Mar 02 2009
Getting a Good Start
My rescued senior citizen McCoy appears to have been track-trained by some previous owner. I’m not sure of the method, but it was apparently quite frightening to him. Showing me he could follow a line of scent worried him. When I asked him to down on an article, his response was panic. When we began at the drawing board, down-equals-cheese, he grew so delighted by this he forgot he knew how to track. It’s ever so much easier not to make problems in the first place than it is to solve them.There are several methods of teaching tracking. If you learned one of the others and it worked for you, that’s fine; there’s usually more than one way to get where you’re going. However, it might be worth it to try the article-and-hour method on your next pup, and it couldn’t hurt to know why I use what I use.
One common method of training the dog to follow a line of scent is the runaway problem. The dog is held back while someone he loves teases him, then runs off and flops into tall grass or hides behind something. Then the dog is allowed to find that person. Gradually the time is increased. It works well for getting a dog to trail or air-scent – however, he isn’t tracking. At 45 minutes to an hour there will be a problem. The trail scent at that time goes to almost nothing, and your dog has no fallback tool in his toolkit. This is when police dog handlers say, “Oh, there’s no scent there anymore.” There is – it’s just not trail scent. I’ve watched several good search dogs follow older lines because the newer fell into the track-scent window. If the missing person is fragile or the weather is cold, you don’t want to wait until the person’s been gone a solid five hours if you don’t have to.
Another common method is for the tracklayer to put food scent on the track as he goes: stomping a sockful of bacon, leaving a dust of tiny pieces, or planting larger pieces in each footprint. The latter method takes good balance and a good back. The former two give the dog no reason to focus on the footprint scent instead of the food scent. They do get the nose down, so as the food is phased out and used only in intervals, the dog may stumble onto the footprints. There’s another problem with food, though, and it comes with the time-interval problem already mentioned.
Do you own a single variety of dog treat that won’t be coated in ants once it’s sat in your yard for an hour? I don’t. My yard is one giant anthill. My dogs inform me that ants taste too nasty to track for. (I’ll take their word for it.) If you try to do the footprint-food method and work right away, before the ants cluster or a neighborhood creature steals all the tidbits, then you’re right back to working in trail scent instead of track scent.
A third problem with both of these methods is that if you want a tracking title, the down on the objects is mandatory. If you start with article=down and connect the dots, you don’t have to do any retraining to get your dog to stop at the article, then start again. It’s what he’s done all along. If you start with rushing down the line, or even sniffing carefully down the line, then drop something non-food on it, you’re probably going to have problems getting the dog to understand what to do about it. Once he’s down, he’s not going to know to start again.
Another method, apparently, involves a shock collar. I don’t know how it’s done, nor do I want to. I do know it makes a dog who tracks fearfully and with far too much attention to his handler’s opinion.
