Andy Bensing submitted this very interesting report from a recent training session with his two pups, Atlee and Buddy. Both pups were sired by our dogs - Atlee's dad is Joeri and Buddy's dad is Billy. Thanks Andy for sharing your experience with all of us!
With tracking season over it's time to start working on my young wire haired dachshunds Atlee, 4.5 months old, and Buddy, 3.5 months old.
Atlee has had minimal early conditioning. He had 2 liver drags before I got him at 11 weeks and I have done 3 short ones since bringing him home. I normally would have done more but I bought him during tracking season which of course takes most of my time. He also had some health issues that needed to be worked out that took potential time away from early training. With the worst of his health issues behind him and me getting the itch to start training, off we went.
I bought Buddy at 9 weeks of age during the tracking season as well. I bought buddy from a local breeder so I have been visiting him and doing some early conditioning work with him and the rest of the litter from the start. The breeder started blood tracking conditioning at 5 weeks of age with the whole litter. 2 or 3 times a week the breeder put Buddy on 6 or 8 foot "liver drags" on cardboard indoors. At around 6 weeks I started taking the pups outside twice a week to do 20 or 30 yard liver drags outside.
The GPS map below shows the layout of the lines I ran with both dogs. The terrain was a snow covered field that I had crisscrossed with tire tracks. I dripped blood in the tracks and made left and right turns where the tracks intersected so as to force the dogs to focus on the blood scent and not be able to just follow the tire tracks visually. The videos tell the rest of the story.
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Andy, thank you for sharing!!
ReplyDeleteRemi