Has anyone noticed the Performances of some of the Dogs and Handlers in this Competition namely the Tracking Section, some getting only 3 points and 5 - 20 - 21 points from 100 marks for Tracking in the World Championships then the same Dogs and Handlers getting good Marks for Obedinace and Protection Phases
This seems unreal in the High Quality of Competition in fact we see thirteen Competitors did not complete the three Phases
Why i bring this up is that if Dogs and Handlers of this Calibiere Fail.
How is it that we expect our Dogs to be fully under the Command of us Handlers at every one time, It just is not realistic to expect it from an animal who is flesh and Blood with a mind of its own, No matter how good or how much we think we have them under control, a time will come when they will prove even the best handler wrong, everything has its off days and it does not pay to take liberties at any time with them.
It sure made me think a lot harder about it when i studied these results, and i also think it will make me a better Dog handler in the future

Basing it on the results isn't the best way to go, especially at that high a level of competition.

Tracking, well thats easy to fail even for the best dogs. All you need is a poor tracking field with less than ideal weather conditions and suddenly all the dogs will fail. I have seen some of the best tracking trainers score 0 on tracking because the dog simply lost the scent, tracking in dry dirt on a windy day, the dog gets to a ditch, doesnt know which way to go and the dog loses the entire 100 points.

Losing points in Obedience at that level is very easy. The handler can lose points if he uses too much body language when working with his dog. He will lose points if the dog chews on the dumbell ONCE on the retrieve. Is the dog in control? Yes. But did the dog make a teeny tiny mistake that the other guys dog didnt make that day? Yep, so byebye points.

Same goes for protection. Maybe the dog didn't come at the decoy just right, so his grip wasn't full. There's a point deduction for poor grip. Maybe the dogs grip shifted for whatever reason. Another point. Maybe the dog forgot to look inside one of the blinds when he ran past it. Lots of little stupid crap will take down points really quickly. The 100 point score is with the assumption that the dog AND THE HANDLER does everything 100% right. You can lose 20 points and that still doesnt mean your dog isn't in control, it just might mean the dog isn't as strong mentally, or had an off day with minor mistakes.

On top of that, you also need to look at the combination of the dog and handler. Maybe the dog isn't the right dog for the handlers style of training. There's been world champions that only won because they had a good dog that came to them already trained, but if they had to train the dog themselves they would have never made it that far.

Just some things to take into consideration when looking at scores

excaltly what i said, no dog can be taken for granted at any time, and this brings back to the thread with dogs off leash in a public place,no matter how well the trainer, owner thinks they have control of the dog when off the leash it is not a robot and will do things wrong or unexpected at times regardless of what control we handlers think we have over them
Going back to the World Championship the winner scored 100 out of 100 for Tracking, 97 out of a 100 for obedinance, and 97 out of 100 for protection, all in all a great performance
Again it proves that noise of a certain kind can upset a Dogs Concentration at times, A few weeks ago there were Dogs training for a forth coming advent, At the time of there trainng There was a Speedway Match going on some 80m from our training field
Not one Dog on that Training session got it right going around the Hides In Protection, about Twleve Dogs from Twleve made a mess of it, something which would not normally happen