Wednesday, June 03, 2015

A Place for Everything


I lost my glasses at the park on Friday.  It's a big park with an overgrown field of wildflowers bordering a sheared lawn and landscaped beds leading to an old farm house that predates the Civil War fortifications that surround it. An old gravel farm road curves around and down through the woods before rising again to the parking lot bordering the butt end of the wildflower meadow.  It's a pretty big spot, varied terrain, and perfect place to train the pups.  Recently, I have been using the scattered benches and boulders to teach and proof the "place" command.

I do not know where I lost my glasses, but by the time I noticed they were gone, I had done a full circle of the entire farm park, and was back up on the lawn again.

I backtracked slowly, scanning the lawn and the last two sets of benches where I had sat with the pups. My glasses were gone.  There was not much hope they would be found either, as they would mow soon, and that would be it; $50 down the drain.

I walked the dogs twice again at this location on Saturday, scanning the ground, but no glasses.

On Sunday morning, before coffee, I walked the dogs again and hit all the boulders for "place".

No glasses.

After coffee, I did yard work, ran the pups through the tunnels for practice, let a captured "training raccoon" go, and then took a short nap.

I then decided to give the dogs one more run through the park.  And there, at the last boulder -- the same boulder I had visited three times since Friday -- were my glasses.  Someone had clearly found them nearby and set them at a location they thought they might be seen.

Yes, there is a place for everything!

2 comments:

Peter Apps said...

The most useful thing that I ever trained a dog to go was the search back for stuff that I had lost.

Shanon said...

Gotta love perseverance of terrier mind...