1.5 Urban Lawn | Melted Cheddar Blobs

Date: Aug 6, 2024
Track Layer: Lorie
Location: Hampton High Football Field
Weather: Overcast/Muggy. ~23C
Wind: Little to No wind.
Track Lengths: 30 yds., 60 yds. and 120 yds.

We started this session yesterday. As I was heading to my original destination, I remembered the Football field at the high school and went to check it out. It was perfect. It was in the back of the school and was quite private during the day since the school is closed for summer vacation. It is a large field and completely closed in.

I unpacked the car and took Rumor over to the field. I was by myself for this session so I was not sure how I was going to manage to have her watch me while I laid the track. There were a number of large goal posts around the field so in the end, I just tied her to one of the goal posts and laid the track in front of her.

As I was laying the first track of the session, I realized how warm it was. I was melting by the time I finished stomping out the 30 yd. track. I went back to Rumor and she was also very warm. We tracked this first short track and decided to abort the session until the weather was cooler. She had a great first track though. I was excited to finish the session and see how she would do on the longer tracks.

I went back that evening around dusk as the weather had cooled and it would be perfect for tracking. However, the field was occupied. I wasn’t a bit annoyed. All I could think about was that the field was getting some natural contamination in preparation for my session the next morning which was great since I did not have a cross track layer. How nerdy is that!?

We finished the remaining 2 tracks the following day. These were a lot like session 1.2 when we first introduced the Urban Lawn. She was distracted at times and came off the tracks a bit. There was an occasional short stemmed Dandy Lion along the track which seemed to catch her attention every time. From a distance, they looked a lot like the cheddar cheese I was using.

The middle track, 1.5.2, was actually quite good with a lot of nose in track time. The third track was the longest and seemed to be most distracting.

I rocked the track laying today! Those tracks were so straight! It does help to use a football field and to run the track along the side line 🙂 As a handler, I also feel some improvements. I am figuring out where to rest my hand when we move forward and I also found myself raising my hand over my head in the correct direction when she went off track. Hooray!

I learned a valuable lesson about treats; thin slices of cheddar may show up better on the grass but they melt into a large melted cheddar blob in your pocket on a hot sunny day.

At the end of our session I removed her harness and gave her some free time. She loves her free time and who wouldn’t with a large field like that to explore!

Evaluation: Overall, this was a good training session. She sniffed at the beginning of the track. On the third track, she was sniffing before I brought her up to the start as if she knew the routine. She hit the tracks enthusiastically and stayed on the track some of the time. All good things. She does not have any type of indication yet at the article. She gobbles up the treats and then looks back at me. She does seem to know that the article is all that. When she sees it, she runs to it.

Below is a video of 1.5.2. There was a section towards the end where she was heavily investigating something and I cut that out to keep the video shorter. Since I did not have a helper today with a zoom button, the end of the track is not very clear 🙂