Dear RMC NAVHDA Members,

I hope this finds you all doing well amidst the crazy times right now. 

I’m sure you all are anxious to get back to training days and the camaraderie of your fellow versatile dog owners. I hope that you all have been working with your dogs and puppies as much as the current situation allows. We are still planning on having the training day at Cobb lake on Saturday, August 8th. We are looking to add another Saturday training day at Cobb lake in July as well. As soon as we have our permit we will post the date and also information on how the training days will look. We are having to make some adjustments due to COVID-19 regulations so these trainings will look different than we had originally planned back in February. Stay tuned and we will share more information as soon as we secure our dates at Cobb.

We are also going to start the Friday evening trainings at Surefire Kennels back up starting this coming Friday, June 12th. These trainings will look a little different as well. Each of these trainings will be a “mini clinic” covering a specific topic. Sara and myself will work with attendee’s dogs through training scenarios showing how we train through different situations and lay our foundation. They will not be NA or UT specific nights anymore. If you are interested in the topic of the week, please come join us. Signups for these will be on the website and will be active the week of the training. The information for all of these training nights will be on the website. Feel free to email Sara Heesacker if you have any questions regarding training days/nights.

I would also like to update you all on our testing situation the rest of this year. We are still planning on a 3 day test August 21,22, and 23. Unfortunately due to difficulty securing additional judges, we won’t be adding any more test days this year. If you have a puppy that needs to be tested this year, and you are not currently in our August test, I highly encourage you to read Dave Trahan’s President’s Message in the June issue of the Versatile Hunting Dog Magazine with the updated NA testing policy. I also highly encourage you to look at the testing calendar toward the back of the magazine and look at entering your puppy in another chapter’s test. There have been a lot of test days added this fall in surrounding chapters but they will fill up fast, so don’t wait to send in your entries for other tests.
Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you all in the field very soon!

Jake Heesacker
RMC NAVHDA President
Dogs with Altitude