The amazing Detective #14

Ok, so maybe I learned something from the nice little lecture I got on Friday. On Saturday’s Detective search, Team Carlin did better. Much, much better, in fact.

The area was reasonably small, about 3400 square feet. It included a sidewalk, with two swathes of lawn bordered by walls on either side, and a small interior space crowded with display cabinets and moveable dividers. The breeze was a little swirly, coming down the right side of the courtyard and going up the courtyard on the left.

Pretty much, this time, I let Carlin do what he wanted to do. And what he wanted to do was rush up to the Birch hide up the corner of the lawn. So we did that, and then I led him back down toward the start line to search the wall. I could see him thinking, “Oh, ok, we’ll do that. She always wants to look at EVERYTHING.”

Having gone along with me doing that, he rushed back up the sidewalk and into the room, where he found the threshold Anise hide and then the Cypress hide on the cabinet. He did a bit of sniffing around the dividers on the right side of the room, decided there was nothing else, and rushed out. “Ok,” I’m thinking, “he always rushes.”

Then Carlin took us along the wall shown on the left, and found the Cypress, Clove, Anise, and Birch hides on the covered electrical outlets, one right after another, in order.

And then, right at the edge of the grass, he sat and looked at me, smiling. I looked back at him for a second or so.

And then, 3 minutes, 28.82 seconds after we started, I thought, what the hell, and called “Finish”. And we got a laughing “Yes” and a very nice first place ribbon.

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Detective #13, by the skin of our teeth

The judge gave the teams 10 minutes to finish Friday’s Detective search at the April 2024 Chuckanut Dog Training Association scent work trials.

I’d say the search area was about 4500 square feet in and around a fairgrounds horse barn. It included:

• some lawn along the side of the barn,
• a bunch of horse stalls that faced the lawn,
• the same number of horse stalls that faced the interior corridor of the barn,
• plus the corridor, which had three, well-spaced wagons parked in it.

The first three hides were in the outer horse stalls. Those stalls were sieves. The slat board that divided the stalls were not closely fitted, so odor traveled pretty freely through all of the stalls. So I insisted that we search each stall separately. But I also wanted to makes sure that we cleared the whole outside before we went inside. So even though we went down through each of the stalls and found hides 1, 2, and 3, I still took us up back up over most of the lawn. Carlin went with me, I think because he gets that I’m slightly stupid and don’t have the nose, but he didn’t do it all that eagerly.

When I finally relented, Carlin rushed us back down and into the corridor inside the barn. As usual, he bombed through the threshold, so missed that hide at first. But soon he did this abrupt U-turn and indicated hide #4. After that, it was pretty much wam and bam, with Carlin’s finding hides 5 and 6 on the wagons.

But did I call it then? No, of course not. I had to have us search every stall, every nook, and every cranny inside that barn, even though Carlin did about three of his “I’m all done here” sits in there. Finally I agreed to move on, and suddenly remembered that we hadn’t searched a stump that was outside and just across the start line. So I took us all the way back to the beginning and had him search the stump.

By that time, I knew we had used about 9-1/2 minutes, and we had only 10 to work with. So I called it, and got a “Yes” and a Q.

Our final time was 9 minutes, 27.76 seconds. I had only 32.24 seconds left. If I’d left it up to Carlin, we’d have finished in about 7 minutes.

But even so, Team Carlin got a 2nd place for that search. And also a very nice, smiling little lecture from the judge about believing my dog the first couple of times he tells me he’s done.

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