Heidi's Spring Visit - Noodles loses!!

We met up with Heidi Roo at the Riverside Dachshund Rescue Picnic, where she set a blistering pace for her spring time trial. That dog loves to run – at the picnic they had wiener dog races, and Heidi was going berserk as she watched other dogs racing – she wanted a piece of them so badly. Noodles made a surprise appearance with his owners, and was upset in his match with Stretch, one of the regulars at Huntington Beach’s Old World monthly wiener races. Hopefully this was just a glitch. Could it be that Noodles is losing his touch? Doubtful.

We also met up with Skittles, a sweet little doxie that suffered horrendous abuse at the hands of a “man of god”. I’ve attached some video of our meeting with her.

Wienerschnitzel's Wiener-dog Wall of Silence

Still no word back from Wienerschnitzel, but my last contact with them did not give me the warm and fuzzies. Their PR people are petrified of me. It's truly the most bizarre thing I've ever experienced. If anyone had told me when I started making this film that it would be a continuous battle to get interviews with people I would have laughed.

My film is rapidly becoming a hybrid of "Best in Show" meets "Bowling For Columbine". What the hell's happening to my wiener dog movie?!?!

Getting down and dirty

Today was a blast. We filmed the Dallas Fort Worth Earthdog competition - earthdog is pretty funny to watch. Picture this, a wiener dog has to make his way through an underground maze, find a rat in a cage, scratch/bark at the rat for a minute, then the rat is removed. So now you have a wiener dog playing underground in dirt, looking for a rat that just disappeared, and his owner is at the opening to the maze calling the dog out. The owner has 60 seconds for the dachshund to "recall". Now what do you think the dog's going to do - obey its owner and come out of the tunnel, or continue having a blast underground?

Yup, they rarely recall, and that's good for us. We got some hilarious shots of people going nuts as they tried to call their dog out. Bribes, threats, promises, pleas. Pretty funny stuff. Can't wait to get back to San Diego to edit this down...

The trials of shooting field trials

We're in Hempstead, Texas for the DCA's national field trials competition. It's a pretty neat contest - dachshunds are brought out in pairs after a rabbit has been chased through an area. The doxies need to rely on their noses to detect the rabbit's scent and figure out which path it took.

It's really difficult to shoot one of these events - the rabbits are so fast, and the grass the wiener dogs run through is really tall. After a day of shooting we only really have shots of people chasing rabbits and dogs running through grass. Again and again and again.

Still I think we have enough to make an interesting segment. I'm off to bed - tomorrow we are back for the Earthdog competition. From what I hear this is going to be hilarious to watch.