anymore but worth mentioning.
The results on the FCI Worldchampionships official FCI 2005 site and beautiful pics on FCI pic's

Lots of "Hail Mary" catches....or maybe that's normal in a world championship?

(Go to FCI link posted above, click on "Photo Gallery", then "List"...)

I posted on another forum about the catches at the FCI. It looks like a lot of dogs got jammed. I can understand that this is something that's going to happen at times, but it seems like it happened an awful lot at this competition.

Common bitch about dog trials. But, I bitch loader when the catches are inconsistant or simply not threatening to the dog so they end up just a prey excersise.
Remember...it is a contact sport.
If the long bite was done consistantly by the decoys, done in a manner that tested the dogs well, then any problems need to be redirected to the training field.

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I posted on another forum about the catches at the FCI. It looks like a lot of dogs got jammed. I can understand that this is something that's going to happen at times, but it seems like it happened an awful lot at this competition.

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If the long bite was done consistantly by the decoys, done in a manner that tested the dogs well, then any problems need to be redirected to the training field.

Kevin, never having been a helper, I may not be interpreting correctly what I see in those photos, but I would like to understand better your comment.

The way I read it now, I see you saying that if the dogs are jammed, wrenched, or jack-knifed on the long bite catch, the handler can train the dog to be caught differently (ie, "problems need to be redirected to the training field")
Is that possible?
Or am I just not understanding your comment correctly?

If the decoy has done a decent job of consistant presentations for the dogs and a few crash but the work on the decoys part has been consistant then where can you blame the decoy????
It is an often neglected part of sport training to work the long bite with enough small steps and with enough repetitions for the dog to become good at it.
In fact I still hear people say the only time the dog does the long bite is on the trial field. This is an invitation to crash.
Flinks really opened my eyes to training the long bite, one step at a time.
just think about it, how many times do you practice the bark and guard??? Compare that to the number of times you have trained the long bite.
I've been a decoy enough times over the last 20+ years to know that sometimes a jammed dog is due to the unskilled, unpracticed dog, maybe not so much at the national and international levels but especially at the local level.
But, all too frequently the blame is placed on the decoys.
No wonder it is hard to find good decoys...........they get blamed for everything.

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But, all too frequently the blame is placed on the decoys.
No wonder it is hard to find good decoys...........they get blamed for everything.

That's sooo true.
I think from my point of view that a lot of dogs weren't used to the decoy speeding up in the last 10 meters and so they were off target ond didn't come high but were still busy running.I agree I doesn't look pretty.

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That's sooo true. I think from my point of view that a lot of dogs weren't used to the decoy speeding up in the last 10 meters and so they were off target ond didn't come high but were still busy running.I agree I doesn't look pretty.

Thank you very much for providing an eye witness account. It's hard to tell what's going on from some photos. That would certainly explain the reason for, what looks like to me, a higher number of jammed dogs than usual.

Good job than to the helpers for not slowing down before the bite! I can imagine that it makes catching the dogs that much more difficult.