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Q. How do you train the dog to track? My gal has had to track a few times on wounded birds, but how do you train it. Books?

Dogs track all the time, it’s usually how your dog finds you in heavy cover. Tracking can be trained by a number of techniques and there a lots of books on the topic. For most of us tracking seems to be a simple behaviour until one investigates the details of the process. For young dogs the easiest way to teach the “track” command is to give it a huge concentrated scent path that it cannot ignore and associate this behaviour (following the track) with a command such as “track” or “find it”. The dog is then rewarded with praise for following the track. I wouldn’t bother to read up on training methods for 48 hour blood tracks but keep to the basics.

The easiest way that I can imagine to perform this introduction to tracking is to use a fresh human scent trace that your pup instantly recognizes…, your body scent. You need a large field of tall grass in the morning, preferably with a bit of dew on the grass, and a long lead and an assistant. The assistant takes your pup for a stroll on leash in one direction and, when the pup cannot see you, mark the start of the track by scuffing the ground with your foot and then walk off through the field. As you will note the grass will clearly show the path you took and it serves as a guide to the assistant. After taking a fairly long and meandering walk with very gradual turns, preferably downwind or across the wind, you simply lie down in the grass and wait. You have now laid down a track consisting of a scent trace that is obvious to the pup and visually distinct for the assistant.

When you are out of sight the assistant can bring your pup back to where you started your walk and tap the ground at the scuff mark and repeat the command, “track” in a slow and gentle voice. As the pup starts to follow your trail the assistant can repeat the track command and/or give the pup praise. The assistant should allow the pup to have a few meters of lead and then follow the pup maintaining a very light tension on the lead. If the pup wanders away from your track it should be gently corrected, perhaps with an “ah” sound and lead tension to keep it on the track.

When the pup “finds” you at the end of the track you can hug it and praise it for the tracking. It only takes one or two of these exercises before you can start the pup on tracking another family member. The time between putting down the track and starting the dog can be increased as the dog improves and becomes more efficient. Most hunting dogs can, and will, learn to track a human at a dead run without errors. The human scent trail is so large and concentrated that almost any dog can easily run the track up to four or five hours after the trace has been laid.

The next step is to combine the “track” command, which tells the dog to search for ground scent, with a fetch command to retrieve something. At this stage you can drag a play toy or a training dummy or a used sock bearing your body scent and leave it at the end of the trail. When the dog finds the dragged object the handling is the same as during a retrieve, praise and encouragement for bringing it back to you. In a short time all you have to do is say the word “track” along with the retrieve command and let the dog go for the retrieve, and the dog will understand there will be a scent trace leading to the training dummy. Mix up the retrieving objects that you drag so the dog will not associate the command to track with a particular kind of scent. Almost any hunting dog will soon come to associate the word “track” with ground scent. When the dog understands what you expect, the track command can be used to send the dog back on your scent trail to retrieve something you dropped. Eventually you can train so that you could switch the dog from a visual search to a tracking search with one command or signal.

Tracking to a flush & learning in young pointing dogs.

Consider the puppy that find an interesting scent trace and follows it, perhaps it’s the foot scent and feather brushings of a pheasant in tall grass. The pup is inherently interested in and excited by the bird scents and so it follows the trace and signals it’s emotional state with its tail. The first thing the pup has to determine (although he doesn’t know it yet) is which way the track is going…this is rapidly learned by bird dogs and scent hounds and after a slight bit of experience they can determine direction when they cross the track at a dead run. The pheasant flushed as soon as it became aware that you and pup were following it, something you saw but the pup doesn’t know. All pup discovers is that the interesting scent trace ends in a dense puddle of exciting odours (the flush wake of the pheasant). The trace it was following is gone but it explores a tantalizingly similar, but much stronger, expanding pool of scent that has no direction and no continuation.

As pup becomes more adept at following this kind of exciting scent trace it becomes more efficient and tracks faster, when it flushes the bird it is tracking there is a noise and the pup suddenly comes to a hot scent pool that is really boiling and rolling in a widening circle. If pup isn’t distracted by the noises you are making it soon figures out that this interesting scent trace seems to always end in a hot scent pool and the louder the noise ahead in the grass the stronger (and smaller) the scent pool will be. Pup my even see the pheasant flush 20 metres ahead of him but that doesn’t mean that the flying bird (a strange, exciting and interesting thing all by itself) is any way related to the scent trace he is going to find ahead of him.

Sooner or later while trotting along a scent trace pup suddenly gets a face full of an astonishingly exciting and very different odour. The pup is so excited that it freezes into immobility and tries to figure out what is causing that wonderful smell and tries to figure out where it is. You have the pup’s first awkward scent point and at this very moment pup has no way of knowing that the thing that flies, the cause of the scent trace, the cause of the hot scent pool up ahead and the exciting thing it is smelling right now are all the same thing, a ringneck pheasant.

Eventually pup will learn to run the scent trace in the right direction until the trace gets strong, then pup turns across the wind until it hits the expected hot body scent and then it moves across the body scent wake until it can pinpoint the precise location of the scent source. If pup hasn’t been encouraged to paly around until it can actually see the bird it will stop and point as soon as the nose tells pup exactly where the bird is. If a human has interfered with pup’s learning the young dog may have already learned that pointing is following the scent until it can actually see the bird, which results in flushes because it can’t figure out how to get a visual fix on a wild bird.

If the pup has a strong prey drive and is mentally tough enough to ignore the handler and his “training” it will learn to handle a pheasant all by itself. If the trainer has duct tape across the mouth the pup may well learn to relocate and block a moving bird and, with experience, it will become skilled enough to trap and block multiple birds. Unfortunately the pup that gets to tis stage is an unique individual, most pups like him are distracted, sidetracked, battered or baffled by their human companion and never do manage to learn about a pheasant…..

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