Apr 16 2009
Setting Goals in Tracking
If you want to train a tracking dog who performs consistently and well, it isn’t enough to plonk him on a track and hope. You need to have an idea what you have, what you need, and what steps (no pun intended unless you like puns) will take you from one to the other.
With Dustin, I have a dog who has learned to down on the articles with a matching scent imprint. Unlike Sunny at the same stage, he’s not lying down on anything and everything that looks like it might be an article, which I think is an interesting personal difference. He’s just about figured out that there’s a line of footprints between those articles, with a little help from some snowy days and some muddy ones.
What I want by the time I’m too pregnant to bend over, pick up articles, and drop cheese is a dog who can track up to a quarter mile without an article along the way. That’s enough for the tracking certificate and TD. What I want in the long haul is a tracking champion — TD, TDX, and VST. If I try to jump straight to that, though, I’ll only frustrate myself and the dog.
Today we have a nice little track laid out. It’s a straight line — by which I mean I sighted on the notch atop one of my shrubs and a flagpole behind it and walked a line where the flagpole stayed in the notch. In SAR, I learned, “a straight line” could mean a great many things, very few of which you learned in geometry class. This track has several articles on it, mostly leather and plastic, as leather and plastic are weak points of his. Until the VST he won’t see plastic as a formal article, but I don’t like to set up expectations and then train the dog back out of them. Too, if we do SAR sometime down the road, very few people walk along dropping leather rectangles, but lots of them drop plastic water or soda bottles. If they have a strong brand loyalty, in fact, those dropped bottles can be significant clues for the search.
Today’s track also runs across the driveway, which is elderly asphalt, at a point which will be in the sun. We don’t have hot weather yet, but this should give me a hint about whether my dog is asphalt sensitive or not. Some dogs utterly lose their scenting ability around hot asphalt, some around any petroleum product. Some don’t. It’s a good thing to know of yours. Sunny picked up scent on asphalt with no difficulties at all, but a bloodhound buddy of ours — normally a dog with an excellent nose — couldn’t work for half an hour if he snoodled some up.
If today’s track goes well, tomorrow’s will add distance between articles. When twenty paces goes well, then we’ll add a turn or two again. I hope that by the end of this month we’ll be working up to 50 paces or so with turns between articles. I hope that by the end of next month we’ll be up to that quarter-mile with just a few articles — and hope that I can find somewhere to put it. We may have to go variable-surface early, just to have somewhere to work!
I also hope to have a post of this nature available frequently over the next month or two. It’ll mean I’m spending more time training and less time writing about it.
ETA: Nailed it! He worked on a harness for the first time, which seemed to make him feel official. At the driveway, he put his head up, crossed on the shortest line, then cast along the edge until he found the track again, all by himself. Smart boy! Tomorrow we’ll try twenty steps.
