"Campo Felice"

[crackerd]

Anybuddy here have personal experience with this Italian pointer & setter event that's the culmination of the Euro field trial calendar, and care to elaborate on its competitive merit? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45pwG5K ... e=youtu.be

MG

[trekmoor]

Sorry, I've never seen it but I watched the link you gave to it. There were some good looking dogs there that were only beaten by the quality of some of the wummin !

To my eyes although some very good work was done I was disappointed to see that the birds were planted and that the handlers did the flushing and that no birds were shot. These things made this more of a field test than a field trial.
In particular I liked watching the English Setters run . This is a breed I have always fancied but I never got round to owning one.

Wullie

[crackerd]

To my eyes although some very good work was done I was disappointed to see that the birds were planted and that the handlers did the flushing and that no birds were shot. These things made this more of a field test than a field trial.

Bill, that was one of my ulterior motives in asking (OK, the pulchritude factor was another, as commented on by you above) - but cannae believe that what's done with the planting and the open fields is essentially an American contrivance transported to Europe. Shocking (almost)! Is that how the majority of Euro pointing trials are conducted - with blank guns and planted birds?

But I'm right there with you on the "atmosphere" otherwise as mighty compelling.

MG

[trekmoor]

All I can say is that I know a few folk who take part in continental HPR trials. They say the rules over there are better than here so they have more chance of winning. There could be another reason they choose to only compete abroad though .......they don't win trials in Britain , our rules and maybe what we expect from our dogs are not only "different," they are, I think, a good bit tougher too.

I noticed in the link you posted that one of the competitors was running full pelt in order to get to his dog while it pointed. If someone did that here the very least they could expect would be to be told to cease running and to walk at a good pace but not a fast one. If the handler refused to comply they'd be eliminated. You should not have to run towards a pointing dog ....if it has been trained well enough to "hold" its point. And ....would you run like that if you were out hunting and holding a gun ?

I have seen videos of a couple of American spaniel trials in which the guns ran while trying to catch up on spaniels in hot pursuit along the live foot track of birds that had ran-on. If a gun did that here he'd probably be told to F-off home ! I realise those American guns were doing their best to shoot the bird for the dog when the dog got the bird up in the air but where does trying to help someone win trials end and simple gun safety begin ?

Wullie

[Springfield Pointers]

Not crazy about watching dogs tested on planted game. It's good for training though.

[Naj]

It's not that different to uk pointer/setter trials, Wullie, apart from the planted game. No game is shot in uk trials. I find these contrived pointing dog tests pretty tedious. Not sure how they judge them apart from a dog running fast and pointing. There's little room for a dog to draw onto a point in classic fashion so you can't really test natural game finding ability and game sense and just about all the dogs in the clip had snap points from a gallop, which might look spectacular but means they've almost bumped into the birds.

As I understand it Italian trials (and some from other European countries) are not doing the breeds any favours from the point of view of the hunter who wants a dog to shoot over. They're for professional trainers running dogs for wealthy clients and since they're all about speed they're ending up with faster and wider hunting competition dogs at the expense of a cooperative nature. Consequently, the dogs they're producing are so independent that hunters have to run them with GPS collars and once they've cast them off only ever see them again if they come on point long enough for them to be tracked down. I like pace and range in a pointing dog but there's little fun in shooting over a self employed dog that doesn't give a damn about your whereabouts. I've had one, and one's enough!

Naj

[trekmoor]

I agree Naj, we don't normally shoot birds over the pointers and setters in our trials .....but I think we do in our Championships (held on grouse.) ??? Not sure about that ???

The trial on the video also seemed to have at least one HPR breed competing, the Brittany. This is a breed that can go like stink and which often likes to run wide.

I had a wee "discussion" about this with some brit enthusiasts a few years back after hearing about the ranges expected in some modern continental Brittany trials. The Brittany was not originally developed as a hugely wide ranger ....their owners were just ordinary shooting men and not field trailers. Then the trailers saw how willing these dogs often are to "horizon run" and began to trial them hoping their dogs would do exactly that ! They bred for this too and I.M.O. are possibly spoiling the breed for use by "the average shooting man."

I will admit that only twice in HPR trials did the judges ever tell me my dog was hunting far too wide .....I was running a Brittany in both of those trials . The little buggers cannae half shift !

P.S. my first Brittany was also my best one but she would not have done well in the videos trial. She was always, even as a pup, totally contemptuous of any kind of planted game. If that "game" was a dizzied pigeon or any kind of bird held in a cage, she used to carefully position herself over the bird ......and then pee on it !

She would probably have been contemptuous of the field used in the videos trial too. She'd have taken a couple of sniffs of that ground and then have given me a disgusted look that meant she knew that about 10 dogs and 16 people had already been over the ground again and again.....she'd have wanted me to take her to fresh ground.


Wullie

[Naj]

Birds are never shot at uk pointer/setter trials, Wullie, not even at the championships. In fact I believe that trials are all finished before the grouse season starts and resume again in the following spring on paired birds after it has finished. So it's perfectly possible to make a champion up and win the championship without ever having had a bird shot over it. And I'm sure plenty of champions have never been shot over. Perhaps just as well when you see the antics some handlers go through to keep their dogs steady to flush.

Naj

[trekmoor]

You're right Naj. I'd forgotten "exactly" what I was told when I asked at a field trial for these breeds if birds were ever shot over the dogs in trials. I think I was told they were not but that shots were sometimes fired ?
All the people I knew who successfully trialed these breeds did work them on shooting days though. The men I knew took teams of dogs up to the Flow Country in N.E. Scotland (one dog would not have done too well over a period of a week or so.) I took Peter O' Driscoll onto "my" estate, Cromlix, once or twice with his pointers coz my dogs were getting knackered after about a fortnights worth of hunting the hills every day ! His dogs were definitely shot over quite a lot.

Wullie

[trekmoor]

P.S. The thing I always noticed when out with pointer/setter people was not so much their antics when keeping a dog steady, it was the antics some of them performed to persuade the dogs to flush. I saw them stamp the ground and bend over beside the dogs head to shake the heather in front of them in addition to constantly urging the dogs on to flush by voice.

Too much of that in an HPR trial and they would have been O-U-T .......Oot !

Having seen that and also having experienced stickiness with my own first HPR , a Brittany, I always wondered why the Americans went to so much trouble to train their dogs to remain on point while their handler flushed the bird. Our dogs seemed to do this naturally .....if they were permitted to !
I think the methods we use in the training of pointers/setters must encourage at least some of the dogs to be sticky ? I trained my Brittany after reading pointer/setter books on the subject and she became sticky. It took me months to unsticky her ! I changed a couple of things in my training following that and didn't have much bother with stickiness with any of the dogs I owned after her.

I.M.O. stickiness can be the result of too much stroke praising a puppy when it points. I believe this can also cause unproductive and false pointing. --- The pup wants the praise so it points !

Wullie