Problems With Switching Back to Artificial Training Lines When the Natural Tracking Season Is Over

by Andy Bensing

After deer hunting season was over I began getting ready for some spring blood tracking tests by restarting my artificial line training. I really did not anticipate any problems as I did not have any the year before when switching back to artificial lines. I wrote about my Parking Lot Training before which was our first training line of the new training season. I saw no problems on that exercise and assumed Eibe and I were off to a fast start. The next training line I set up was to focus on live deer distractions and heavy cross trails. I had a friend in a suburban NJ neighborhood lay me a 650m blood only (no tracking shoes) line through a neighborhood nature park that is just crawling with deer, especially in the cedar thickets during the winter. He laid the line by following well established deer trails the whole way which would present my dog with deer trail intersections and Y's very frequently. The snow pack was very hard so the tracklayer did not leave any impressions much to speak of but as you can see in the picture, the snow was just covered with tons of deer tracks of all ages and tons of deer pellets. I have used this park before for distraction proofing and it is just a great place.

Note the hard packed snow,  the deer tracks everywhere and all the deer droppings.  These were perfect conditions for diagnosing and solving the problem.

When I started Eibe I saw there was a problem right away. She did her normal searching at the start to orient herself and then started down the blood line as usual but left the blood line and started searching again within a few yards of getting started. Just by luck, not design, the hard snow with visible deer tracks allowed me to figure out what was going on. The blood on the snow was quite obvious so I could see when Eibe would put her nose right on it, sniff, and then leave it. She would go right down the line a few meters at a time and then take her nose off the visible blood and start sniffing in all the deer tracks. At first I thought she was distracted by all the fresh tracks and deer droppings. As I observed her it became clear that she was not following all the fresh sign. She very carefully followed several heavy cross trails for 5 to 10 meters checking out all the hoof prints along the way but she turned back on her own to the blood line. When she returned to the blood line she would put her nose across the visible blood and then fail to follow, and then check out other tracks again. She would give up on the other tracks for awhile and then follow the blood for awhile and then do the same deer print checking again. She never committed to any of the cross trails for more than 10m without coming back on her own to the blood line. It became clear to me after awhile that what she was doing was looking for an actual wounded deer "scent picture". She smelled the blood on this artificial line for sure but after spending literally a couple of hundred hours following natural lines in the 47 calls we had taken this past season, blood only did not quite make sense to her. After all, most of the time when we are tracking for real there is little or no blood even present.

I did not correct her in any way for leaving the blood line but I took quite a few opportunities when she was away from the line checking hoof prints to point to visible blood on the line and verbally and visually encourage her to follow it. As the exercise progressed, she seemed to be getting better and better but it was obvious that she would need more work on this if we were going to be successful in the spring blood tracking tests I hoped to enter. One interesting thing I noticed about her work was that as she improved along the exercise, she was willing to stay on the blood line longer but when she would hit a check, her searching was centered on deer tracks looking for that "scent picture" of a wounded deer. Those are the times I pointed out and encouraged her to the visible blood and that seemed to help a lot. I never would have been able to easily figure out what the problem was and come up with a good way to work on it so quickly had the line not been laid on the hard packed snow allowing me to be able "see" what Eibe was smelling.

I ran another training line a few days later in somewhat similar conditions and Eibe continued to improve in her desire to follow the blood line and not look for a real wounded deer "scent picture". I handled her the same way for that line as well. I would visually point to the blood and encourage her back to the blood line when appropriate and verbally reward her when she made that decision on her own. The problem was not completely fixed after this exercise and showed up 3 days later at our first trial of the season the VSwP 20  in North Carolina but luckily half way through the test it seemed to finally click for her and now she is back to her old form. The next day we took the 40 hour VSwP and she was right on. We scored a Prize I that day and Eibe had no problems at all focusing on just the blood line. I am looking forward to the rest of my spring training and the Deer Search Competition in April.