u/sashawanks

this weekend we ran our fifth senior barn hunt trial and for the fifth time we came out with no Q's. i was finally feeling optimistic again after our last trial experience was so bad that it completely changed who my dog is for months afterward.

i looked back at my records from all of the trials, and i know that senior is hard, but is a ~5% Q rate normal?? in 4 tests this weekend only 3 TOTAL Q's were earned. it feels insanely low and really demoralizing.

We've done barn hunt classes for nearly two years and got our RATN pretty quickly in two trials, finishing that in December 2024. We finished RATO in May of last year, and since then, we have been stuck.

we took a few months off from trialing since it's such a big jump to senior, and did our first senior trial in October of last year. We NQ'd all our runs, which I expected, to be honest, but she hunted really well. We've done four trials since then and NQ'd in all of them, even this weekend, when we tried Open B for the first time. we even timed out in those, despite finding 3 rats in both senior runs in the same weekend.

we've taken breaks and have spent troubleshooting things that are hard in the ring, but it feels like much of what we struggle with at trial is stuff that happens in the blind that we can't train for.

I know this is reasonably common, I guess I'm just looking for encouragement - if you were stuck in senior barn hunt, how many trials did it take before you broke out of it?