I drove to Calgary for a seminar with the Chinook Schutzhund Club. The club was hosting Joanne Fleming-Plumb for two days. I went mostly for tracking ideas, because I sure need the inspiration! I’m still waiting for the tracking endorphins to kick in!
Don’t devalue the reward
A common thread throughout the seminar was one that’s near and dear to my heart, what I call “that’s close enough” dog training. To use Joanne’s language, “Don’t devalue your reward. The behaviour is either right or it’s not. There is no “close enough”.
Rewarding the dog for a substandard response devalues your reward, and it makes a grey area for the dog. Expect and reward greatness. When you train motivationally, you have to keep asking for more. Don’t get stuck accepting a low level of performance.
Tracking tips
Tracking begins with scent pads. Joanne uses a smallish scent pad, maybe three feet square, on which she puts about 15 pieces of food cut up very small. Pull the dog off before he has finished all the food, and while he’s still wanting more. Put the dog up in a crate where he can think about and absorb the lesson.
She begins actual tracks with the first arc of a serpentine, maybe only 15 paces long with food in every step and a small (4-6 pieces) pile at the end just so you know where the track ends . On day one, begin with an arc to the left; on the second day, arc to the right. You’ll probably notice that your dog has an easier time with one direction that the other. This is normal. Just practice the harder direction more frequently — pretty soon you’ll be arcing both directions.
Start Flag
Hold your dog by the collar and feed as you approach the start flag. Then give the command to begin tracking. This avoids having the dog drag you up to the start, which frequently results in rushing the beginning of the track. You can also do an exercise where you put lots of flags out, then walk up to each one, feeding your dog as you approach. Then turn and walk away and approach a different flag.
Articles
Teach your dog to focus on the articles. It’s a common problem in Schutzhund tracking for the dog to find the article, down correctly, and then flop over on one hip, and look back over their shoulder as the handler walks up. This is faulty and results in point loss. To avoid this, teach the dog to focus on the article, and then once you pick the article up, to focus on the track until told to resume tracking.
Reward by dropping food onto the article from over the dog’s head when they’re looking at the article. Don’t reward if they’re looking at your hand or up at your face.
You can teach this off the track first.
When first introducing articles on the track, only use one article and put it at the end. Take a giant step past the article so that the track has a definite end and the dog has no scent to continue on. Dogs that really like to track find articles to be an annoying interruption in the beginning; by putting the article at the end, they’re not having to stop tracking to indicate the article, and then resume tracking again.
Tracking too fast
If the dog is tracking too fast and skipping over food, take the dog off the track. Hold him by the collar with one hand while you pick up and pocket food while the dog watches. “You missed out, Buddy. Look what you don’t get!” Put the dog up to think about it. No meals until the track the next day.
Taking food off the track
Go to smaller and smaller pieces until you’re using crumbs. Start removing food first on the arcs of the serpentines. Put in random footsteps here and there. Continue to use food on the straight sections because this is where dogs tend to go to sleep.
Corners
When the dog can track 80 paces or more of serpentines, you can start introducing corners. There are several ways to lay a track around a corner.
Tracking a dog with no food drive
Went tracking for the third day in a row today, which, for me, is quite an accomplishment! Today was a good teaching day. Lexi and Zappa both did very nicely. Dax, though, presented me with some problems to solve.
Dax
has very little food drive. He’ll eat if there’s nothing else to do, if there’s no toy in the picture, and if he feels like it.
Yesterday we did a track with food in every footstep. We used kibble mixed with boiled and chopped beef heart and mutton. And yesterday, Dax stopped and ate only the delicacies, leaving all the kibble behind.
So today, he is tracking for kibble only. He will get the tasty stuff at the articles.
I laid a track of serpentines along the edge of a ploughed field, transitioning from the dirt to the grass and back again. I kicked in the grass steps with a goose step, digging my heels into the ground, because while the grass was green, the ground beneath was very hard.
I put food in almost every footstep: an important consideration in Schutzhund tracking, because we’re looking for that sylised rhythm of the dog checking every step. Some footsteps had only once piece of kibble; some had a handful. There were just a few steps that had no food at all, and these were along the arc of the serpentine.
I brought Dax up to the start flag where there was quite a bit of kibble scattered in a small scent pad. He put his head down and started tracking, but didn’t pick up a single piece of food. He tracked faster than I would have liked, and occasionally had his head up, mouth open, while he skimmed over the top of the track.
His article indications were good, and he happily ate all the beef and mutton that was given at the articles. After the last article, there was another 20 or so paces and then a baggie with the rest of his breakfast kibble. He ate this willingly enough as well. But the kibble on the track just wasn’t rewarding enough to entice him to stop and eat.
At this point, I realise I have two options, two directions I can go.
I can resort to force tracking, and use prong collar corrections to create the slow speed and the head down picture I’m looking for. I can correct every time his head comes up. I can correct for excess speed. Ideally, every time I give a correction, there should be a food drop right after that to tell Dax he’s “on the right track”. The problem with force tracking is that once you go down that road, you can’t turn back. And it’s not a road I enjoy going down.
So, my other, and preferred choice, is I can let the track itself slow him down. In order to accomplish this, Dax has to be hungry. That means the only food he’s going to get for a while will be on the track. At the Joanne (Fleming-Plumb) seminar last weekend, she said that it’s not enough to have the dog skip a few meals, bringing him out hungry to track. The dog has to learn how to solve the problem of hunger by finding food on the track. He has to be given every opportunity to learn that finding food on the track solves his hunger issue. In this way, the presence of food on the track becomes relevant or meaningful to the dog.
The nice thing about tracking this way is the food becomes more than just a way to get your dog to put his head down and find the scent. It becomes a tool to help problem-solve specific issues, a tool that the dog understands. As we become more proficient at tracking, judicious use of food will help Dax learn new skills.