o'cockaigne

Last week I had the caravan in front of the door and lugged full of what one needs. Cearrean bravely helped and he jumped in and out of the caravan as if he were used to it. Thursday 21 March, late in the morning, we left for Een where the Spring-Coursing would take place at RONOstrand. The trip went well and Cearrean behaved exemplary. In that regard, he is very easy, he thinks everything is fine as long as he can be there.
Cearrean was very amazed with all the dogs and of course had to greet everyone and everything. He does this with quite a bit of noise which I find very annoying but it is difficult to tell him off because he must like the other dogs.

Friday at the start of the afternoon we went to the ‘Nienoord Estate’ in Leek. Nostalgia! The hounds that we have now never run on Leek, but Cearrean’s father, Argyll Bryan from the Market Garden, ran his first coursing here in 1989. He was already 5 years old then! In the years before, he had already done several demonstrations and funcoursings, there were hardly any competitions then.

Nienoord has changed over the years; a lot of trees and shrubs have been felled, it looks bare, especially now that everything is still without leaves. The ice club has placed poles in the middle of the terrain and in the summer sheep are walking around. So if WvCNL wants to hold a competition there, they first have to remove the posts and fill in the gaps. Nor does the terrain seem to have improved in terms of holes and potholes. It is a shame but we have many wonderful memories of Nienoord. It was a great time!

Back on RONOstrand, Cearrean was the first to have a piece of “coursing”. Of course I had a real fur for him, that makes it extra exciting! And although he goes super fanatically behind his mouse, he still had to get used to the fur that just “ran away” over the sand. The first time it went a bit uncertain but the second time he went after his hare confidently.

He certainly enjoys the game and hopefully it will stay that way. 

It was Cytaugh’s turn on Saturday. She was the only Deerhound entered because Chidish had an  operation on his foot a week earlier, so she ran alone. I didn’t mind that because it was for the first time after her broken thumb and after the birth of Cearrean. It was clearly visible that her condition wasn’t the best, the first part of the course she ran beautifully but halfway you saw that the loose sand was troubling. But she had enjoyed it and her toe had remained whole again, that was the most important thing!
When, after a long pause, I wanted to prepare her for the second round, we were told that there was no more coursing. After the first round it turned out that a Whippet (from a very important person) most likely had broken his toe and it was thought that the cause was a stone because they found quite some stones in the sand. (But of course it could also have been a pulley.) This is of course ridiculous because those stones are always there and the soft sand with the stones never caused problems. It is also true that if you walk across any random coursing field, you will find stones, crown caps, plastic spoons, glass fragments and so on everywhere. This is unavoidable and never actually causes a problem. What was much worse was the coursing field of the NKC last year. Almost 3 of the 5 dogs rolled over there, I don’t know how many dogs got injured, Cytaugh broke her thumb there but do you think they would stop the competition? No of course not!!! And what about the grounds of the EKC; in Pouch (Germany) the entire area was full of broken glass, in Hungary the coursing area was more hole than field (by the ground squirrels) and in Italy the fields were littered with boulders of all sizes! (An Italian Greyhound has been killed as a result of crashing into a block.) No, canceling a game because of a few stones in soft sand I think is really going too far, I don’t have a good word for it, next time we will run on a billiard cloth! How do we ruin the coursing ?!