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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