Stay for the Entire Event

When you enter your dog in an event and she's not called back after one of the series, the compulsion to leave the event and head for home can be overwhelming. Please don't tell me your reasons why you do this, believe me, I know.

However, with one exception, I'd like to suggest that you overcome those reasons, compelling though they are, and stay for the entire event.

The exception would be if you regularly train with highly experienced trainers of competition retrievers. If that's the case, you're probably already getting the kind of information you would get by staying.

But if that's not the case, then staying for the entire event can provide you with invaluable information.

For example, let's say you're dropped after the land blind and won't get to run the water blind. It would be great to run your dog on the water blind, and it hurts at a visceral level that you won't be able to. Besides, it's a long drive home and you're beat. I get it.

But if you stay to watch the water blind, and just as importantly listen for the callbacks afterwards, you might notice that some of the dogs you thought would be dropped weren't, while others you thought would be carried weren't. Now you have a chance to go around and ask some of the friends you've been making what was going on. "Oh, it looks like the judges weren't carrying any dogs who got out of the water at the end," you might learn. Maybe you didn't know that a judge might consider that important enough to base the callback decisions on. Now you do.

But if you hadn't stayed, you still wouldn't know that. And it might take you getting knocked out of another event sometime in the future for you to learn it.

What's more, the effect can compound. You might need to get dropped from several events before you learn all the things you could have learned from staying till the end of that one event. That in turns means that your dog might need a lot more events to accomplish what she could accomplish sooner if you were learning all you could from the events you're dropped from. It might even limit how far your dog will eventually go in her career, because she only has so much time while you are going thru your learning curve as a handler.

When you think about it, what better way can you learn how judges judge than by watching actual judges judging? And after all, if you had been called back, you wouldn't think of leaving.

So when you sign up for an event, I suggest you plan on staying until the ribbons are handed out (in effect, that's the last callback), no matter how your dog does, even if it means staying overnight after you've been dropped. I know, I know, it's hard. But think what it could mean to your dog's career.