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Re-running a dog... from the October - November 2003 Judges Corner In the scenario below, the dog messed up the test
enough that, to everybody's surprise, the judges decided to re-run the
dog. Is there such a thing as
judges going overboard to make a dog successful?
Take a look at this Seasoned land scenario and decide. Scenario:
The dog seemed to see both birds of the Seasoned land double, but had a
controlled break on the second mark. It
was handled (with several whistle and cast refusals) to the area of the fall on
this bird, getting out of sight several times in the process.
It had some difficulties on the memory bird and while the handler
attempted to handle to the AOF on this bird, the dog got a bird from the bird
boy. On the way in with the wrong
bird, the judges told the handler to come back three dogs later as they decided
they’d better just re-run the dog. Question: Admit it.
Until the last sentence in the scenario, you were wondering what the
question could be. The dog was
clearly having a failing performance. After
being offered a re-run, the question is why? Answer: It
seemed when someone asked the handler the same question, the handler said
something about the judges indicating the first bird didn’t quite get high
enough, and then of course the bird boy allowed the dog to have a bird.
The person who sent this to me and witnessed the scenario indicated both
judges and the handler seemed to be close friends and wondered if a little
“home cooking” was going on. I
said I’d never heard of that at an HRC hunt, have you? Nevertheless, I was
asked to mention “ethics”, so I will. Shame
on the judges if they treated this handler and dog different from any other. How
bad can a handler need a pass to accept a re-run if it’s not deserved?
That being said, let’s look at the dog’s performance objectively.
If
the first bird was not high enough, the judges probably should have declared a
no-bird and stopped the test. Let
me correct myself, one of the judges (the one watching the throws) should have
declared a no-bird. I’ve written a lot in this column about a mark needing to
be visible, hit in what I call the “target area”, and not land where it will
cause problems on a retrieve. Anything
short of this and a no-bird should be called.
To do otherwise will not be giving the dog the same test as all the
others and force the judges to say, “We’ll judge it accordingly”.
Always take the “we’ll judge it accordingly” occurrences out of
your test at every opportunity. Of
course a decision to call a no-bird needs to be done in a split second, which is
why if I’m working with an apprentice I won’t usually put that burden on
them. Continuing our analysis of
the dog’s performance, let’s look at what happened when it got a bird from
the bird boy. I indicated the dog
had not reached the AOF on that bird. If
it did not wind the bird boy birds while taking a line toward the fall, what was
it doing there? This performance
would be another markdown for lack of memory to go along with the markdown for
the controlled break and markdown for lack of marking on the go-bird.
There’s a difference between setting up a scenario where a dog is
presented every opportunity to succeed and one in which a judge makes excuses
for the dog every step of the way. Would you stay with me for one more scenario? Three scenarios an issue is all I ask – and I promise to give them to you fair and balanced (hey - that might make somebody a good slogan). I’m not sure this next scenario actually happened. It might have just been a case of several Finished handlers experiencing the phenomenon of mass hallucination. I wanted to include it as an example of a tough test (nothing especially wrong with that in and of itself) where whether they meant to or not, the judges set up a marking test where the dogs were simply not given every opportunity to pick up the birds cleanly. |
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The Judges Corner - copyright
2006 All Rights Reserved Last modified: February 18, 2008 |