Losing Focus

Four years ago, while hunting pheasants, a friend lost focus for a split second when the dog flushed a pheasant rooster just a few feet in front of him. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say not that he lost focus but that his focus was too intent on the bird and not on the where his hunting partners were vis a vis that particular bird. 

The result was a face full of number-five shot for me. Luckily, the shot was nearly spent when it reached me, which meant the wounds were, for the most part, superficial, although I still carry one pellet in my face and one in my hand.  

Like all head wounds, this one bled a lot. By the time it stopped, there was a fair-sized puddle of blood by my pickup, and I spent several hours in the local hospital’s emergency room getting as many of the pellets as possible removed from my face and hand. In the military, what happened to my friend is known as a loss of situational awareness, and for someone like a fighter pilot in a dogfight, this can result in that person having a very bad day indeed.

Although the consequences are not nearly as dire as they can be for fighter pilots, for dog people participating in performance events, a loss of situational awareness almost always means you manage to mess something up so badly that you cause the dog to non-qualify or, in the case of field or herding trials, be dropped. Either way, the end results are the same: You’ve just blew a lot of money on entry fees and travel for nothing, and you can’t blame the dog, because what happened is entirely your own fault.  

Members of the U.S. military have an acronym that provides a perfect description for this state of affairs. It’s called “fubar,” but since this a family publication, if you don’t already know the words that make up that acronym, you’ll have to look it up. Sadly, that cloud of mental fog leading to a tale of woe often occurs when someone is going for the last qualifying score or is on the verge of the win that will give the dog a new title.

Sometimes, the “fubar” occurs on the breed’s biggest stage, as happened to another friend of mine at the national specialty. She needed one more placement with her Golden Retriever — any blue, red, yellow or white ribbon would do — and the dog would have the 100 points needed for his OTCH, as they had long since met the other requirements for that obedience championship. They were cruising along in Utility B at the specialty — until they came to the directed retrieve exercise.  

 “The judge clearly said, ‘Number three’ but somehow I heard it as ‘Number one.’ So, at the biggest event of the year for the breed, with the dog’s OTCH on the line, I made the boneheaded mistake of sending the dog to the wrong glove,” she sighed. “What’s even worse is that the dog had heard the judge say, ‘Number three,’ and, knowing which glove was number three, he sort of started in the direction of the third glove, but I’d sent him to number one. Being really well trained, he instantly made a course correction and picked up number one.”

The Golden Retriever gave his owner a very dirty look after she sent him to the wrong glove at the national specialty.

The Golden owner said that if she could have caused the floor open up and swallow her, that was the time she would have loved to have had that ability. 

“I’ll bet I turned 17 shades of red, I was so embarrassed,” she added. “My dog didn’t help matters either, as he gave me the absolute dirtiest look I’ve ever gotten from a dog. That was one time I was glad dogs can’t talk, because I suspect I would have been the recipient of a world-class reaming from my dog.”

Another lady said her most embarrassing loss of focus also occurred several years ago, when her Border Collie was on the verge of his first MACH. 

“My BC had 748 points, so we only needed two more and he’d have his MACH,” she remembered. “He was a wonderful and very fast agility dog, so there was no doubt in my mind that he’d get those two last points at this particular trial. 

“The dog was fine. Did a really great job on the course. Completed it in well under the time allowed, never came close to hitting a jump, hit all the contact areas. All in all, he did a truly wonderful job. The only problem was that his handler — me — managed to forget the course about halfway through it. I don’t, to this day, know what happened. I had thoroughly memorized the course, having seen a dozen dogs do it before it was my dog’s turn. I just absolutely blanked out about halfway through it, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember the next obstacle, let alone the rest of the course. So I paused for a couple of seconds — a friend of mine watching said I looked really confused — before I remembered what I thought was the course.”

Unfortunately, what she was remembering was the course the dog had run two weeks prior to this trial, and it wasn’t even close to the obstacle order on the remainder of this course. 

“I’ve felt pretty stupid at times doing dog sports — I’ve done a couple of really dumb things during herding events that cost my dogs and me — but never before, or since, have I forgotten an agility course in mid-run,” she continued. “When I realized what I’d done, I could have kicked myself all the way out of the arena and across the parking lot to my vehicle. What’s more, somehow my dog knew I had totally blundered, and he absolutely refused to even look at me. It didn’t take a ‘dog whisperer’ to figure out that he didn’t want anyone to know that he even knew who I was.”

When the Border Collie’s owner sent him on the wrong course, the dog somehow knew she had messed up and refused to look at her.

Another person described what he said was a total brain malfunction when his Welsh Terrier was going for his final qualifying score to finish his Senior Earthdog title. A television director in his day-to-day job, he described what he called his “fade to black” moment that cost his dog the last qualifying score needed for his SE.

“While my dog wasn’t the noisiest when it came to caged rats and had something of a ‘meh’ response to rats in a cage, he was plenty vocal when he encountered ‘free range’ rodents, so both the trainer who was helping me with Alfie and I were confident we’d be able to overcome this shortcoming,” he explained. “We were correct: Once he figured out what we wanted, he cruised through Junior and had two of the necessary green ribbons in Senior, so I was pretty confident that he’d have no difficulty finishing his title. What I didn’t expect was that the human half of our partnership would absolutely pull a dunderheaded move.”

The Welsh Terrier owner still is not entirely certain what happened. He speculates that he may not have given the dog his release command as forcefully as usual, but whatever: When the dog was released, he froze in place for a few seconds. 

“Like a total idiot, instead of waiting just a bit longer to see if he’d move toward the tunnel entrance on his own, I bent down and gave him a little push,” the owner recounted. “Not only was that a DQ, and we’d wasted a 150-mile round trip to the test site, along with the entry fees plus meals and lodging, but I hadn’t expected my dog’s response to me being a nitwit. When I pushed him, he whipped around, glared at me and started the angriest barking I’d ever heard from him.”  

The dog’s owner noted that when he was in the Army’s Officer Candidate School, he was chewed out more than once by the drill sergeants for infractions of regulations or failure to properly carry out orders. But those were mild reprimands compared to the dressing down he got from his dog. 

“The judge and the rest of the test participants in the area were practically rolling on the ground, they were laughing so hard,” he said. “Finally, the judge managed to stop laughing just long enough to gasp out, ‘There is nothing I can add to what the dog just said’ before he returned to laughter as the dog continued telling me off. It took a lot of apologizing and treats before Alfie was willing to forgive me for my faux pas.”  

Several years ago, while judging a senior flushing spaniel hunt test, I watch a Field Spaniel person make a similar lamebrain move on what would have been the last qualifying score needed for the dog’s Senior Hunter. Because hen pheasants tend to lose their scent during the spring nesting season, the club had chosen to use chukar partridge instead of pheasants. This sometimes “throws” dogs because they may not have any experience hunting chukars, but that was not the case with this dog.  He worked chukars like he’d been hunting them all his life, and he had just a wonderful hunt going. I don’t think he had anything less than a 9.5 in any category on either my or my co-judge’s scoresheet.  

He had found, flushed and retrieved three birds flawlessly. But on the fourth bird he found, just as he got to his owner something spooked him, and not only did he drop the bird but he shied a couple of feet away from it. Accepted practice in this situation is simply to tell the dog to fetch it up, because the words “to hand” in the regulations mean just that: The dog must put the bird in its handler’s hand. Even at the Master level, a dropped bird, if the dog picks it up, is only a minor deduction, and this dog definitely had points to give. 

Instead, before either my co-judge or I could caution the spaniel’s handler, he bent over and picked up the bird, handing it to my co-judge. That momentary loss of focus was all it took to cost the dog not only a qualifying score that day but also his Senior Hunter.  

When the Field Spaniel owner made the “fatal” mistake of picking up a bird his dog dropped in a Senior Hunt test, he was fortunate that the dog didn’t choose to hold his “handler error” against him.  

When he realized what his inattention to that little “to hand” requirement had cost both him and his dog, the dog's owner was appalled. 

“I never pick up a bird when the dog drops it. Not hunting, not training, not anywhere,” he said. “I can't imagine whatever possessed me to do it today. It's for sure I wasn't thinking." 

No, there wasn't much doubt about that. Adding insult to injury, when he saw the dog’s scoresheet, he was even more distressed, but at least the dog didn’t hold his nincompoop move against him, because he finished his Senior Hunter at the test the next day with a score just as impressive as the previous day’s before his owner’s “handler error.”

Losing focus resulting in handler errors can happen to anyone. But it’s probably wise to be prepared for, at minimum, a reprimand from your dog, because they know, somehow, when the fault for the problem lies with their human partner. What’s more, some of them are not a bit shy about telling that partner that they know who’s to blame for the absence of a new qualifying ribbon hanging in their vehicle on the way home.