Angie B said:
Ditto to what Tim C. said except for the blind thing.
Blinds I never repeat. I teach blind concepts in a drill format. I always run 2 if not 3 blinds everyday on the same concept that we are working on that day.
Angie
For the record, me too! We'll get to why very soon.
I confess, the hardest part of posting something like this is shutting up and waiting for all the great replies! I want to engage each response as I read them because each brings a fresh perspective in some pertinent area of the discussion.
I posted this poll on three forums, and it?s been interesting to see the responses, not only in rationale and perspective, but also in raw numbers. I thought you might enjoy seeing those numbers to date.
On Multiple Marks? 6
On Just Key, or Missed Marks? 33
Blinds? 23
Never or Rarely Repeat? 26
For "train wrecks", and on occasional contrary/school blind? 2
In 90 votes, and a similar number of replies (total for the three boards), only one person (an experienced trainer) responded by asking for a ?Definition of repeating?? I anticipated that it might go something like this, but not to this extent.
?Repeat? doesn?t conjure up the same image to each trainer who reads it, does it? It is actually a broad, and somewhat relative term. Even broader is the scope of rationale that the various trainers accept for its use. But let?s look at what we?re discussing.
If a dog is deemed to have failed a mark ? to the extent that he has gotten little or no benefit from running it ? a trainer may reasonably want to repeat it, as long as they believe the repeat will have merit worthy of the risks. We haven?t heard much about the risks yet.
Looking strictly at the term ?repeating a mark?, in the context of the example above (a pretty typical one, I think), different trainers may have a different vision of what is about to happen. It may be that the trainer will simply have the failed mark re-thrown and run it as a single. That may have value.
It may be, in the same circumstance, that a different trainer would have the failed mark re-thrown, and then toss a bird or bumper off to one side in order to make the repeated mark a memory bird ? thereby giving a bit more depth to the lesson.
It may also be that another trainer, in that same situation, would opt to re-throw the entire set up because they feel that the other marks, even though the dog had succeeded at them, are what caused the failure of the key (or failed) mark.
This represents just a handful of approaches to the same situation, and they are distinct from each other. Another distinction, as seen in the responses, is that some people would do some version of a repeat virtually every time there is such a failure, while others would elect to go and set up something similar and run it again there ? repeating the principles and concepts, rather than repeating the same marks. Of course, this is also repeating.
When someone asks if you repeat, what image comes most quickly to mind?
Evan
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We got rid of the kids.
The dogs were allergic.