Paprika and Fran High in Trial!
On Saturday, my training partner Fran Bryan went High in Trial with her girl Paprika! I am so proud of both of them because they have worked hard to become a great scentwork team. Fran is a phenomenal trainer and Prik is the best behaved dog that I have ever met. She sticks close to Fran’s side no matter what because that is her nature. So a lot of the scent work training with her has focused on confidence moving away from Fran and making the game fun and rewarding. It all came together for them on Saturday’s AKC scentwork trial in Altadena (put on by the Scent Work Club of the San Gabriel Foothills). Fran says, “I was super happy with her attitude! She was whining and even doing a little bark at the starting line of each search and moved around without hesitation. Even if she had not been fast, I would have considered it a win, because of how excited and confident her searching was” But Prik was fast, fast enough to earn High in Trial! Here are her times and placements:
1st in Exterior: 7 seconds
3rd in Handler Discrimination: 25 seconds
3rd in Buried: 5 seconds
4rth in Container: 5 seconds
5th in Interior: 14 seconds
Here is are some fun videos of Iona, Soli, and Prik from a practice session a month or so ago. For this elevated hide, the wind was blowing straight at the hide blowing odor all over the place. You can see that Soli and Iona get stuck in pooling odor while Prik has not problem with it at all! It is always interesting to watch different dogs work the same hide.
On this day, there was a huge flight of Painted Ladies (a butterfly). Throughout the day, they were streaming by at a rate of 15-60 per minute. You can actually see them in these videos flying R to L!