Hank in the mall first time, learning to foucus on handler.

Originally uploaded by Laura & the pack.

Our latest project Hank is a dog Sam Connley is fostering. She thinks he will make someone a wonderful assistance dog so she asked to put him through our assistance dog-training program. Sam has done a lot of foundation obedience work with Hank now we are starting to work on the public access skills. Here he is learning to focus on Sam and do a default down while he is in the mall. If you think you know someone that may be interested in Hank as an assistance dog please feel free to contact Sam directly at anigraphix@aol.com

HPIM2441

Originally uploaded by Laura & the pack.

On that tangent of training dogs in “drive” I’m thinking of starting my trailing dogs a little differently. I still like footstep tracking as a concept to keep the head down but when we are putting the sequence together into trailing dog we should probably work with the “natural” behaviors the dog offers. So I started with some dogs fostering in the kennel a couple that have a tendency to go out side drop their nose to the ground and sniff along. Also dogs that either love other dogs or cats or people depending on what we are going to teach them to find. I decided it is a whole lot easier to let the dog do what he would do anyway than force him to perform some behavior I want him to do. If he wants to find people anyway it is a lot easier for me to say here is the rule you can do what you want as long as you follow my rules. Than to it is for me to take the “by golly you are going to do this and you will like it” attitude. We are going to use a back chaining technique where we start at the last step the dog is getting rewarded at the subject. Then I move him a little distance away show him something that smells like the subject and let him go play with her again. I repeat until he understands that smelling the article starts the game. Next I’ll do the same thing with different people then have several people there let him smell the article of the only person that will play with him. Following are some photos of Bubba going through the beginning sequence we don’t have room for pictures of every step But you can fill in the blanks.

HPIM2439

Originally uploaded by Laura & the pack.

We take Bubba Just a few feet away get him to “mark” the Item from A.C. then let him play so we introduce the start of the game and show the dog who we want him to find in order to play with her. The actual track is whopping two feet long, but so what, distance is one of the variables we will add.   There are more photos of Bubba starting trailing at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lauratotis/ 

HPIM2447

Originally uploaded by Laura & the pack.

Bubba is actively searching for A.C. Notice his head is a little high for a sport tracking dog, but if we age the track a little he will start to keep it down. It is important that we focus on the dog doing the job not on successfully not how the dog looks doing the job when we are training working not sport dogs.  Sport tracking is comparing one that looks better than another. No one cares how a working search dog looks as long as he is able to produce results.  Some variables we need to add, different age tracks, different environments, Turns are all ready here since she went around the front of the car to hide.

If you want to train your dog for AKC tracking find someone to work with that is successful training their dog for AKC tracking.  If you want a sch. title on your tracking dog find a competent sch. trainer.  If you want to train your dog for scent detection find a trainer that has a successful track record training real working detection dogs. If it sounds like I am on a soap box than I probably am.  Particularly in the lost pet detection area there are a lot of folks that decided they can make a  quick buck in the field.  Time and again we see heartbreaking cases where misinformation is worse than no information at all.

Teddy searches

Originally uploaded by Laura & the pack.

Teddy is a pup in the snifferdog class. He tried the tracking technique for us also. Notice his head us up because it was a fresh track, if we aged it a little, and gave the scent particles a chance to fall to the ground, he would most likely have his nose on the ground also.