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Saturday, July 23, 2011

The Whoa Post for Blood Tracking

by Andy Bensing 

I am taking a different approach in training my young dog, Atlee, than I did with my older dog, Eibe.  With Eibe it was important to me to get her to a high level of performance as quickly as possible.  I was not totally satisfied with the dog I was tracking with when I bought Eibe, and I hoped for Eibe to be the one to replace him.  Now that I am wonderfully satisfied with her and have found a great new tracking home for my old dog, I have the luxury of taking a much slower approach with my young dog Atlee.  Atlee shows me terrific natural tracking ability and comes from a pedigree loaded with dogs that turned out as terrific tracking dogs with minimal training so I am not overly concerned with doing my normally large amount of artificial line training.  He's 10 months old and even counting short puppy drags starting at 11 weeks of age I have only had him on 14 artificial blood lines so far. 

My end goal for Atlee is to have a dog that while tracking never goes more than 30 or 40 feet in front of me so that the majority of the time I can just let the tracking line drag on the ground at my feet and not have to worry about him kicking into high gear and running off down the track, even if we jump the deer.  I track a lot in thick cover and sometimes swampy areas and having the ability to drop the line and let my dog work his way through nasty obstacles while I walk comfortably around them appeals to me.  In thinking my plan over I decided to use the whoa command to accomplish this.  The whoa command is basically a stand stay from a distance and is more commonly used with bird dogs to stop them in their tracks especially when there is some extremely large temptation nearby but I thought it would be a good fit for my use in blood tracking.  In researching the different methods of teaching the whoa command (of which there are many) I decided on using the "whoa post" method as taught by Rick Smith .

The 2 links below give a detailed explanation of how the method is done.  I will basically replace distractions in general for the normal bird work done at the end and described in the articles.

My plan is to teach the whoa command completely away and separately from blood tracking.  When my dog will easily stop in his tracks on a verbal command in a relaxed manner from 50 yards away while he is chasing a squirrel or some other big distraction I will bring the command to the blood line.  I also will not introduce the whoa command on the blood line until Atlee's on leash tracking is at a very proficient level.  At that point I will start dropping the leash and letting it drag and if Atlee gets farther than 30 feet in front of me, I will whoa him until I catch up.  In training I will build up until he will track nicely in front of me completely off the leash so that when we track for real with the leash on and dragging, it should be a piece of cake.  My thoughts are that he will quickly figure out that I will let him do what he wants as long as he does not get too far in front, in which case I will stop him.  Below is a video showing where I am with Atlee's whoa training at this time.  We are starting to work on distractions.  I am very happy that I finally found a good use for my wife's new kittens!


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