Sniffydog — Train Your Dog’s Nose

Apologies for promising a post yesterday and not delivering.  At just past midnight, my first, amazing, communicative sniffydog Sunny passed away from cancer.  She went quietly as I rubbed her head.  Writing about tracking just wasn’t on the menu yesterday.

To track with “Find another one,” you train your dog to alert on a variety of samples of the same human scent.  Whose scent is most easily available?  Yours!  If you have a cooperative spouse, child, parent, or roommate, adjust the directions.

Gather up some pieces of cloth, leather, paper (business cards are great), metal, and plastic.  Size may range from credit card to glove or so.  My favorite tracking articles came from chopping apart hot-pink sweatpants.  Humans can see hot pink against green-tan grass very easily; dogs can’t.  Stuff them in your pocket for a bit, then have your dog do “find another one” on two or three of them at a time.  She’s learning to match the scent of the human who has handled the object, not the scent of the object itself.  If you want to track for titles, have the dog lie down with each found object between her paws.  Scatter them at a reasonable distance for your dog’s size.

Once she has settled on finding the items scattered about, and has learned to pass over her slobbered-on toy or your baby’s blanket lying in the middle of them (be creative with the non-articles), you can move the game outside.  Find a stretch of grass you are unlikely to cross in the next hour, ideally one with a straight-line guide nearby.  Grab up a surveyor’s flag and plant it to your left, and march in place for a moment beside it.  Then take ten short steps (don’t shuffle) straight ahead and march again, and drop your first article between your marching feet.  Repeat as many times as you can stand to stay bent over with your dog when you run the track an hour later – for me, no more than ten.  At the last article, take a HUGE step to the right or left, whichever gets you back to your house more easily, and return without crossing your track.

Wait one to four hours.

Now take your dog out on a short leash to the flag and show her the trampled spot with your “take scent” command.  She will probably look puzzled and sniff obligingly.  Show her the line of the track – each footprint, if you can see the bent grass, and guide her to the first article.  “Good track!”  Have her lie down at the article, and as you pick it up, deposit a small goodie in the spot it lay.  The goodie will be snarfed, and the spot sniffed.  Right there, what your dog is getting a snootful of is track scent.  “Good track!” you repeat, and “Find another one!”  Again, you progress down the line of your marched-in footprints, and again, your dog should lie on the article.  Treat and praise.  Say “Good track” only when you’re pretty sure that track is, indeed, what your dog is sniffing, or you may accidentally teach your dog that “Track” means “Find all the crickets.”

After some amount of time – possibly that day, possibly a dozen ten-article sessions later, your dog will have an aha! moment.  Suddenly, she will realize there is a line connecting these articles.  After this, you can start putting your articles farther apart and taking bigger steps.  Why is this so tricky?  The line smells almost nothing like you. 

When you first walk along the grass, your scent is heavy in and around your footprints – but then the wafting scent blows away.  The skin rafts, primary components of scent, lose their biological activity and stop producing much vapor.  The main scent is not of you, but of crushed grass which indicates your weight, the twist of your foot as you pick it up, and all sorts of personally-distinctive components which still do not smell of you.  About four hours after you have walked through, the grass will be sealed over, and the rafts will be gaining new biological activity from the microbes of the ground.  Strangely enough, after about four hours, the scent is more like it was at fifteen minutes old than it has been for the past three hours.

I’ve had police-dog handlers tell me there is no scent after one hour.  I’ve had search-dog handlers assure me they are NEVER called on-scene before four hours have passed.  I’ve worked my dog on real searches at four hours and on practice runs of several days’ age.  If you are training for the rushed work of law enforcement, be aware that you may pursue someone who manages to widen his lead – and it’s embarrassing when your dog suddenly puts his head up and says, “Sorry, boss, he flew away.”  If you are training for search, be aware that if you are gradually catching up to a person, that person’s life may depend on your dog not putting his head up and saying, “Sorry, partner, we just crossed the trail/track threshold.”  Interestingly, bloodhounds seem completely unaware of this threshold.  Other breeds can become quite lost.  It won’t hurt to spend a few extra weeks on tracking before moving to trailing. 

Credits to Mary Adelman, www.glendhenmere.com, for the core of the tracking method.

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