Apr 23 2009
Positive Training and Your Tracking Dog
Today at Sniffydog, we’re looking at positive training again.
I’ve started Dustin working in the harness, as he’s probably as big as he’s going to get. I start puppies in their collars, because collars are cheap and harnesses are not. Luckily, he’s smallish for a male and Sunny was largish for a female, so with minor adjustments he can wear hers. Today I put it on him for the third time.
He tried to jump into it as I sorted out the neck from the leg openings. In fact, he’s developing a lot of the funny little habits that I’d thought were unique to Sunny. He whoops with joy when I get out training equipment. He starts sniffing out the start of the track when he sees the flag, which will be great if we get to TDX level. He’s also taken to snuggling on the bed in the morning. Since they aren’t particularly related (not within 20 generations, most likely) I’ll have to put it down to environment. My dogs like to work with me.
A police-dog training friend once took on a Schutzhund reject: great bitework, decent obedience, lousy tracker. The dog worked well enough on a track as far as what the nose was doing, but everything behind the nose cringed, tail tucked right to the ribcage. This tends not to impress judges. It turned out the dog had been trained to track with a shock collar, zapped if his nose left the footprints. Since police dogs should follow suspects, and the suspect should be impressed with what he sees following him, this was a potential problem. However, once the dog learned that he was no longer wearing the collar, and that at the end of the track there was someone in a big padded suit for him to bite, he was a happy, jolly, eager tracker.
Since I started with more interest in search and rescue, naturally a bite at the end of the track isn’t something I’m looking for my dog to expect. So — cheese. Cheese at every piece of evidence along the way, and nowhere else, so my dog doesn’t turn into one of those who blasts past evidence and exhausts himself before he gets to the end. You want the evidence AND the end, and a rest point for both handler and dog does save the back and feet some pounding. If you want titles, the evidence IS the end, and you don’t get the titles if your dog misses the bitsies.
There is one side effect of the cheese, though. I dropped the cheese as I picked up the article, and Sunny took to tossing the article aside to see if the cheese might be hiding under there. She learned fast that it wasn’t, but did tend to lift the article in this “You saw this, right?” sort of way. Now, though Dustin knows full well where the cheese comes from and watches it through the whole trip from pocket to ground, he often presents the article with a nose-nudge or a lift too. We’ll have to work on that. Though probably not, we might actually need a DNA sample off something he’s found someday, and I doubt dog spit is beloved of lab technicians.
