Wesley, you are correct. It is not illegal to run a blind through the marks.
However, we have been taught at seminar by Tim Gibson that this is not an advisable thing to do. Here is a copy of an old "Judges Corner".
Scenario:
The Seasoned land test was a simulated dove hunt. The dogs came to the line and were asked to mark and retrieve a straightforward double using dead pigeons. After completing the marking test, each handler was asked to momentarily leave the line with their retriever. While the handler and dog were “offline”, the blind was planted. This blind retrieve was placed between the two marked falls the dogs had just picked up. The handler then returned to the retrieving line, fired a shot at the bird with the dog at heel, and ran the blind retrieve.
Question:
Was this a legal test?
Answer:
Two licensed Seasoned judges set this test up at one of our hunts this past spring. The hunt committee felt the test might be either illegal or improper and questioned the judges about the scenario. The judges stated that it was their intent to “see who would go to the old falls”. In checking the Seasoned Rules and Guidelines in the rule book, the hunt committee found nothing illegal about the test. Predictably, the majority of dogs went to one or both of the old falls first. The judges ended up passing every dog who picked the blind up, regardless of how they got there. While this scenario was not an illegal test, the judges demonstrated a profound lack of understanding of how to set up a Seasoned blind and evaluate the dogs running it.
Our HRC rule book offers very few guidelines for our judges concerning blind retrieves at the Seasoned level (and no guidelines for blind retrieves at Finished). These limited rules and guidelines concerning blind retrieves gives our judges a lot of flexibility in our tests, but make it imperative that judges have a good understanding of the purpose and objective of the blind retrieve. We discuss the purpose of the blind, and the rules and guidelines for Seasoned blinds in the Judges/Handlers Seminar and offer some recommendations to our judges for setting up a successful blind test. The first recommendation offered in the seminar is that the Seasoned blind should be run in a direction that is away from the marking test! Separating the blind from the marks increases the judges opportunity to adequately evaluate the retrievers ability to be controlled “to a bird it has not seen fall”, which is the purpose of the blind retrieve. At some test sites (perhaps a small pond), it is hard for the judges to place the blind away from the marks. In those instances, it is our recommendation that the blind retrieve be run first, then the marks. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the judges in the above scenario should explain why they felt they needed to test which dogs would go to the old marked falls. I’m going to go out on a limb here and offer these judges the following advice: When judging Seasoned, the blind should be set up to test the retrievers ability to do Seasoned blind retrieves! It would seem to me that they were testing which dogs were ready to do Finished blind work (albeit at 40 yards), where running the blind in conjunction with the marks is acceptable. The best judges set up their Seasoned blind retrieve tests to run in the absence of distractions. Distractions affect the handler’s ability to successfully control the retriever, and the judge has a difficult task evaluating whether the dog was controlled to the blind, or merely stumbled upon it. Probably the number one distraction for a young dog on a blind retrieve would be other birds in the field (such as old falls). Other distractions would include the contour of the terrain, scent from bird boys or crates of birds, changes in cover, field roads across the path of the blind, echo of the gunfire, angle of the bank on a water blind, etc. Clearly, in this test, having just picked up marked falls in the vicinity of the blind had an adverse effect on most of the retrievers ability and willingness to respond to commands from their handlers. By moving the location of the blind, or running it first, these judges would have had a much better test. Instead of losing the opportunity to properly evaluate the dogs for control, they would have been better able to judge which dogs were performing to acceptable Seasoned standards on the land blind.
