Since there won’t be much in the way of shows for a good while, I am going to try to improve my reporting from other activities in Ringo’s life. Given that its so far been next to non-existent, improving it a little bit shouldn’t be so hard. ;)
Today we finally got around to doing some proper tracking for the first time in a good while. In the past, we’ve stuck almost entirely to letting Ringo look for various toys, but now we got some proper wooden markers. We also fixed up some clothespins with ribbons on so we’d know where we had gone, and we put down two tracks. One straight line with one of the markers at the end, and one angled line with one marker before and one marker after the bend.
A little mishap led to Ringo running back and grabbing one of the markers from the second track right off, but at least he grabbed it and came running with it. Then we went off picking mushrooms—or, well, looking for mushrooms, anyway—and returned about an hour and a half later. Ringo was a bit stressed and not very focused, but even so he found the second marker on the track that was supposed to have two (but where he had already nabbed one) quite easily. The best part was that he grabbed it right off, without any prompting from me. Looks like teaching him how to indicate the markers won’t be too hard.
The second track he picked up well on his own, and followed fairly well. He also went right for the marker as he found it, though didn’t pick it up right off. But he marked it clearly, and took it as soon as he was asked to. Overall, I am quite pleased, since its been a while. Someone who knew what they were doing could easily get him ready to compete ... of course, I don’t. ;) But we’ll try to work in a more focused way on both the tracking and obedience this fall.