler had failed to mark the fall due to giving too much attention to keeping the dog steady. What happened then was up to the dog. If the dog had marked the bird then all was well but some dogs did not mark well and needed to be handled onto the bird. A few of the handlers didn't have a clue where the bird was or they had "forgotten" the mark. I quietly calmed the handlers down a bit then told them where the bird was. If I had not done that there was a very good chance those dogs would have been eliminated for failing to find the bird.

No matter what breed of dog is being trialed I don't like to see beginner handlers eliminated due to their nervousness. My "A" Panel judge preferred just to leave the handler to sort it out for themselves. Trialing can be hard on beginners and the upward learning slope can be so steep that handlers fall completely off the hill they are trying to climb and never attempt trialing again.

I now think I did help too much but I was on a steep learning slope as a judge too !

The "A" panel judge was much more lenient than I was in one other regard. I had been helping one of the trials competitors with his dog for a few months. It was a damn good dog and a possible field trial winner and I told it's owner this. The result was invites to dinner with his family and an after dinner cigar.

The dogs first retrieve at the trial he decided to enter , maybe because I was judging , was a marked retrieve on a runner on a stubble field. The dog did the retrieve but what had been a strong running bird came back very dead. I felt the bird and it's ribs were in , I handed the bird over to my co-judge and he felt it then asked what I thought should be done. I wanted the dog eliminated for hard mouth but the judge would not do that. The dog was ran on , found another bird, the bird was shot stone dead and the dogs mouth was O.K. on that bird.

The "A" judge then said something like ," There you are then, the dog is O.K." to me. I disagreed and wanted the dog to retrieve another bird, preferably a still live one. The dog got another run and another runner was shot. The dog caught it and killed it, the ribs were "in." The "A" panel judge still did not want to eliminate the dog but I was insistent. I was told that I could tell the handler his dog was "out" for hard mouth ,he wanted nothing to do with it.

I asked the handler to examine the bird but he was inexperienced at feeling for damage and said he couldn't feel anything wrong. I eliminated him anyway and that was the end of a beautiful friendship. No more invites to dinner and après dinner cigars !

It was decided at some meeting held down in England that all judges not already "on the Panel" should, in future carry a marking book to trials . This meant trials had two panel judges plus a sort of apprentice judge who was to mark his own book but his "results" were not taken into consideration when the two panel judges decided upon the winners.
I admit this slightly annoyed me. I had already judged Novice trials and now I was to attend trials and mark trials but my marks meant nothing unless they agreed with the books of the panel judges. I felt I was a better dog trainer than several of the panel judges and was maybe a better judge too. One judge back then had never even competed in a trial and I don't think he even trained dogs ! He had become a panel judge under the "old school tie" system. Anyway, rightly or wrongly, I was a bit peeved !

It was very difficult for me to get any days off work and I liked to keep those days for competing or for judging but not for being an apprentice judge. In order for me to put back into trialing what I took out of it I felt I should judge an occasional trial so in order to do that I went to a grouse trial as a "book carrier." An apprentice judge.

My "book" would be examined later by the trials "A" panel judge and possibly by others too in order to see how closely my marks coincided with those of the panel judges. I was given my book and the trial began.

One dog present there I had judged before. It was the dog that had made a mess of the snipe retrieve. In this trial it was given an into the wind hunt and it was a very good running dog , I began to be impressed by it. Then it bumped up a covey of grouse and was called up. I marked my book.

Lunchtime arrived and a cloud fell over the trial. The two judges were falling out. One of them was considering leaving the trial there and then , he could not agree with the "A" panel judge. He stayed on but did no more judging, his reason for staying was that if he had left the trial could not have continued which would have been unfair to the handlers and would not have endeared us to the trial's hosts. He did not tell me exactly what he'd disagreed about but I soon guessed when I heard which competitors were getting runs in the afternoon.

The trial restarted and off we went o'er hill and dale once more. The dog that had bumped grouse in the morning was still in the trial. I said nothing, I was only a book carrier not a judge.

In the afternoon that dog had a very good, hunt, point and retrieve and the "A" panel judge was pleased to tell us other "judges" just how good this dog was. He asked me then how I had marked the dog so I told him. I said I hadn't marked it at all. He wanted to know why the hell not so I told him that too. I said the dog had very clearly bumped up a covey in the morning so I had drawn a line through that dog in my book and had eliminated it there and then.

The "A" panel judge said I couldn't do that , he was not at all amused ! I replied that I could do that because it was my bloody book not his ! I don't think that judge and I were ever meant to see eye to eye about anything ! He was the same judge who had told my co-judge over the phone just prior to a previous trial that the dog was a good one and should be placed.

I was never again asked to judge or to carry a book. The "A" panel judge saw to that.
I was never cut out or destined to be "in with the in crowd."

I judged quite a number of HPR tests and tests for these breeds can be very different from their trials....mainly because since game is seldom found during tests a number of things cannot be judged . Many dogs do not like to hunt over ground already hunted over by other dogs. They do not hunt as well as they normally would and receive lesser marks than the other dogs do. Test grounds are often limited in size necessitating taking one dog after another over the same ground as they hunt.

If caged pigeons or quail are used to see the dogs point then what often happens is that unless the dogs have had experience of those birds in training , they fail to find them or approach the caged birds so closely that a wild bird would have flown away. My own first Brittany could easily find caged pigeons but having perhaps "flash pointed" on them she would then show her utter contempt for this false situation by getting herself on top of the cage and deliberately pee-ing on the poor birds below her ! She liked her game to be wild and free of human hand taint.

Retrieves in some HPR tests could turn into nightmare marathon sessions for both the handler and the judge. This was especially true of blind retrieves and water retrieves. Back then not many people with HPR's had much idea of how to train dogs for blind retrieves. The handling was often deplorable ....if the dog would handle at all ! Dogs were sent for blinds and then the handler was, for all intents and purposes, no longer part of the equation.

The dogs would run all over the countryside sometimes by as much as 70-80 yards from where the handlers knew the blind retrieve to be. The handlers just hoped their dogs would eventually run near enough to the dummy on the right side of the wind to scent it. When handling was done it was often completely ineffectual. In the retriever tests I had judged I was used to seeing dogs docked a point or two every time they needed to be stopped and redirected. If I had judged in that way during blind retrieves at HPR tests with a top mark of twenty then the dogs would have been owing me points !

The handlers , a good number of them anyway, seemed to think their dogs should be allowed to hunt on until their dogs did find the dummy, even if it took 5 to 10 minutes. I am in favour of that if the handler does not know where a bird has fallen at a shoot and has to hunt a football pitch sized area to find it but in tests the handler does have a very good idea of where the blind is . At the very least the handler will be told the dummy lies in an area not much larger than a tennis court. It is up to the handler to send his dog into that area and to keep the dog within it.

It took forever and a day to judge blind retrieves during tests so I began to operate differently when judging blind retrieves. I set a time limit after which the dog was eliminated. A couple of handlers were so incensed by this that they would never run under me again. I thought my "method" was fair. All of the handlers were told in advance what the time limit was and they could handle as much or as little as they liked within that period and be marked accordingly.

At one of the tests I judged using this method my co-judge was a man who had never trained an HPR but who had won the springer spaniel championships .... I think it could be said he was experienced but he had never before experienced what he encountered that day ! He quietly asked me during our lunch break ..... "Are they all as bad as this ?" ..... The poor man was in deep shock !

He had been judging the hunting and a marked retrieve or two with a shot fired as the dogs hunted. I didn't see much of that , I was judging in a different area but it must have been pretty bad. He saw dogs that didn't hunt worth a damn, he saw dogs that hunted just a bit too well and went out of control, he saw dogs that regarded the shot being fired as a retrieve command and he saw dogs making very heavy weather of marked retrieves falling just 30 yards from them among ferns.

I assured him that they were not "all as bad as this" but I don't think he ever volunteered to judge another HPR test.

At one other test I attended I was there as a dummy thrower and one of the judges was a retriever trial lady of some experience and with some trial wins behind her. I should have warned her to set a time limit on the blind retrieves prior to her judging them but I didn't know her and she didn't know me so I kept my mouth shut in case she thought I was trying to tell her how to judge.

She was mentally exhausted by the end of the blind retrieves. Some of the dogs had ranged and raked all over the hillside plus one small wood. It took a long, long time for her to finish judging that element of the test. I had a quiet word with her later to reassure her that it wasn't always like that and that in future ,if she set a time limit on the retrieve things would speed up a lot. She cannot have believed me for I never saw her judge another HPR test either.

Quite a lot of the problems with HPR tests comes from the handlers. Many of them got an HPR breed not as a worker but as a pet or show dog . Until they have learned otherwise they think one hunt or one retrieve done by their dog is just as good as those things done by another dog with a more experienced handler. Since tests are more available and can be done without the dog having much, if any, experience of working on game, a fairly high number of folk that enter their dogs for tests do not have much idea of what is actually required from the dogs. It would not however be a good idea to discourage these folk from entering tests. Sometimes a few of those folk become very good handlers well capable of taking their dogs to shoots or even to trials without suffering too much embarrassment.
They can be recruited into the ranks of those who actually work their dogs on game.

Water work causes problems for many HPR owners. Many of these dogs aren't very fond of water ! Twice now I have stood on a river bank twitching with embarrassment as HPR owners try to persuade their dogs to enter water during tests. At those two tests spaniels and retrievers were also being tested in their own disciplines on the same day. Some of their owners watched the HPR water tests and were not at all impressed.

The spaniels and the retrievers were being sent for dummies over a fast flowing river from several yards or even many yards back from the river. The dogs that even hesitated to enter were marked down. The HPR's , on the other hand, were being sent from the easiest point of entry with their handlers right beside them at the waters edge. Too many of those dogs still refused to enter or ran up and down the riverbank for several yards in each direction trying to find a way across the river without getting their feet wet. Some of those dogs whined as they did this.

It doesn't have to be as bad as that if the dogs owners spend more thought, time and effort on training water work. I have owned two HPR's that detested water but they would still do blind retrieves over rivers or even fairly wide ponds or loch inlets.

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To be continued
Wullie

[trekmoor]

I had called my GSP pup "Eva" and right from the start it was obvious she was something a bit special. Anything I wanted she did her best to give me. Hunting was no problem, pointing was no problem, retrieving was no problem. Even swimming was no problem. That bitch was born trying to please me . In an earlier post on this thread I said I had taken her at 5 days old from the litter , that was a typing error ! I took her at 5 weeks old and that did have an effect on her. I think she thought she was not a dog ? She showed very little interest in any other dog unless it was pointing. She was a "natural backer" of other pointing dogs.

As I do with all my HPR's, I let her chase any game she found right off the field, she enjoyed doing that. The chasing continued until about two weeks before I ran her in her first trial. A novice grouse trial.

She could jump like a flea on steroids even as a young pup and as she ran loose at one shoot she saw a bird shot that landed high up in a vertical tree. She took a good, hard run at the tree and jumped high up the trunk then continued to run upwards ! A couple of stumpy branches allowed her to scramble a bit higher up the tree and then she made another leap at the wedged in bird. I heard her jaws click together from many yards away but she missed the bird by several inches and fell to the ground.

A gamekeeper was out with me that day and his comment was ...." Well, she's got the right idea anyway !" She was well used to chasing birds but had no idea about steadiness to fall. The grouse season was underway and I had no time left in which to train steadiness to shot game but I had managed to train her not to chase flushed grouse a few days prior to the trial. She didn't mind being steadied to flush as she never caught the birds anyway. I'd entered her for the trial thinking I'd have time to steady her to fallen game but things didn't work out that way, if I remember correctly she'd came into season, her first ever season, before I got the chance to train steadiness to fall . I decided that since I'd paid my entry I'd run her since her season was now over with. I thought that it would give her the chance to find, point, flush .....and then run -in ! It's all experience isn't it ?

On the day of the trial I was on my way up north with my wife for our summer holiday so my wife was at the only field trial she has ever attended.....I'd told her the trial was "en route !"

I think we ran third in that trial with one dog already eliminated for bumping while the other dog had a birdless run. Off Eva went over the heather on a fairly flat section of the moor. She was a hell of a good running dog and she had a very good pattern as back then I had a lot of open ground with game present on it I could hunt over.

She had only ran for a few minutes when she drew onto point. I made up my mind to do my best to keep her in the trial even if I had to indulge in some crafty handling. It took split second timing but I managed it. I was told by the judge to command her to flush and I did. Eva was a very hard ,determined sort of flusher, not a hint of stickiness on point in her. She flushed a good sized covey and she sat as she had been taught to do during the preceding few weeks. I then watched the man with the gun like a hawk as he began to pull the trigger and deliberately distracted Eva as she sat watching the birds away ....she thought it was a reminder that she must sit but in order to look back at me she took her eyes off the covey and off the bird that fell to the shot for just long enough to miss seeing it fall into the heather. Then she looked towards the departing covey again.

The judge almost at once told me to send her to retrieve but I didn't send her to retrieve . All I did was tell her it was O.K. to chase off after the covey ! She almost tripped over the dead bird as she ran and retrieved it with a look of , " See what I've found !"

She was into the next round in the afternoon ....but my wife wasn't. You need eyes in your feet to walk over heather and if you haven't got them you trip and fall. My wife decided she'd seen enough heather at two inches from her nose so she retired to the car at lunchtime and stayed there.

Somehow, in the afternoon I managed to repeat my crafty handling "trick" with the result that Eva won the trial , she was still rather young and she was anything but steady to fall but she was now an "Open" dog. My wife, a very hard lady to impress, was told by the other competitors that I was about to be awarded first place . She remained sitting in the car with the comment of ..... " Oh , that's nice " before returning to reading her magazine. The other competitors were surprised by her complacent attitude but I wasn't, I should have warned them about The Soup Dragon !

I wonder if anyone else in the entire history of British field trialing has ever won a trial with a completely unsteady and only part trained dog ? I don't think I'd try that again, my nerves wouldn't stand it .

About a month after this and having now been trained steadiness to fall, Eva won her next trial too and qualified for the H.P.R. Championships. That trial was a hard one to win but a very long bit of "roading -in" and then an even longer track on a black cock that had ran from the point helped a lot. The water retrieve at that trial was the longest swim any dog of mine has ever done in a trial. The water retrieve was a blind on a dead homing pigeon "planted" on the far side of the river Tay near Dunkeld. I'd never sent her more than about half that distance in water in training.

When I saw the Tay, one of Britain's mightiest salmon rivers, was running fast and hard I was considering withdrawing my dog from the trial. One other bitch , another GSP, had got through the trial to the water and she was to swim first. I watched her swim while still thinking of withdrawing .... I half expected her to be drowned but she managed to complete this very nasty retrieve despite being swept well down river both going out and coming back.
I knew Eva was a strong swimmer and I knew she was very willing to give anything a go if I said so .... so I sent her but with considerable misgivings.

For a while I had worked as a Lifeguard at a swimming pool and had also done a couple of survival swimming events . I never was a fast swimmer but I was a very strong one , all the same I did not fancy my chances if I had to rescue my dog from that river. Eva got about halfway over then looked as if she might turn back. I train what I call "driving" as dogs do long memory retrieves so I began to "drive" Eva. She swam strongly outwards once again and was swept off well down river. She gained the far bank then turned herself to run back to opposite me along it. She found the dead pigeon easily and once more entered the water for the swim back.

I thought, " To hell with the bloody trial !" and encouraged her for all I was worth. She was again carried off down river but scrambled ashore and made her way back to me. She did win the trial but I felt at the time and I still feel now that the judges should not have required the dogs to swim right over the Tay. A field trial award or even a field trial win is not worth risking a dog's life for. I feel a bit ashamed that I went along with that water test.

There has been some crazy goings on at a few HPR trials. One trial finished so late on a winters afternoon that the dogs doing the water test did it by floodlight . Cars were brought to the water and their headlamp beams were trained on the water and the dogs . I have heard a few people laughing about that but although I was not competing I still don't find that at all funny.
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To be continued
Wullie

[LJR]

Yay, another installment, thank you

[Alice]

hurray, glad to see another installment! Eva sounds like one hell of a dog- did you ever breed from her? If so, did it pose any problems? I've heard it said that bitches taken so early, who- as you said- don't think of themselves as a dog, can be tricky to mate?

[trekmoor]

You are spot on Alice ....Taking her so early did cause a problem later. She struggled against being mated . I took just one litter from her, partly because I felt bad about having to hold her during the mating and partly because one litter was all I ever took from any of my bitches (I mated my bitches after they had proven themselves in trials.) I should have taken more than one litter from all of those bitches for every one of them produced some very good puppies. I seem to have a happy knack for putting together the right bitches with the right dogs. It certainly does not come from studying pedigrees. I am not one of those folk who can rattle off pedigree names like poetry !

Those bitches still exist in some of the field trial pedigrees of today. I heard of Eva's pups and grand pups and gt. grand pups from one of this forums members only a week ago. I think his "line" goes back in part, to Eva. Either that or the dog he is thinking of using at stud does. He puts occasional little training films on here of two of his own G.S.P.'s. I take very little credit for Eva other than for seeing the possibilities of the dogs in the mating done to produce her and then persuading their owners to have a mating. Dogs in a thousand like Eva are born not made.

In a way she "spoilt" me forever when it comes to G.S.P.'s. No other G.S.P. I have owned since her could match up to her . She was one hell of a G.S.P. to have as my very first one.

Wullie