Walking the dog

Last Saturday, thanks to the blogger Hare-Brained at Home I got to attend what I would describe as a field test for sight hounds. This was a hare hunt. I've been curious about sight hounds and their working abilities. You can read things online, but until you actually see them live and in person, you really can't fully appreciate what and undertaking the event is.

All I can say is, WOW! Those dogs are fast!

I figured that it would be similar to Retriever tests/trials in some way, the participants run their dogs and the gallery hangs behind watching, and a few folks help to facilitate the actual test/trial. Boy, was I wrong. In the world of sighthounds, the gallery are full participants in the event, acting as flushers for the game, and the game is where you find it, not purchased ahead of time from a game farm and/or planted. Everyone lines up equally distributed on either side of and behind the designated hunting group in a nice line and walks along until a there's a flush.

I was handed a dog to walk, and joined the group purposefully trudging back and forth and hither and yon quartering the desert for elusive jackrabbits. They're not as abundant as you'd think. Willow, the dog, and I must've put in what felt like at least a million miles, along with all of the other folks with their dogs. I know the next day I felt like I do after a long day in the backcountry with my hiking buddy and her Labs, scrambling across rocks or through the river. Based on my aches and pains, the relative flatness of the terrain was augmented by the unending distances it seemed that we walked.

Once a rabbit is flushed, someone yells "rabbit" and the huntmaster yells "Tallyho!" and the dogs designated as the current hunting pack are released to the chase. Again I say, WOW! They flatten out and quickly zig and zag and before you know it they're out of sight. My 135mm lens was far from adequate for the task of capturing the moment.