FarmTek Electronic Timer Sound Recordings
13 Jan 2011
Ever since electronic timers have been introduced to dog agility competitions there have been dogs that were startled and scared by the sounds and voices coming from the timer speaker. Many dogs overcome their fear of these noises with a little time and exposure and go on to compete. But other dogs need to work with their trainers and take more time to acclimatize to the sounds. That is hard to do when most trainers can’t afford a full timing system just to get access to the speaker and controller.
There was a request on the AgileDogs email list asking for assistance with this problem. It occurred to me that the manufacturers of the equipment might want to help the competitors by providing the recordings they use. So I sent an email to FarmTek, who manufacturer the majority of timers used in the US, for their help. Mike at FarmTek immediately replied to me that he wanted to help and would see what they could do.
The very next day he sent me an email with a file containing MP3s of all the sounds they use in their timer! He also is allowing anyone to use these sounds for training purposes. It is really nice to see a company that wants to help.
I’ve copied the file to my recently upgraded web server so it should hold up to all your downloads. Click here to download. Save the file to your computer and (on a recent PC) it will be a compressed folder that you just click on to access the individual files. Then you can play any of the files with the MP3 player on your computer or copy them to your MP3 player.
Please don’t just send the link above to share these sounds with your friends. Please send them the link to this article so they know what nice folks there are at FarmTek and how they didn’t hesitate to help the agility community.
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