Friday morning videos

I got a double-feature presentation: the first video will give you a taste for how wild the dogs get when they know there’s birds to find, the second is just some video of them running the pasture. It all began when I looked out the window yesterday morning and saw two rooster Pheasants fighting out in the pasture. There was only one thing to do – strap on my spy cam and send Mia out after them, but unfortunately the action was far enough away and hidden by enough weeds that you really can’t see anything.

The roosters flushed when we went outside, one of them flying just over the fence line and into the ditch. I let Mia through the fence whereupon she immediately hit scent and was off and tracking. She tracked it the entire length of our property before losing scent. Now this is speculation but what I’m assuming happened is: the bird ran up the bank and into the weeds and that Mia climbed out of the ditch as well and looped back through the weeds where she caught its scent again.

I caught a brief glimpse of her tracking just before the bird flushed and flew off, and what really pleased me (aside from her tracking) is that I could see she was steady-to-flush. Her normal reaction was to chase flushed birds, so she is showing some good improvement in this area. In the videos, Mia is still searching for the Pheasants.

On more than one occasion, Dakota damaged our window blinds by trying to watch us out in the pasture so normally I’ll either crate Dakota (and sometimes Sophie and Elvis) or kick them in the back yard. Yesterday I had things to do and didn’t want to leave Carrie with a houseful of spun up dogs, so to save time I let them all out together. Dakota reminds me of Scooby Doo where his feet are going a mile a minute and he stays in place.

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Tags: chocolate labs, dog behavior, dog training, spinone, spinoni