Adventures of Nick and Ted
Illness forces a change to Ted’s hydrotherapy fitness training and Nick Ridley tries to calm young Percy ahead of his show trial
Iassume that I am not the only one getting excited about the forthcoming shooting season. I was lucky enough to get a bit of shooting and beating in last year but, like everyone else, nowhere near as much as I would normally do, and I am champing at the bit. Last month I wrote about Ted’s new fitness regime.
In fact, we had a few weeks suspension due to him having kennel cough and, because of this, we decided that we would restart his programme. The real benefit of the water treadmill is compounded through regular sessions, so it will be another few weeks before we can measure how things are progressing.
Heatwave
I also mentioned that I was preparing Percy for the Game Fair Working Test challenge, which we had qualified for a few months earlier. I had set out a training programme running up to the event and then the week before the test a heatwave hit. We had temperatures pushing 30°C and even at 6am trying to do some hunting exercises soon left the little dog with his tongue hanging out, so I needed to revise things, and quickly.
On the Monday leading up to the test I headed back over to Percy’s breeders, Jon and Dana Rees, as they have some fantastic training facilities, including three large rabbit pens, one of which runs alongside a lake. It was a boiling hot day and not ideal for hunting the dogs, but we did some water work first and then ran them in the pen and then put them back in the lake to cool off.
I wanted to make sure Percy’s pattern was up to scratch as in previous weeks I had really been working hard in getting him to hunt grass cover.
Sometimes you need someone to watch and observe and offer some advice, especially if you are like me and tend to do most of your training on your own. Jon picked up that Percy pulled out straight away as soon as I cast him off, I would get out after him and after that he was back on track. The observation was that this had become his routine and I needed to change things, so he didn’t expect that ‘normal’ sequence of events to happen. We worked on some techniques, which seemed to have the desired effect.
In an effort to ‘take the edge’ off of Percy I also changed his food. We feed our dogs a pre-prepared raw food and I spoke to our
supplier and bought the same product but one with a lower fat content, which in turn reduces the energy levels. It has worked a treat. Percy is much less prone to boiling over but has maintained that drive and enthusiasm that puts a smile on my face.
I also arranged for him to have four sessions on the water treadmill in an effort to ‘knacker’ him a bit and that also worked. I reckoned a few sessions would be enough to stop him from climbing the walls but not enough to get him really fit, especially as it was too hot to do any real hard training.
Football pitch
By the end of the week I was pretty confident that I had done all I could to get Percy ready: we had practised hunting, jumping, distraction retrieves and steadiness. Then I was sent some photos of the test ground and my heart sank. I was expecting an area of fairly rough grass but it looked more like a football pitch with a few piles of brashings spread over the arena; I was never going to hold the little dog on ground like that.
I made a couple of phone calls to my mentors and was given the same advice: “Go for the stick piles, don’t try to hold him on the grass.”
Thankfully, by the morning of the test the weather had changed: it was cool and windy with a slight drizzle in the air – perfect for the dogs. The ground didn’t look any better, but it was what it was and everyone was in the same boat. I worked out a strategy in my mind and waited for our run. I was nervous and Mrs R did her best to keep me calm.
We kept Percy away from the other dogs to stop him getting too wound up. We had plenty of support from people who had been following Percy in Sporting Gun and on the YouTube series Percy’s Progress. Not much pressure there, then. Two dogs were running at the same time and we went against a very smart little springer.
As soon as the judge gave us the OK to start our run, I cast Percy straight into the nearest stick pile and he hit it like a little bulldozer; a few yards further on and a dummy was fired from a launcher and he made a tidy, straightforward seen retrieve. I was desperately trying to keep the dog in the brashings for as long as I could rather than letting him run on the flat ground, as on this his nose came off the ground immediately. There were a couple of blinds to retrieve and on one he got downside of the wind, which drew him to the wrong dummy, and, with it, we lost any chance of a medal.
Overall, though, I was delighted with his performance and he did me proud. We came
“Percy hit the nearest stick pile like a little bulldozer”
seventh out of 20 and that was with a ‘0’ in our score, so had we not messed up on that blind we would have been in the top quarter of the field. It was a great experience for us and I am grateful for all the kind messages of support we received, both before and after.
Percy topped off a full-on week by mating his first bitch. It will come as no surprise that he performed the task with his usual level of enthusiasm.