Spent Saturday at the Frome Cheese show, not because I have a particular penchant for ripe Brie (which I do), but because I wanted to watch the various dog displays.
The Rockwood team were there doing their obedience, agility and tricks stuff with a wide variety of dogs and handlers. Very impressed with the colour awareness trick (I cheat when I do my colour awareness demo: from an early age, I named three particular dummies yellow, red & green so that the dogs now recognise the name, not the colour. Oops, another secret out of the bag!). So too was Tom Sheppard from Wiltshire Working Gundogs Society with his niece(?) Vicky and their spaniels and labs. I thought Vicky was calmness personified and her labradors were just beautiful to watch.
But what I liked most of all was the display by the two Martins, Love and Harris, from M&M Gundogs. Great stuff, demonstrating what I’ve always believed in: gentle and kind handling, even when things go wrong, achieves better results than harshness and punishment. Lovely display, even though they were short of dogs due to illness in the kennels. Had a long chat afterwards to Martin Harris about Daisy. Very knowledgeable chap but, more importantly, a good and sympathetic listener, keen to help and seemingly genuinely interested in my dogs.
I think I’m going to try a session with him to get a few pointers about where to go next with Daisy in the development of her gundog (rather than show ring) skills. I’ll keep you posted.
Sep 162013