Post by Aussienot on Jun 5, 2005 1:40:44 GMT -5
The foundation exercises in Part One teach the fundamental skills of using the nose, and moving forward.
You’ve also introduced the command to track- ‘Track’, ‘Find It’ or the traditional German ‘Suck’ (pronounced ‘suuuuk’) are all traditional choices.
TRACKING FUNDAMENTALS
Terrain
Choosing your field can be one of the hardest parts of tracking. Remembering where the track runs is the other difficult part.
For a novice dog, look for a flat area with one type of cover – grass, dirt, leaves, etc. Don’t lay a novice track over terrain changes.
Try to avoid natural or man-made obstructions such as trees, hills, paths, or fences, which can trap and distort scent.
Try to find three or four tracking fields, so that you can rotate between them to vary the tracking.
Choose recently mowed over longer grass. Scent floats on top of longer grass, and the dog can easily track with “high nose”. Shorter grass keeps the nose at ground level, which is the behavior you want to develop.
You need two visual points to keep your track straight. You might want to bring a couple of push-in poles, just in case you can’t find bushes, trees or other natural markers to sight on. Remember to remove the sight guides when you’ve laid your track. Also, don’t use flags or other markers to show you where the path is. Your dog will very quickly choose to use his eyes over his nose.
I won't go into atmospheric conditions. There are entire books written about wind currents and tracking. Save yourself the trouble and track on reasonably still days.
Track Laying
When you first start tracking, most expert advise a training session of three 10 – 15 feet of double laid tracks. This puts pressure on laying a lot of tracks when you the handlers are least experienced at track laying, but it offers the bonus of making it easier for your dog to be successful on the track. Dogs generally find employment of their natural instincts highly rewarding, and you want to play this up this tendency and make your dog feel like a tracking star.
Food plays an important part in novice training. It motivates the dog to track, and it provides confidence that he’s doing the right thing. Eventually you’ll fade the food rewards, but in the beginning, use food lavishly. Ed Frawley suggests feeding your dog on the track, making him track to eat. As a raw feeder, I’m not sure how to do this, but I appreciate the idea.
Start the track with a scent pad. Lay three or four food pieces pointing in the direction of the track. Use your sight markers to keep your track straight. Start scuffing and kicking as you lay your track. Kick your track in heavily. Remember where the track runs. Be able to recall every footstep so you know when your dog is going off track.
With a novice dog, you’ll want to double lay the track. Double lay by scuffing and kicking back along exactly the same track. Make every footstep visible to help you remember when the track runs.
Put a single piece of bait into each footstep on the return trip when you are double laying.
Always lay up and down the exact same line. As your dog improves in tracking ability, you’ll start single laying the track, and putting the bait down as you lay. But for now, double lay your tracks and only bait on the return trip. Trench if you need to. You should aim for a visual track that you can see. Remember where your track is.
Use natural markers such as stones or leaves to mark the side of the track as you go. Keep a notebook handy, and draw the track and make notes. Remember where your track is.
Do not use flags or obvious markers because you don’t want your dog visually reliant on these clues. Competition trackers actually blindfold their dogs. I can’t image the dog enjoys this process, so I try to keep it more fun, but the idea is the same. Make your dog use his nose, and remember where the track is.
Never walk across a track that you’ve laid.
Handling
In novice tracking, use a regular 6 foot training leash. The tracks are too short for the longer lead, and you need to be close to help guide the dog. If you are using a regular tracking harness, holding the leash high up, on top of the neck, away from the back and well off the ground. If you are using a Bottcher harness, the leash runs down from the collar and between the front and back legs. A pull on the leash brings the dog’s head back down.
Keep a light tension on the leash. The handler should concentrate on keeping the dog working slowly, diligently and carefully. If the dog starts moving too quickly, pull back, putting “drag” on the dog. Otherwise, maintain a constant light tension, and work on remaining calm and quiet.
Stay behind your dog. Only move forward if you need to re-give the Track command. It’s not a natural position at first, particularly for obedience trained dogs. A simple rule is if you find yourself in front of the dog’s tail, you are too far forward! If you do move forward to re-give the command, don’t walk back to position. Stay still and let the dog track ahead of you. Slip back into tracking position as the dog moves away.
If the dog starts to leave the track but still has his nose on the ground, use the leash to gently guide him back to the track. This is why it is critical to know where the track is.
Your dog is trying. It’s a mistake in the learning process, not a failure to perform. You need to be alert to when the dog starts to go off track to prevent him from making a mistake. If he gets too far off before you guide him back, you need to use so much pull that it’s impossible to get him back on track without pulling so hard that it becomes a correction.
Lifting his head, though, is a correctable sin. Say your choice of corrective words - BAH, PHUI or UGG- and give your tracking command as you use the hand signal of pointing to the track. If your dog repeatedly lifts his head, add a leash pop to the correction. Be careful that the correction doesn’t kill the motivation. I find a verbal correction is enough.
When the dog finds the end of the track, release with a clear release word. Ed Frawley says to ‘Thank your dog’ for tracking, which I think is a nice way to do it. A game at the end of the track helps refresh the dog for the next track. Tug games are particularly good for releasing stress while keeping the dog connected to you and ready to work.
DEVELOPING CONCENTRATION
Be silent. Just as being behind your dog seems unnatural at first, chatter is also a hard habit to break. Don’t talk to the dog, unless you’re correcting or re-giving the tracking command. You can verbally praise, but many dogs turn their focus to the handler when praised. Don’t let praise break your dog’s concentration.
This is where knowing your dog comes in handy. For some dogs, praise needed to keep them concentrating. For other dogs, finding the food is the best reinforcement for successful tracking.
You develop concentration by gradually increasing the length of the track, by removing the clues of double laying, and by randomizing the food rewards.
After a week or two of doing three 10 – 15 feet tracks per session, move to two 20- 25 foot tracks. Alternate between the shorter and longer tracks. Then move to one 50 foot track, and gradually increase the length of the track to 100 feet.
That’s when you can start using the long line and move farther and father behind your dog. Don’t be in too much of a rush to gain distance from the dog. Only move back when you don’t need to be close to correct any more.
The second variable to fade out is the double laying. Once your dog is comfortable with a distance, only double lay the first few feet of the track. Randomly single and double lay your tracks until you feel the dog is reliable at certain distance.
And be sure to mix it up a bit. When you start doing the longer tracks, still throw in a short track every once in a while.
The last thing to fade is the food. Instead of baiting every step, skip baiting the third step, the fifth step, the ninth step. Make it really random, and don’t create “food desserts”. When you are fading food, bring back double laying until your dog doesn’t need it.
Tracking gets better the more frequently you do it. The rule is track every day, 7 days a week, for months until the dog is at competition level. That's probably why Finn has never progressed very far, I just can't do it more than once a week. It's like a foreign language. If you're suddenly imersed in it and need to to communicate, you pick it up pretty quickly. If you only take one year in high school and never use it again, you quickly lose it.
So track often, and did I mention it important to remember where the track is?
That’s all for this week – I’ll try to get to Corners and Articles next week.
You’ve also introduced the command to track- ‘Track’, ‘Find It’ or the traditional German ‘Suck’ (pronounced ‘suuuuk’) are all traditional choices.
TRACKING FUNDAMENTALS
Terrain
Choosing your field can be one of the hardest parts of tracking. Remembering where the track runs is the other difficult part.
For a novice dog, look for a flat area with one type of cover – grass, dirt, leaves, etc. Don’t lay a novice track over terrain changes.
Try to avoid natural or man-made obstructions such as trees, hills, paths, or fences, which can trap and distort scent.
Try to find three or four tracking fields, so that you can rotate between them to vary the tracking.
Choose recently mowed over longer grass. Scent floats on top of longer grass, and the dog can easily track with “high nose”. Shorter grass keeps the nose at ground level, which is the behavior you want to develop.
You need two visual points to keep your track straight. You might want to bring a couple of push-in poles, just in case you can’t find bushes, trees or other natural markers to sight on. Remember to remove the sight guides when you’ve laid your track. Also, don’t use flags or other markers to show you where the path is. Your dog will very quickly choose to use his eyes over his nose.
I won't go into atmospheric conditions. There are entire books written about wind currents and tracking. Save yourself the trouble and track on reasonably still days.
Track Laying
When you first start tracking, most expert advise a training session of three 10 – 15 feet of double laid tracks. This puts pressure on laying a lot of tracks when you the handlers are least experienced at track laying, but it offers the bonus of making it easier for your dog to be successful on the track. Dogs generally find employment of their natural instincts highly rewarding, and you want to play this up this tendency and make your dog feel like a tracking star.
Food plays an important part in novice training. It motivates the dog to track, and it provides confidence that he’s doing the right thing. Eventually you’ll fade the food rewards, but in the beginning, use food lavishly. Ed Frawley suggests feeding your dog on the track, making him track to eat. As a raw feeder, I’m not sure how to do this, but I appreciate the idea.
Start the track with a scent pad. Lay three or four food pieces pointing in the direction of the track. Use your sight markers to keep your track straight. Start scuffing and kicking as you lay your track. Kick your track in heavily. Remember where the track runs. Be able to recall every footstep so you know when your dog is going off track.
With a novice dog, you’ll want to double lay the track. Double lay by scuffing and kicking back along exactly the same track. Make every footstep visible to help you remember when the track runs.
Put a single piece of bait into each footstep on the return trip when you are double laying.
Always lay up and down the exact same line. As your dog improves in tracking ability, you’ll start single laying the track, and putting the bait down as you lay. But for now, double lay your tracks and only bait on the return trip. Trench if you need to. You should aim for a visual track that you can see. Remember where your track is.
Use natural markers such as stones or leaves to mark the side of the track as you go. Keep a notebook handy, and draw the track and make notes. Remember where your track is.
Do not use flags or obvious markers because you don’t want your dog visually reliant on these clues. Competition trackers actually blindfold their dogs. I can’t image the dog enjoys this process, so I try to keep it more fun, but the idea is the same. Make your dog use his nose, and remember where the track is.
Never walk across a track that you’ve laid.
Handling
In novice tracking, use a regular 6 foot training leash. The tracks are too short for the longer lead, and you need to be close to help guide the dog. If you are using a regular tracking harness, holding the leash high up, on top of the neck, away from the back and well off the ground. If you are using a Bottcher harness, the leash runs down from the collar and between the front and back legs. A pull on the leash brings the dog’s head back down.
Keep a light tension on the leash. The handler should concentrate on keeping the dog working slowly, diligently and carefully. If the dog starts moving too quickly, pull back, putting “drag” on the dog. Otherwise, maintain a constant light tension, and work on remaining calm and quiet.
Stay behind your dog. Only move forward if you need to re-give the Track command. It’s not a natural position at first, particularly for obedience trained dogs. A simple rule is if you find yourself in front of the dog’s tail, you are too far forward! If you do move forward to re-give the command, don’t walk back to position. Stay still and let the dog track ahead of you. Slip back into tracking position as the dog moves away.
If the dog starts to leave the track but still has his nose on the ground, use the leash to gently guide him back to the track. This is why it is critical to know where the track is.
Your dog is trying. It’s a mistake in the learning process, not a failure to perform. You need to be alert to when the dog starts to go off track to prevent him from making a mistake. If he gets too far off before you guide him back, you need to use so much pull that it’s impossible to get him back on track without pulling so hard that it becomes a correction.
Lifting his head, though, is a correctable sin. Say your choice of corrective words - BAH, PHUI or UGG- and give your tracking command as you use the hand signal of pointing to the track. If your dog repeatedly lifts his head, add a leash pop to the correction. Be careful that the correction doesn’t kill the motivation. I find a verbal correction is enough.
When the dog finds the end of the track, release with a clear release word. Ed Frawley says to ‘Thank your dog’ for tracking, which I think is a nice way to do it. A game at the end of the track helps refresh the dog for the next track. Tug games are particularly good for releasing stress while keeping the dog connected to you and ready to work.
DEVELOPING CONCENTRATION
Be silent. Just as being behind your dog seems unnatural at first, chatter is also a hard habit to break. Don’t talk to the dog, unless you’re correcting or re-giving the tracking command. You can verbally praise, but many dogs turn their focus to the handler when praised. Don’t let praise break your dog’s concentration.
This is where knowing your dog comes in handy. For some dogs, praise needed to keep them concentrating. For other dogs, finding the food is the best reinforcement for successful tracking.
You develop concentration by gradually increasing the length of the track, by removing the clues of double laying, and by randomizing the food rewards.
After a week or two of doing three 10 – 15 feet tracks per session, move to two 20- 25 foot tracks. Alternate between the shorter and longer tracks. Then move to one 50 foot track, and gradually increase the length of the track to 100 feet.
That’s when you can start using the long line and move farther and father behind your dog. Don’t be in too much of a rush to gain distance from the dog. Only move back when you don’t need to be close to correct any more.
The second variable to fade out is the double laying. Once your dog is comfortable with a distance, only double lay the first few feet of the track. Randomly single and double lay your tracks until you feel the dog is reliable at certain distance.
And be sure to mix it up a bit. When you start doing the longer tracks, still throw in a short track every once in a while.
The last thing to fade is the food. Instead of baiting every step, skip baiting the third step, the fifth step, the ninth step. Make it really random, and don’t create “food desserts”. When you are fading food, bring back double laying until your dog doesn’t need it.
Tracking gets better the more frequently you do it. The rule is track every day, 7 days a week, for months until the dog is at competition level. That's probably why Finn has never progressed very far, I just can't do it more than once a week. It's like a foreign language. If you're suddenly imersed in it and need to to communicate, you pick it up pretty quickly. If you only take one year in high school and never use it again, you quickly lose it.
So track often, and did I mention it important to remember where the track is?
That’s all for this week – I’ll try to get to Corners and Articles next week.