A Fine Blend of On-The-Job Training and Formally Taught Exercises

by Andy Bensing

I had a very interesting and exciting day recently while training my dog Eibe on an artificial blood line. Instead of me teaching my dog something new, she ended up teaching me that she already had learned the lesson!

As readers of mine may remember, one of the problems I planned to work on this spring and summer was that Eibe spent the majority of her time at a check searching left, right, and back and did not reach forward as often nor as far as I would have liked. I believe I partially caused this problem by focusing too much on teaching back tracks last training season.

Eibe certainly did a great job last year learning how to work out a back track but because of all the back track work, I think she came to believe the solution to most checks is likely back to the rear. Anyway, the goal of this training line was to set up two situations where the scent line would just stop and then restart again 30 meters ahead creating a dead spot. When Eibe would hit this dead spot and start her inefficient search to the rear, I would take over with a directed search and teach her a more efficient way to re-acquire the line by circling in ever expanding concentric circles. I had taught her the concentric circle pattern previously before the back track work so I did not think it would be too difficult to bring it back out in her and override the strong focus she seemed to have on looking for back tracks first.

To set things up I made a relatively easy tracking shoe line with blood dripped every 10 to 15 steps and aged it overnight in a hardwood forest. I wore rubber boots and clean clothes to minimize the human scent at the dead spots hoping my dog would not just use my scent to follow through the dead spots. At the beginning of the dead spot I took off the tracking shoes and carefully looped out 10 or 15m to the left and then looped back to the other end of the 30m dead spot. The red line on the GPS map shows the path I took.

Click on the images to see a larger version

When Eibe hit the first dead spot she went by the last place I had the shoes on and passed by it about 2 yards and started to check back, but when she got back to the last place where I stood, instead of continuing back farther as I expected and was prepared to prevent, she turned around again in the original line of travel and searched FORWARD 15m. I was amazed! Finding nothing she then turned back again and went back through the start of the dead spot and looped around to the left and forward 25m just missing the end of the dead spot. She then looped again back through the start of the dead spot this time circling wider than the first loop and reached forward 55m and reacquired the line. This was pretty much the exact pattern I had hoped to teach her and somehow she did it completely by herself. The only intervention I made was to push her a little wider than she was going to go on her own in order to prevent her from taking the same path I had walked along when I took the tracking shoes off. I did not want her to catch my human scent trail and follow it.

Shortly after getting back on the line she hit the next dead spot I had laid out and she worked it in a similar fashion. This time she made two small loops to the right and then a big 50m loop to the left and reacquired the line completely independently again. I was amazed! How did she all of a sudden become so good at this? I had only worked one exercise like this before and that was way back in February or March.

Then it hit me. It was the on the job training from two weeks ago at the NATC trials in NJ. As I mentioned in my last article those lines had gotten washed out and there were many dead spots in them. We worked for just under 4 hours on the 1000m of test line and 600m of blind training line combined. That's a lot of experience for the dog. When I look back there were 8 big dead spot checks on the test line and 5 or 6 on the training line that I treated like a test since it was basically a blind line. When taking a test, I let my dog work a check much longer than I would in training. Since I do not know where the line is I am a little hesitant to take over and direct her to search in a specific direction. Eibe worked those dead spot checks in all sorts of directions and eventually got past them. Between the 2 lines, there were 3 times where she had worked the dead spot very long and was basically stuck, one time for nearly ½ hour, and then I took over and cast her with a directed search in a big loop and she picked up the line past the dead spot. When I look back and measure the GPS maps of those loops I see that ironically there were two 50m and one 60m. That is the same distance that she chose to loop ahead in this latest exercise! I don't think that was a coincidence.

Training Note: Most handlers realize that when you are running a training line, you are there for your dog to learn something and hopefully you as the handler have set things up so that the habit learned by the dog that day is a good habit, not a bad one. When I got into blood tracking training, I think I was like most handlers and did not consider fully what a dog might be learning during a test or out in the real world on a natural track. On a test or a natural track the handler rarely knows where the line is and the dog can learn some very bad habits unbeknownst to the handler until it is too late. It happened to me with my first dog so I speak from personal experience. It is for that reason that I do not believe in putting my dog into the field in any uncontrolled situation until I feel he and I have the basic skills and abilities necessary to minimize the chances of him learning a bad habit. Most importantly, I believe you have to be able to really trust your dog to stay on the correct line or be able to very accurately read your dog and know when he is tracking junk. Of course some risks have to be taken but I like to keep them to a minimum. I believe Eibe was able to learn what she did in those 4 hours of struggling at the NATC trials in relatively uncontrolled circumstances without picking up any bad habits for the following reasons:

1. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing (trying to find and follow the line);

2. She knew exactly what she was not supposed to be doing ( following more interesting and much easier junk);

3. She had previously learned the skill of going back to the last piece of scent and searching out from there;

4. She had the previous skill of understanding how we do a directed search to cast out to find and reacquire the line;

5. I can read her and know when she is off the line and searching or off the line investigating junk.

The above skills along with a natural ability to stay focused and concentrate for long periods brought the whole thing together.