Barn clean out continues on a foggy Saturday morning.

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Off-track Article Indication Game

Martin took an IPO tracking course with Shade Whitesel to work on Bosco's long standing issue of adamantly refusing to indicate articles on the track. [Bosco indicates an article by doing a straight sphinx down with his front paws framing the article.] Bosco has a gorgeous tracking style but he also has a very high hunt drive. The desire to search always wins over operant article indication. Martin finds this training issue to be incredibly frustrating since the goal of tracking is to find the articles.

In the photo, Martin is working on an exercise to build value for article indications off the track. Martin does his tracking homework at 6:15 AM and occasionally, there is a beautiful dense fog. I rarely take tracking photos because I need to video Martin's homework for his online course but I couldn't resist trying to capture the moody atmosphere. I chose to make the image black and white because the grass was so obscenely green from all the rain that it looked fake or like I made poor photo editing decisions. :)

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Bosco runs to greet Martin in our laneway on a very foggy morning.

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Focused on Martin even in the dark.

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Cue Jaws theme music.

This silly shot was challenging to set up. I have a narrow window where there is a relatively clean horizon in this field. I wanted Bosco to lift his tail above the wheat so that all you can see are his large pointy ears and the tip of his puffed tail as he moves towards the camera. I needed to get the shot in one take since I wanted to do minimal damage to the wheat. But how do I get Bosco to drop his head (so that only his ears are visible) while simultaneously raising and puffing his tail as he moves directly towards me?

I left Bosco at home and hid a small piece of leather in the wheat. I brought him to the field, patiently waited until he was a bit away from me, and then said, "Artikel!" (ie. search for the article!). As soon as I cued Bosco to look for an article, I knew that his tail would shoot up and puff as his nose hit the dirt since I've videoed a zillion of Martin & Bosco's tracking practices. Thank-you to Martin for doing the training that I leveraged for this shot.

[Photo of Bosco in the wheat field taken with the farmer's permission.]

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