Four of us decided to celebrate the new year with a weekend of training. Katie Danzig, Karen Pardini, and Sarah Sherburne spent the better part of Saturday and Sunday, January 2nd and 3rd, with me at the Family Foundation School, along with all of our dogs: Abby and Raven, Ripley, Scout, Katya and Suki. Oh, and don’t forget Lily, our beagle. She’s not part of the team but she keeps the other, bigger dogs in line. We also watched Buddy Meyer’s dog, Max, for the weekend. Altogether that’s eight dogs, four handlers and one husband, mine–Sid Parham.
Truth be told, much of the weekend went to dog walking and dog obedience. With three German shepherds, two Dobermans, and Mallanios there were lots of little ranking issues to deal with; but nothing a five-minute down stay couldn’t handle.
Karen rewards Suki after she makes a building find
Abby and Raven squabbled just like the two sisters they are. They also have a wonderful time playing with each other. But there were a few times when their exuberance got out of hand so we cooled things down with a few time-outs. I don’t think there was a single second of actual canine aggression. But SAR dog handlers need to respect the sensibilities of the average person. Civilians are put off by dogs growling at each other–even when it’s perfectly normal doggy communication.
Lily’s little and it’s a good thing. If she weighs much of the shepherds she’d be the alpha bitch. As it was we caught her trying to dominate the Mallanios, Max. I can’t figure out any G-Rated way to explain what she was doing to him.
The new year brought our first serious winter weather. Snow on the ground. Snow falling. Bitterly cold temperatures with a significant wind chill. Large area search problems were out of the question. So we decided to focus on snow burial, HRD, and a little navigation.
Matt dressed for the weather
Two students from the Family Foundation School, Jens and Matt, prepared the sites for the snow burial problems and acted as subjects. They had a ball playing in the snow. Our two youngest dogs Abby and Raven, had no difficulty finding them.
Jens after a hard day in the snow
We spent the rest of the weekend indoors as much as possible using an unfinished building to train in human remains detection.
Katie and Karen took lots of pictures. Here’s a great sequence of Abby doing her first Snow burial.
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