Reply To: Karen & Haggis

[Alana McGee]

Karen

These are great experiences you are having Karen, and what fun you have orchards to work on too! Really good learning experiences for every handler. No matter how much you prepare something will always surprise you at one point or another, and it is in how we adapt to those challenges as they arise!

For orchards and with dogs of Haggis’s personality, the staying at site of the find while you dig up the truffle is going to be one of the key ones to work on, depending on if you have additional harvesters helping you (but that will depend a lot on site/ client)

This was great to see you on the orchard! Thanks for sharing. We know this is a bit of a unique circumstance, but so other students/instructors know what’s going on, Haggis alerted, and then the video cuts, and then you see Karen & haggis working the rest of the orchard while someone else is at Haggis’s alert site. For Orchard harvesting, this is what you want to do with a dog with Haggis’s personality type and very active. If this was a larger orchard in mid or full production, you’d want to put Haggis away if you needed to and come back to the truffle alert, as it would have been marked (you’d mark it. We use florescent tape). But it depends on if you have helpers with you as well. As some of you know, in the larger plantations in Australia the dog team actually does none of the harvesting. Simply the indicating!

You do a good job of encouraging him along Karen!

This is good Karen at 0:41- and REALLY interesting and tells us a lot, and REALLY good on your part. Watch that nose of his and trust it. He gets excited and so digs early, perhaps where odor has pooled, but you notice this right away. Follow that nose! He’s doing a really nice job staying with you there too!

He is rather adorable shoving his nose in there, and adamant!

So much fun you are going to have with this boy.