Tracking

A human's nose has 5 to 6 million olfactory receptors. A dog's nose has over 220 million. Why then, do I continually find so unbelievable to watch Abbi follow a track with her nose?

I began teaching Abbi to track late last fall. I've never been too serious about teaching it...as long as she gets to the end of the track approximately the same way I laid it, I'm happy with her. If we were training for a competition, I would train her to track very carefully and precisely, making tight turns and staying right on top of the track at all times, but since we never plan to compete, I don't really worry about her rather sloppy way of tracking. I think of it more as a fun and hopefully useful hobby that we both enjoy immensely. I started teaching her by giving her short tracks of about 10 feet to work...with a piece of food in every single one of my footsteps. then I started lengthening the track, then leaving food out of a footstep every so often, and finally adding turns.  Of course, she learned incredibly fast (as always) and although she isn't weaned off of food completely yet, she is doing fantastic. She's starting to pass me up actually - that is, she's gotten to the point where even if I've forgotten where exactly I've laid the track, I can trust her to follow it. I'll try to get a video of her tracking and upload it on here soon...

What I really need to do is train Jed to track. He actually is much better with his nose than Abbi...He has much more of a natural instinct to track. Haha, I've been thinking if I taught him to track, he could help me find Abbi when she runs off :P

Flowers and a New Camera

Last month, I graduated from High School. Two weeks ago, my parents gave me my graduation present: A Cannon EOS Rebel T2i dSLR camera!! Wowie!!

 For someone who has never owned any sort of camera, (well except for an ancient little film camera that was passed down from one of my older sisters that I had when I was like, six....does that really count? ) a dSLR is just a tad overwhelming! How did I get this lucky?! In just two weeks (which includes the time before I even got a memory card) I've taken over 1000 pictures. Something tells me that I am going to need an external hard drive for my computer if I plan on keeping this up :P

So anyway, I get an awesome camera, take half a ton of pictures, yada, yada, yada....don't you want to see some of them? Don't worry...I won't put all of them up ;) But I did take some pretty flower pictures today that you might enjoy:

(ok, so that one wasn't a flower picture :P )

Meet Simon:

The Beagle/Lab mix who has a very lovable white tip on the end of his tail.

Of course, we couldn't leave that out, so we had to move his tail out from behind his body just a bit :)

This drawing is just a 5x7, so it's been pretty quick work....almost done!