During the test the dog is exposed to a number of standardised situations. Since experience of life will affect the dogs reactions to the situations the dog should not be older than 4 years. Since we want to test a dog that has matured to a certain degree it should not be younger than 22 months. These limits are used when official test (registered by the Swedish kennel Club) are done, for private purposes younger dogs can be tested. When the test has scientific purposes, for example when comparing a great number of litters, the age limit is kept very narrow.
The dogs behaviour on the test track is evaluated when the dog has gone through all of the situations. Sometimes the dogs cant take the pressure of the entire test and the testleader will stop further testing in order to avoid to put unnessarry stress on the animal or even risk that the dog will riot. Such dogs are of course discarded for duty purposes but can sometimes make good pet animals or work well within their capability, for example as retrivers on informal shoots or to keep a roe-deer in motion in covered terrain.
The dog is walked to the test-track by the handler. It first meets a group of people that it has to make contact with. On the picture to the left you can see that this dog is not very fond of the group and the low head indicates that it is slightly reserved for some reason or another.
Then the test-leader takes the dog and tries to play some games with it, like the tug-of-war to the right. The dog has responded to the invitation, but as you can see here the test leader has turned her face away from the dog in order to appear less threathfull. The rag is then thrown and the dog is encouraged to fetch it. An open, frank dog runs into the thrown rag but this dog hesitated a little. We can already see that there is something bothering this dog.
Now we have made some mental notes about the dogs shyness but we dont make any conclusions yet about the reason to this pressure the dog is undoubtly feeling.