On May 11th, I visited the Midtjysk Greyhound Stadium in Bjerringbro with my wonderful club.
There were 17 of us with almost as many different dog breeds.
I even brought my sheltie, Lucky, with me. A Sheltie is not exactly the most obvious and most used breed in racing.
Lucky is a security junkie who prefers not to leave me, so I was really curious to see if I could get him to run around independently after the artificial rabbit. Hunting instinct is not exactly his strongest trait.
When the "real race dogs" race, they are put in a box, muzzled, and race after an artificial hare mounted on a skin. The muzzle is to prevent them from fighting over the hare.
But this day we were just going to try it for fun, so it happened one at a time.
The dogs first had to sniff the hare, which on this occasion was some tempting fur, to arouse their interest. And there arose the first challenge. Lucky just didn't want to greet that hare. He thought it was incredibly noisy and scary, and I could play with the toy myself.
But luckily, there's nothing in this world that food can't solve. So with treats, even Lucky could be persuaded that that Hare over there was actually quite okay.
The next point in the training was for the trainer to hold Lucky while I ran around the next corner of the field and called. When I called, both Lucky and the hare were released.
And then came the exciting point, would Lucky stop with me? Or follow the hare?
The first few times he stopped with me and had to be helped and coaxed on, but the second time we tried, we actually managed to get him to do a little over half a lap independently, focusing only on the rabbit, before he had to wait again to get me. I was just so proud of my super cool star dog.
I enjoy doing a lot of different things with my dogs. And this has definitely been a fun experience that we could easily do together again. Both Lucky and I were very tired and exhausted after a nice, fun and different form of training.
And my little star dog had just done his first day as a racing dog super well.
Behind the scenes of this week's blogger
My name is Mette, I am the happy owner of 2 beautiful dogs. Balto, who is a 6-year-old Coton de Tulear, and Lucky, who is a Shetland Sheepdog, who is just under 2 years old.
I am super active with my dogs, spending many hours training and on the competition tracks.
As a child I had very bad selective mutism. But thanks to the dogs I have moved on with life and my fear of speaking.
Racing dog for a day
On May 11th, I visited the Midtjysk Greyhound Stadium in Bjerringbro with my wonderful club.
There were 17 of us with almost as many different dog breeds.
I even brought my sheltie, Lucky, with me. A Sheltie is not exactly the most obvious and most used breed in racing.
Lucky is a security junkie who prefers not to leave me, so I was really curious to see if I could get him to run around independently after the artificial rabbit. Hunting instinct is not exactly his strongest trait.
When the "real race dogs" race, they are put in a box, muzzled, and race after an artificial hare mounted on a skin. The muzzle is to prevent them from fighting over the hare.
But this day we were just going to try it for fun, so it happened one at a time.
The dogs first had to sniff the hare, which on this occasion was some tempting fur, to arouse their interest. And there arose the first challenge. Lucky just didn't want to greet that hare. He thought it was incredibly noisy and scary, and I could play with the toy myself.
But luckily, there's nothing in this world that food can't solve. So with treats, even Lucky could be persuaded that that Hare over there was actually quite okay.
The next point in the training was for the trainer to hold Lucky while I ran around the next corner of the field and called. When I called, both Lucky and the hare were released.
And then came the exciting point, would Lucky stop with me? Or follow the hare?
The first few times he stopped with me and had to be helped and coaxed on, but the second time we tried, we actually managed to get him to do a little over half a lap independently, focusing only on the rabbit, before he had to wait again to get me. I was just so proud of my super cool star dog.
I enjoy doing a lot of different things with my dogs. And this has definitely been a fun experience that we could easily do together again. Both Lucky and I were very tired and exhausted after a nice, fun and different form of training.
And my little star dog had just done his first day as a racing dog super well.
Behind the scenes of this week's blogger
My name is Mette, I am the happy owner of 2 beautiful dogs. Balto, who is a 6-year-old Coton de Tulear, and Lucky, who is a Shetland Sheepdog, who is just under 2 years old.
I am super active with my dogs, spending many hours training and on the competition tracks.
As a child I had very bad selective mutism. But thanks to the dogs I have moved on with life and my fear of speaking.