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Here Be Dragons – The Perils of Outdoor Dog Sports

Click here to read the complete article
170 – July, 2016

 

By Chris Robinson

In medieval times, cartographers would put images of sea serpents, dragons and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of their maps as a way of saying there is bad stuff out there. The phrase “Here be dragons,” meaning dangerous or unexplored territory, actually appears in Latin on a pair of historical globes, the Lenox Globe which dates from around 1510 and the egg globe from about 1504, the only known instances of a historical map actually using the phrase. If you were to add “and misery” to that phrase, you’d describe to perfection what sporting, hound, working and herding folks have known for generations: That Old Mother Nature (OMN) is rarely the sort of benign, life-giving, nurturing mom that she’s frequently depicted as being. Instead, she’s an ornery, evil-tempered old battle-ax who will happily kill you if you give her an opportunity to do so. In addition to her normal ammunition for this mission–wind, rain, snow, sleet, lightning, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes–she harbors some fearsome critters perfectly willing to do the killing for her should one of the regular tools in her arsenal prove to be unavailable, inconvenient or inadequate to get the job done. The following tales are presented, more or less as a public service to those readers of Canine Chronicle who are contemplating doing field activities with their dogs, but who may not be exactly the rugged, outdoor types with vast experience dealing with the fickleness of OMN in order that you might have some inkling as to the things she has in store for you so you can tilt the odds of survival for yourself and your dogs a bit more in your favor.

A guy I interviewed a couple of years ago had a harrowing story about a duck hunt he had made the previous year with his champion Golden Retriever Kip. They were hunting sea ducks on the Atlantic just off his land on the coast of Maine. It was a great hunt helped along by the sudden and totally unpredicted strong wind off the ocean that forced the ducks to fly close to shore which meant that none of Kip’s retrieves had been more than about 20 to 30 yards in length. But, when the skies also started spitting snow, it was time to call it a day. Unfortunately, the last duck was a cripple that started diving when Kip got close.

Click here to read the complete article
170 – July, 2016

Short URL: http://caninechronicle.com/?p=107838

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