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Thursday, October 9, 2008

Starting to blood track with an older dog

Ken H. asked this question:
I have an 8 year old dachshund that loves to hunt. Do you think it's possible to train her to blood trail at that age?

John replied:
A hunting dachshund, who has used her nose in hunting, will certainly be able to transfer these abilities to tracking wounded deer. She simply needs to be shown what is expected through some training. The downside of all this is that she won’t have very much time to learn from experience. And a really good dog reaches a high level of performance through experience. By the time she reaches 11 or 12 she may have this level of experience, but then she will be too old to profit from it.

If you begin to work with her now you will certainly find some deer with her. If you want to get into tracking over the long term, I think that you should be starting a well-bred puppy at the same time.

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