The new hunt test rules have been posted. There are some changes that might be important to people on the list serve.

Changes to the AKC hunt test rules are posted at http://www.akc.org/pdfs/events/hunti...ns_Nov2011.pdf

Judge eligibility requirements effective Jan. 1, 2012 are posted at http://www.akc.org/pdfs/events/hunti..._HT_Judges.pdf

For people participating at the junior level, there is a possibility of a third series, as more than four birds are allowed, but no more than two per series. I suspect this won't happen very often. No walk-ups are permitted. I've done walk-ups in JH tests, but not recently. The biggest addition to the rules is that dogs will be under judgement as they are brought to the line and will be marked down for trainability if they are not under control. The change in the rules makes official something that has been pushed by AKC reps recently.

For people training in advanced stakes, one big change is that you can now run your dog in a lower stake even if it has titled at a higher level. This change was done to accommodate people with older dogs who wanted to run them in less demanding stakes because of their age and to accommodate people like ME who want to run the dogs themselves after they were titled by a pro and are more poorly prepared than their dog!

Other changes are that no attention getting calls are allowed on walk-ups. The bird will be launched without any warning. This is going to make walk-ups even scarier!

Handling is no longer preferred to a long hunt. A dog that finds the bird on its own will be scored higher for marking than a dog that is quickly handled to a fall. For instance, in one test Jake had not handled before the last bird was retrieved, so as soon as he overran the bird, Larry handled him back to it rather than risk him really overrunning it and ending up out of the area of the fall. The new rule would probably still allow such a dog to qualify, but you'd need to think about it more, especially f you have already had a handle.

At least two tests in MH must be true triples, with three birds down before the dog is sent. If a test is a double, there must be something else added such as a blind, a diversion bird, or a walkup. Jake ran one test that had only one triple, on a walkup. The other sets of marks included two birds thrown initially and after the dog retrieved one, a very long flier was thrown. Although the dog had to remember the third bird after retrieving two marks, this would not be counted as a triple under the new rules. It would be OK under the new rules as one series, as it was combined with a double water blind, one of which required the dog to run under the arc of the memory bird. But it would not have been OK combined with the third series that had some handlers saying interesting things about the judges. There we had a double with a diversion bird thrown across the dog's path as it was returning with the go-bird. The dog had to retrieve the other mark and run a blind past the diversion bird before picking it up. It was an imaginative test and certainly tested the control of the dog.

Most other tests Jake has run included two or three triples, but there was one that had a triple on the first series, four marks on the second, with two thrown before the dog was sent and two more after he retrieved the first bird, followed by a double blind, six birds in all, but not a triple under the new rules. That second series took so long to run that the judges did a double, not combined with anything else, for the third series just to get the test finished by nightfall.

This rule may prevent the judges from putting all the bells and whistles in a single series, as those judges did. It also will require them to stick to a more predictable format. I'm not sure it is a really good thing overall. Neither of the tests Jake ran with only one triple were easy or allowed an inferior marker to qualify.