A little Fall Training!

Fall is here! Well sort of. The leaves in the northeast are starting to change but yesterday during training it reached almost 80 degrees. It looks like were in for an Indian Summer.  After a 3 week lay off from training it was great to be back at it. Jim, Cleo and I headed up to North Jersey to shoot some chukars over Cleo and get  her ready not only for the upcoming hunting season but another shot at her AKC Senior Hunt Title.

Cleo had a pretty good training day. She ran big and she ran hard. She stayed steady to the shot and fall on all her birds. She did pretty well with retrieving. On two birds she dropped them about 5 feet from Jim. She readjusted and then delivered them to hand but that would have earned us a big FAIL if she was to do that during a test. Jim worked her on some force fetch this morning and she had no issues.

Cleo on the go!

Cleo on point

Retrieving to hand

Another nice point

 
A requirement for the AKC Senior hunt test is your dog needs to honor another dog while it is on point. To do this you need to work with another dog. Today we had Cleo honor Frank Hulsman's 13 year old GSP Jenny. I have to say this was one of the best parts of my day. Jenny is clearly a senior dog but watching her run through the field, hunt, point and retrieve you would have thought she was a puppy. I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to hijack my own blog. Senior dogs are great dogs. Just because they move a little slower, are grey in the face it doesn't mean that they are useless. I wish people would open up to the idea of adopting senior dogs. Go to any local GSP Rescue website and the will have senior dogs available.  For some reason people always overlook these great animals. Senior dogs are worth adopting and loving. And they are much more mellow than a high strung puppy. 

13 year old Jenny hunting for chukars

Jenny on point

Cleo honoring Jenny

Does that look like a 13 year old Senior dog to you? 

Cleo did good with backing today. Hopefully we will run her in the AKC Senior Hunt Test in the next couple of weeks. But more than anything Jim and I can't wait to take her out hunting!