This is a hard cover 8 ½ by 11 inch book with 356 pages, 243 drawings, and 35 tables. It is whip stitched and printed on quality paper.
Most book chapters include quotes from magazines, competitors, judges, newspapers, books, and web sites. An extensive reference list is provided.
The first chapter details the degrees and organizations covered: DVG, GSSCC, USA, and WDA. The counts of clubs is presented across Canada and the United States.
Chapter two gives an overview of the players: dog, handler, judge, tracklayer, helper, spotter, gthers. Each overview reviews items that we found of interest. For example: the judge s section outlines duties, types of judges, credentials, scoring consistency among judges, how to assign judges to a trial, how to divide work among the judges, judge equipment, pre-trial preparation, trial activities, schedules, bribery, fraud, benefits, and hazards.
Chapter three shows an example field setup for obedience and protection.
Chapter four shows trial paperwork. We also included judge paperwork and sports medal information.
The trial structure is chapter five. We included weather, lodging, bathroom facilities, parking, seating, and trial schedules.
Chapter six shows how a handler will prepare for the trial.
Chapter 7 helps the user understand the concepts of Draw and Flight.
Helper tryouts are presented in Chapter 8: equipment, preliminary steps, exercises, and critiques.
Chapters 9, 10, and 11 show the equipment used in the exercises and then the basic moves that the handler will go through. The exercises are presented in a movie-frame layout.
Chapter 12 shows the field positions of judge, handler, helper, equipment and dog during the obedience and protection routines. We included these as birds-eye views to help the reader understand who is moving where.
Chapters 13, 14, 15, and 16 present, in detail, the exercises. Points, reporting in, and each movement (like Down out of Motion with Recall) is drawn both in a movie-frame layout as well as a bird's eye view.
The closing ceremonies are presented in Chapter 17.
Chapter 18 is a discussion of the trial results. Scoring is shown for failing, courage and hardness, TBS ratings, and ties. Next is how to read the results from DVG, GSSCC, USA, and WDA scoring using trial examples from the literature.
Chapter 19 is the historical archives where we analyzed cross-year data from the USA National Championship and the USA North American. This gave us statistics on injuries, the amount of competitors, non-qualifiers, and top dogs.
Chapter 20 shows the types of trials: for example HOT trials.
We included a glossary for words that might be confusing for a participant. Clubs and their web sites are shown for 2007. SchH/IPO organizations are discussed and their relationships are graphed.
Also included is a list of figures, list of tables, and an index.