Theo's advanced blood tracking training

by Darren Doran

This April Theo turned four years old and is developing into a solid tracking dog. We had somewhat of a disappointing tracking season last year as the call volume just wasn’t there. I really only got a few calls that I would consider difficult enough to test Theo’s current tracking ability. With that in mind this spring I decided I would really push Theo hard to see where he really is in his development.

My first line was a 800 yd, 24 hour old tracking shoe line with about 1 oz of blood used. He ran this in about twenty minutes and it was obvious that this was too easy.

My next line was a  880 yd, 40 hour old tracking shoe line with no blood. Again Theo ran this with no problem.

My third line was a 700 yd 72 hour old tracking shoe line with no blood. Part of this line went through a controlled burn area in the woods that was done three days before I placed the line. Theo made one mistake when he left the line on a turn to follow only what I imagine was fresher deer scent. I gave him the opportunity to correct himself but he didn’t. Also his body language was such that if the line wasn’t marked I would have followed him. The second spot that slowed him up was the burn. He really had to pick his way through this. Even though he had a mistake and got slowed up it only took 40 minutes to finish.

So far my training with him had been excellent. So I decided for my next line I would try to make it as close to a real hunting track as I could. In New Jersey you are allowed to bait deer and most of my tracks start in a bait pile. I have a spot in a natural county park which holds a lot of un-hunted deer. I train here frequently and I decided that I would pack bait into the park in two spots. After the deer started feeding there I would start a training line in one bait pile and track through the second about 300 yds before the line ended. In about two weeks I had the deer cleaning up about 25 lbs of corn every two days or so. I had a trail camera out at what was going to be my hit site and pictures confirmed that deer were there regularly and at any time of day, but mornings and evenings were the best just like in hunting season. I also had raccoons visiting the corn at night as well.

Deer visiting the bait

I decided that Friday after work I would pack in another 25 lbs of corn and the materials needed to make the training line. I dumped the corn and put on my tracking shoes. This line was going to mimic a bow shot deer from a high tree stand with a pass-through the liver and gut. I brought an old half of an arrow and put it in a plastic bag and poured blood on it and let the fletch soak it up. I put a wad of hair in the hit site and dropped in the arrow. I was going to walk out of the hit site for 30 yds put down a small squirt of blood every third time my right foot hit the ground. After the 30 yd mark there would be no more blood on the line. I tried to walk out so that I wasn’t on a deer run but there were tracks everywhere. I wanted to make it as evident as possible that Theo was taking the line and not just any deer leaving the bait.

Getting ready to lay the track

One thing I want to mention is that all my training materials used on a training track come from the same deer. The feet, blood, hair, and skin and not only that I only use materials that come from a deer that has been shot and run before it dies. I don’t use road kills or deer that die instantly from a gunshot.

I believe a deer that has been shot and is going to die smells different to a dog or predator than a healthy one. I see a difference in my dogs tracking style on a deer that we get as opposed to one that is high back or shoulder hit. I want my training lines to be as close to real thing as possible.

Shed buck in the bait 1.5 hour before the start

The line ended up being about 900 yds. It started in a creek bottom and went through various terrain to include saplings, a gas line crossing, brush, mature forest and finally across a power line.

The second distraction was located in the mature forest in a clear area amongst a bunch of blow downs. This was about 300 yds from the end of the line. Again I left the distraction in a way that was not being used by the deer so I could tell if Theo was tracking the line correctly. I also lost one of the hoofs from the tracking shoe in this area and didn’t realize it until I was finished.

We started the track on Sunday morning at 9:15 am it was 34 degrees and 40 hrs after the line was put down. Also we had a steady rain most of Saturday. This was going to about as close to a real track as I could get. The trail camera had pictures of deer up to an hour and a half before we got there.

I started Theo at the hair and arrow. The rain had washed all the blood off the arrow but I was sure the fletch still held some scent. Theo started too quick and really didn’t lock onto the hair or arrow. He was all over almost instantly. The amount of fresh and old scent there must have been intense.

Working the hit site.

As with most of my hunting tracks, I had a direction of travel the deer took from the hit site. I didn’t let Theo take any of the deer runs for any length of time. He crossed over the line a couple of times and didn’t acknowledge it. I was beginning to think that this was just too hard. I restarted him three times and made him smell the hair and arrow each time. The second restart he had part of it but pulled off. On the third restart he ran right down the line to the spot I picked him up at the second time, made a correction and started tracking the line. He had it! We spent over 15 minutes at the hit site and by him settling down recognizing the proper scent and ignoring the hot scent we were finally making progress.

We tracked out of the bottom, through the saplings, across the gas line, into the brush and finally to the mature forest without any real problem. He located the wound bed in the forest and I gave him a meat reward. Theo was now heading for the second distraction. When he got into the blow downs and other scent he started searching. He found the dropped hoof and I made a mistake here. I rewarded him with some meat, and I think he thought the track was over. 

I was encouraging him to track and he kept going to where the hoof was laying and smelling and digging in the dirt. I imagine that there was a lot of scent there as the hoof laid there for 40 hrs and was rained on for a day. I finally got him going, and he was now tracking only 1 hoof . We went up through the hardwoods and turned towards the power line. He tracked to the power line and out into it. He was searching around and moving side to side in an arc moving in a forward motion. The skin was just inside the edge on the far side. I wasn’t sure and I didn’t think he really had it but at one point he was heading right for the tree that the skin was behind. I dropped the lead expecting him to find the skin at the tree but he passed on the upwind side and went right past it and into the next woods. He continued on and I called him back and was going to do a controlled search on the power line. On his way back he air scented the hide and went right to it.

This line took 55 minutes total and 17 minutes at the hit site and maybe 5 minutes at the second distraction. Once he locked on to the right scent he had no problem finishing this line. 

Theo has a very good nose but he also has great mental ability on a track. Put those two things together and you get a very honest tracking dog that gets the job done without a lot of mistakes or very little help from me.

I couldn’t be happier with our training so far and I’m already looking forward to the next tracking season.

How to train your experienced blood tracking dog: a training report from Darren

This is a report from Darren Doran describing his latest training line for Theo. Regular readers of the blog are very familiar with this tracking team from New Jersey. Darren used a new design of tracking shoes, which is produced by Ray Holohan. We will have a separate post about them soon, when Ray is ready to start selling his product.

TRAINING LINE
The line is 1000 yds. long. This line was my first line using Ray Holohan's buck shock tracking shoes. 4 oz. of blood was used. Blood, feet, and articles were from the same deer. The line will be 36 hrs. old when ran and is set in an area the County burned this spring. The soil is very sandy here. The vegetation is sparse due to the burn and the woods are mostly oak and pine. Visibility is good here and the over story is somewhat open. There are numerous 90’S and one backtrack and one wound bed. Three articles were used on this line and were made from deer skin about 2 X 1 stapled to a 4 inch by 1 inch diameter dried piece of stick.

TRAINING GOAL
The goal of this exercise is to work on article identification, stopping and re-starting on the line and the backtrack. I will also start this line as a controlled search and see how Theo does.

ACTUAL LINE
It was 71 degrees, overcast and humid this morning. I started Theo in a controlled search about 80 yds. from the line and about 50 yds. into it from the hit site. I asked him to search and “find the blood”. He worked nicely in a left to right forward arc until we hit the line. He took the line back towards the hit site and through it and began searching. He looped back to the line and took it back to the hit site and was about to pass through it again when I alerted him on it. He stopped and smelled the hair and turned around. I gave him a piece of meat and we started tracking.

I thought this was going to be harder for Theo but his tracking speed told me differently. We did numerous stops on the line and I would reward him with a piece of meat and give him water. He restarted nicely. He found the articles and these were too big for him to swallow. Articles in the past were small pieces of skin and hair that he would pick up, swallow and continue tracking so fast I was not able to reward him for finding them. He took all the turns but one perfectly. The one he missed only took a minute or so to require the line. His tracking speed also caused him to miss the wound bed. The backtrack took seven minutes to work out. This line took 33 minutes to finish and does not include the controlled search.

CONCLUSION
Theo did real well on this line. What I thought was going to be difficult was very easy for him. He handled the controlled search excellent. There was no mistaking his reaction when he hit the line. Stopping and re-starting was good. The larger articles got him to stop and be rewarded for finding them. The backtrack still needs work but is getting better. Theo has a natural tendency to search forward and away from the last scent. When he circles back he doesn’t always make his circles large enough to cross back over the line. He does handle and when asked to “search here” he will respond. I’ll repeat this line and add 12 hrs. to the age and see how he does.

Andy and Eibe are getting ready for Tracking Season 2014

By Andy Bensing

With tracking season coming sooner than you think, in addition to brushing up my dog’s tracking skills, I also want to make sure that she is physically and mentally conditioned for the long season.  The early season especially, with the higher temps, can be quite fatiguing. 

This 10 minute video shows a training exercise I did recently.  The main purpose of the exercise was to work on conditioning.  My additional goals were to work on line control and tightening up her check work on turns.  

My seven-year-old Eibe has quite a bit of experience by having taken almost 250 natural calls, and she has done upwards of 120 training lines in her five hunting seasons in the field. However, I still need to do some training with her occasionally to keep her in top form.  If I lay off training completely, she begins to revert to some of her natural tendencies that are not always the most efficient, specifically getting a little loose on her line control and inefficient in working checks.  Interestingly, with just a few exercises like I initially used when she was younger 

http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/04/journey-to-win-part-1.html  http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/05/journey-to-win-part-2-training.html http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/05/journey-to-win-part-3-pre-test-and.html 

she straightens right back out and uses what she had learned in the past.

This particular training line was 1100 meters long in a hardwood forest and aged 72 hours. I used tracking shoes with minimal blood along the way with stretches of upwards of 250 meters with no blood at all.  There were ten 90-degree turns and eight mountain bike/deer cross trails along the way.  The line configuration was actually designed for Eibe’s granddaughter, Addi, who ran the same line at 24 hours two days before. 

Initially I was going to run this line at 96 hours to make it very difficult for Eibe, but when we had a big thunderstorm that dropped almost an inch of rain on the line on the third night I ran it at 72 hours instead.  Sometimes tracking shoe lines do not hold up too well in the rain.  I thought there might be a possibility that the line would be gone but as you will see in the video, conditions were quite difficult but doable. Actually, they were perfect for what I was trying to do.  The point of the difficulty was to make Eibe struggle both physically and especially mentally.   A line of this length (1100 meters) would typically take my dog about 45 minutes or so to run but the minimal scent available created the desired effect and Eibe had to work very hard.  It took her over double the normal time, 110 minutes.

As you watch the video you will see that I put two ribbons on turns and on each turn there is either a wound bed or at the very least I put a pretty good squirt  of blood right under the double flag.  I often do my turns like this in training.  For my young dog it encourages close check work on the turns (which I wanted to refresh Eibe on). If the line were too difficult for Eibe and I needed to help her advance to keep the exercise going, I would absolutely know where I could find a good spot of scent to restart her.  Luckily that did not occur and Eibe required very little handling along the way.  In that same regard I also knew that within 2 or 3 yards of every bike trail/deer trail crossing there was also a little extra blood squirted on the ground.  That extra blood was for Addi to encourage her to cross directly over to the other side of cross trails/roads/paths and check for the line before checking left or right along the cross trail. 

As you watch the video I hope you enjoy Eibe’s careful hard work in the difficult conditions and perhaps gain some insight into how to set up training lines to maximize the learning opportunities for you and your dog when in the field.

The video can be accessed at 

https://vimeo.com/101682014

Eibe 7-24-2014 stamina HD from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

Advanced blood tracking training with Darren and Theo

Darren Doran is continuing advanced training with Theo. A week ago he did a training line, which was 24 hours old, 1000 yards with 2 oz of blood and tracking shoes. The track had numerous 90 degree turns and 1 back track.

Besides working on the back track, Darren was also training for article identification, stopping and re-starting on the line and the "easy" command. 

He says:

"I saw a deer get out ahead of us and I really like the way Theo ignored the hot scent and stayed with the line.

The line crossed a gas line and the brush was so thick in order to get back into the woods, I angled the line down to a walking path and went about 25 yardss to a hard right turn. Theo crossed the gas line and hit the path. He went right across the path and back along the edge of the gas line and woods.He went about 15 yards, came back to the path, went right down it and aced the turn.

At the back track he worked about 12 minutes before he reacquired the line. He's getting better at the back tracks, but we need more work there.  

Theo took 45 minutes to do this training line and we're getting ready for bow season. The picture shows Theo cooling off in the Ireland Brook after the track.

Proofing Search Patterns - seeing into my dog's mind's eye

By Andy Bensing

After our last training line 2 weeks ago I had a good feeling that Eibe had developed a clear picture in her head of how to recognize dead spots and efficiently work them out.  As mentioned in previous articles, I also believe that for some time now she actually recognizes back tracks as soon as she smells that the line has doubled over itself.   I set today's training line up as a proofing exercise to see if my assumptions were correct.  Since we had been focusing lately on dead spots and had not done any backtracks for quite a while my plan was to lay out a dead spot on the line to assure that she was thinking about dead spots. and then 150m later go right into a backtrack. This way I could see if she would recognize the back track and work it in her usual backtrack efficient way or would she initially think it was another dead spot and work it that way.  I also threw in a couple of sharp 90 degree turns to compare her style on them as well.  Overall, the line was 1050 meters long laid with tracking shoes and a squirt of blood on the ground every 50 steps or so and I aged it overnight (15 hours). 

Click on the image

I am trying a new technology (for me) with this article so check out the videos below.  The videos show how Eibe ultimately worked through the above exercise but also show some of the great value in using your GPS and associated desktop software while blood tracking both on training and natural lines.  The videos are not of my dog but rather they are taken from my computer screen and show how you can evaluate you and your dog's actions when you get back home after tracking.

• Dead Spot Work  
• Backtrack Work  
• Two 90's Work  
• Whole track video   

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.

Training Excerpts: Wound Bed Indication, Road Distraction, and Track Layer Scent Misdirection

by Andy Bensing

The main goals for training line on March 30 were as follows:

1. Continue working on wound bed indication by making the beds very small (smaller or equal to 6") with only a very small amount of hair and small squirt of blood.

2. Emphasize left turns which may facilitate the need for reinforcing previously taught search patterns.

3. Work on "saw toothing" (line control) http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/05/journey-to-win-part-2-training.html  which has lately been showing up occasionally in Eibe's work.

To accomplish those goals I laid out a 1600 meter (1 mile) training line using only 5 oz. of blood including the blood squirted onto 7 small wound beds. I used minimal blood and ran the line at 48 hours so that the blood line itself would not have a strong scent and the lightly scented wound beds would still stand out. I also wanted to further investigate the role of track layer scent on the artificial line so I thought the 48 hour age may help me learn if the blood scent or human scent lasts longer. I thought the light blood might also cause Eibe to be more likely to saw tooth. By laying the line out in a counter clock wise direction in the pattern seen below I could maximize the left turns and taking prevailing winds into account could be pretty sure that at least half of the line would have the wind coming from right to left as I desired to work on Eibe's right side saw toothing.

Click on the picture to enlarge

The 7 minute video below shows how I have been training the wound beds and working on saw toothing. As it turned out, Eibe had no trouble whatsoever with any of her turns. You can see on the GPS map that she spent very little time at any of them, left or right so you will see no reference to them in the video.

Wound Bed Indication 3-30-2011 from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

As I was laying the line I ran into 2 opportunities to create additional goals for the exercise.

1. Track Layer Scent Misdirection - At the northwest corner of the line I decided to set the bottle of blood down and continue on for 20m over and down the crest of a ridge without blood and then backtrack to the blood bottle and make a turn. I did this to observe how Eibe would react when the blood ended, the track layer scent continued on down the hill as a misdirection exercise and then abruptly stopped.  

Sorry, I did not catch this part of the track on video but it did reveal some interesting information. When Eibe came to the corner she continued on and tracked along the bloodless tracklayer line without skipping a beat with no visible cue to me that she did not have the blood. When she hit the end of the bloodless line she made a brief but efficient check that started literally inches from the farthest place I stood 2 days before. This check was much more brief than she normally does at a normal blood line dead end. After the brief check she bee lined it right back to the blood line 20 meters back and made the turn instantly. Of course it is only an intuitive, educational guess on my part but there is little doubt in my mind that she knew she was using the tracklayer scent to "cheat" her way to the next blood but when the track layer scent ran out abruptly, I think she recognized the back track of the track layer's bloodless line and ran right back to the last place she actually smelled blood.

2. Road Distraction - I was about to make a left turn and I ran into a forest road so I decided to use the road to my advantage and give Eibe practice in not being sucked down roads. I made the left turn right on the road knowing Eibe would assume the line when straight across and then really kick in after working the check and finding the correct direction. I went down the road 125 meters and then made an abrupt 135 degree turn off the road. The 4 minute video below shows how that worked out. I was very pleased with her performance.

Lure Down a Road Tracking Misdirection from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

John Jeanneney's commented on Andy's blog post:

This blog is committed to presenting different perspectives on tracking dogs and their training. Andy Bensing’s contributions, in the form of articles and videos, are an important part of the blog. It must be remembered that Andy is a professional dog trainer with many years of experience. However, people following this blog should not assume that his methods of working with his dachshund Eibe are necessarily the best approach for training their own dogs. Eibe is a mature and quite extraordinary tracking dog, who stands up well to close direction and rather stern discipline. It would be a mistake to assume that these methods are appropriate for training a young dog at a time when motivation, by making the exercise fun, is the first priority.

For example Andy’s emphatic “Downs!” at woundbeds may work well with Eibe, but they would discourage and weaken the confidence of some other good dogs, particularly younger ones, which I have worked with. Even Eibe shows by her tail and body action that she does not enjoy the “downs” part of the exercise. Andy’s methods are more appropriate for a psychologically tough Drahthaar than for many Bavarians or dachshunds. If a dog promptly drops down upon encountering a woundbed or other wound sign placed on the test track, this may impress test judges. However, training for such behavior doesn’t have much to do with making the dog useful for natural tracking.

A dog can learn that his handler/teammate wants to see the blood, bone or tissue clues along the natural track, but certainly he can show this by stopping and pointing with his nose, not by lying down. In dog language lying down tends to be a sign of submission rather than an indication of active cooperation.

There is no one cookbook method that can be applied to all dogs and all situations. I know Andy well, and I’m sure that he is not encouraging everyone to use his “Eibe Method” on every dog. He knows that the goal of training for most of us is to develop a dog’s initiative and heighten his motivation to work out tough tracking problems in natural situations. In this particular video Andy is training Eibe for competitions in the US and possibly in Germany. It is a special situation. Andy’s Eibe is an excellent test dog as well as a natural tracker.

Andy's reply to John's comments:

In this video I am telling the dog "stay" not " down" at the wound beds and only after she has already stopped. In previous video, earlier in her training I commanded "down" but not here.

I do take a little exception in the comment " training for such behavior doesn’t have much to do with making the dog useful for natural tracking." This past tracking season I had several very strong indications of hidden sign under leaves by Eibe that I would attribute to this wound bed work. Dogs can figure out that you want them to point out sign over time but this method will surely accelerate the learning process for the dog. My original reason for teaching the formal wound bed/sign indication was to benefit my natural tracking. The flashy look on a test line was a secondary consideration.

Advanced Blood Tracking Training: Wound Bed Indication, Dead Spots, and Search Pattern

by Andy Bensing

Eibe's Training Line March 2, 2011

After a successful weekend at the North Carolina VSwP I am continuing to train Eibe in anticipation of the Deer Search Competition coming up in April. The purpose of this training exercise was to work on wound bed indication, dead spots, and efficient search patterns. Additionally I wanted to reassure myself that Eibe's problem of ignoring artificial blood scent and looking for a real wounded deer "scent picture" was gone.

The training line consisted of the following:

1. 1000 meter blood line was laid out in CRP field using about seven ounces of blood.

2. Six 12-inch-diameter wound beds with a clump of bloody hair in the center.

3. Two offset "Dead Spots" were created, one 30m and one 20m in length.

4. A little extra blood was squirted at corners.

The video is long, 48 minutes, but with all the wound beds, turns and dead spots there is pretty much some type of training technique being demonstrated every few minutes. The highlights of the exercise are as follows:

1. It is obvious right from the start that Eibe is now having no problem tracking just blood.

2. Wound bed indication improved as the exercise progressed.

3. I continued to confirm a suspicion I had that Eibe will attempt to use human track scent to advance the line when no blood scent is present (I began to believe this during my parking lot training exercise). At the 30m offset dead spot she followed my bloodless path 25m past the last blood until she turned around and began to search. At all the turns, where of course I turned, that she overshot, she went straight 10m or less before beginning the check. At the 20m dead spot I made a turn when I laid it, and when Eibe got to the beginning of the dead spot she made the bloodless turn exactly as I had done. She slowed down in the void and was obviously looking for blood but clearly was following my scent. When she hit the blood again at 20m she kicked back into a faster speed. It was obvious that she was looking for blood but using my path to get there. As I mentioned in the video, I do not think this will be a problem in testing or in real life tracking. Actually, it might even be a help in taking a test.

4. Eibe's performance on the overall exercise was great but it clearly showed my future training needs to emphasize ingraining efficient search patterns.

Eibe - Sign Indication, Dead Spots, and Search Patterns from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

A map of whole blood line - click to enlarge.

The above expanding concentric circles were a directed search initiated by me to teach the pattern.

More Spring Training 3/16/2011

As I continued my spring training with Eibe today I ran a very similar line as described above but this time it was a little longer and was in a hardwood forest as I expect the Deer Search Competition to be held in. It was a 24-hour-old line and there was about ½ inch of rain on it overnight.

The whole exercise went very well and I continue to build my confidence in her understanding that we are not tracking real deer right now. There were 3 highlights from today's work:

1. Eibe's speed is picking up without sacrificing accuracy. I think now that she is more comfortable smelling for just blood, she is making fewer unnecessary checks and the checks are quicker. She tracked the first 1000m of today's line in 33 minutes and that included 9 minutes working out the second Dead Spot.

2. Completely on her own Eibe located, stopped, and stood over all five small, six-inch-diameter wound beds I had laid out. I think this was the cleanest series of indications she has ever given to date.

3. I did run into a logistical problem in my attempt to work on teaching more efficient search patterns. When I laid the line and created the Dead Spots to use for teaching an expanding concentric search pattern I stopped the blood and walked to the spot where I would restart the blood in a way that was not direct. I hoped that Eibe would not follow my human scent trail. Well, that did not work as she very quickly and easily found my trail and followed it to the blood as you can see on these two GPS diagrams below. I have a different layout in mind for trying to prevent her from using my human scent next time. I will let you know how it works. One thing is absolutely for sure. After seeing how she worked these Dead Spots this time, there is no doubt in my mind that when the blood is gone on an artificial line, she will follow human scent if it is there in expectation that it will lead to blood again. She uses the human scent as a guide. She follows it slowly a few feet then checks to the left and right a few yards then moves forward on it a few feet again. When she hits the blood, she then takes off quite quickly.

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.

The Value of Efficient Training Lines - Part 2 "The Star"

by Andy Bensing

A "Star" is nothing more than an obstacle you put in a training line where the line just sort of becomes jumbled up and the dog must learn to figure it all out and find the exit out of the confused area. The pattern and size of the star is dependent upon your dog's experience level and what you are trying to teach the dog that day. I had somewhat randomly worked Eibe on a few stars in the past. This particular exercise was the beginning of what was to be a concerted effort to systematically teach the star at ever increasing degrees of difficulty. When you make a star on a training line it is important that you know the outside boundaries of where you walk so you can tell how the dog is working it. Memorizing boundaries if fine if you are good at that but I prefer to have an easily seen marker. I use pieces of cotton balls scrapped onto the bark of a tree or wedged into undergrowth. Your dog won't pass every marker for you to be able to pick them up so using something like cotton you can remain environmentally friendly without having the inconvenience of going back to pick up your flags. Cotton balls will fall to the ground and decay or most likely end up in a bird's nest.

On this training line I made a 30 meter diameter star as diagramed above. I put a wound bed in the middle with my thoughts being to encourage my dog to think about the "center" of the confused area and work out from there, much like I do when I am teaching efficient check work. The black line in the diagram shows the path my dog took to work the star out. As it turned out, this star configuration was not much of a challenge for my dog. As soon as she went out the other side (1) she treated it just like any check and went right back to the last point of contact with the line and treated it like a turn. Because of the way I configured the star Eibe was able to simply work the perimeter around the confused area until she encountered where she had originally entered the star (2). She retraced her steps through the wound bed and this time she turned left at the check (3). She worked the perimeter again in that direction until she found the single exiting line (4) and off she went. The whole thing took maybe 2 minutes, which was great on her part but in a way I was disappointed. I had expected it would be more difficult and she would really have to think about how to get out of the confused area and in the process perhaps learn something new. I don't think she learned too much on that exercise but I know I did on that star and the next star I ran the following week.

On this second star I did not put a continuous perimeter on the confused area hoping to cause the dog to struggle a bit more but again she aced it to my surprise. Both these exercises were of course good for the dog but I think I learned the most. I had always thought of confused areas for a dog to work out as a skill to be taught or learned separately just like a dog learning sharp turns or backtracks. But what I realized in watching my dog work these problems areas out is that it all falls back to fundamentals.

In a previous post Journey to the Win I talked about teaching my dog to be more efficient in her check work / search patterns and teaching circles a deer might make. I haven't written here about it but I also have spent time in the last 6 months getting her to master backtracks. Well the reason I believe she has had such success on the stars mentioned above is because the confused area is really just a combination of backtracks, checks, and circles. Look closely at the diagrams and you will see what I mean. On the first diagram (1) is just a normal check. As the dog travels from (1) to (2) to (3) it is just an overlaping circle. At (3) it is another check and simple tracking to (4) where she finds the exit, which is a skill previously taught when she learned about circles. In the second diagram you can see she simply worked it as a series of backtracks until the line exited. I certainly have to give my dog great credit for her ability to keep it so clear in her head but the basic skills used I think are obvious.

Just as I believe teaching a few basic obedience commands like down and come make for a solid foundation for you and your dog's relationship, a few basic skills well learned in tracking work make a solid foundation for the more advanced and difficult tracking scenarios. Here is a diagram of the next star I am going to try but at this point my guess is that she will ace it as well.

Next installment.......A water backtrack

Note: Before I finished writing this installment, I did get Eibe out on a training line with the type of star diagramed above. From the results of that line and much of the other work I have been doing with her it is becoming quite clear that she has been learning much more than I thought. As she entered and passed through this 40m meter star she seemed to immediately recognize that the best way to handle it was to get completely out of the mess and work it from afar. She very systematically went right out the other side and searched around it's perimeter, uncharacteristically far off the line for her, a good 30 meters away, until she found the exit. She actually reacquired the line almost 60 meters away from the star. She wasn't lost or just being inaccurate. It looked as though she just figured it made sense to get away from the mess. She spent almost no time in the middle of the star.

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Brian asked: Andy excellent info. Do you use tracking shoes to train and are the diagrams you show from a Garmin Astro? Thanks.

Andy's response:

I almost always use tracking shoes to train. I use my GPS for all my tracking activities both real life and training but these diagrams are hand drawn, not from a GPS. The accuracy on any GPS would not be good enough to show the detail needed when you are dealing with short distances like 40 or 50 meters.

I don't know if Jolanta can do it or not but I will try and have her post here what the GPS map of the first diagram actually looks like. Where I actually walked is very much like the diagram but you will see that the GPS made it look quite differently and not as well organized as it truly was.

Advanced blood tracking training

The Value of Efficient Training Lines - Part 1

By Andy Bensing

It takes a lot of time and effort to set up a good blood tracking training line for an experienced dog so I am a big believer in getting as much as possible out of that time for both dog and handler. I had a great day training this morning with my dog Eibe, which was in big part the result of setting the line up with specific goals in mind for my dog. I never just" lay a line out" for my dogs. I always have a plan.

This particular line was 650m long in a hardwood forest and had two major obstacles for my dog to work out. The first was a 30m diameter "star" and the second was a 30m backtrack in a shallow stream. Additionally on this line I had several small wound beds with pieces of deerskin laying on them for the dog to indicate. The track was laid with tracking shoes. I am working on using less and less blood with my dog and on this line I squirted blood on one hoof every 200 steps. In addition to a couple of turns, I had a 50m wide "hook" in the line near the end. Deer often circle around to watch their back trail before bedding down; often found dead in that bed. If I were working with a less experienced dog, I would never pack so much into one training line. But my dog has been doing great lately, and all these scenarios I set up were just expansions on things she had successfully done before. In a series of short articles I plan to explain each part of what I did on this training line and how each plan worked out.

 
Weaning off Blood
 
If you want to work with less and less blood, one option is to put less blood on the line and see what happens with the dog. That's fine if the dog can do it, but what if he can't and begins to struggle a lot? Or worse yet, just quits due to the difficulty? I guess you learn something about your dog in that situation, but I would prefer to salvage the day in that case and give the dog an incentive to try even harder next time he has difficulty.
 
There are several ways you can safely wean your dog from blood on the line, but the one I have been using lately is to put less and less blood. When the blood gets really thin, as I am pushing the dog's known limits from previous training lines, I have the line come to a wound bed or marking point (piece of skin, bone, or hair). Using tracking shoes works great for this by putting the blood on just one hoof and refreshing the blood at greater and greater distances. As you walk the blood coming off the hoof naturally gets thinner and thinner as it wears off the hoof until there is no actual wet blood coming off. Only hoof scent is being transferred to the ground. (Dabbing in the same manner or putting more and more distance between squirts will accomplish the same thing.) By having this spot of heavy scent available, if the dogs is really struggling with the thin blood, I will have a good chance of carefully manipulating him towards the bed without him realizing it. When the dog finds the bed, this relieves the stress that has developed while he was trying so hard. Perhaps this gives the dog incentive to keep trying longer next time before giving up. I always have my dog lie down on the special the sign I left at the bed, and I give him a piece of meat as a reward for finding it. This gives the dog also a chance to rest mentally and physically before continuing.
 
Coming out of the bed I will have the dog continue on a thin blood line that I have laid. My reasoning is that the refreshed dog will have an easier time with the difficult conditions after the rest period at the bed. I continue on a thin blood trail for 30 to 50m coming out of the bed. At this point I will have refreshed the blood on the hoof and let it dwindle away again. With the heavier blood only 30 to 50m away, there is a good chance that the dog will bump into it, even if he is unable to track directly out of the bed on the thin blood. He will have a successful continuation of the line. Of course like with any training line, everything must be well marked in the field so you can see it coming as you work your dog. I put double ribbons to mark a wound bed or sign location and hang the ribbons pointing up to indicate where I change from light to normal or heavy blood. I like to use clothes pins with colored tape for marking. They go on and off easily and allow me a lot of flexibility in positioning them on a branch to indicate different things that I do when I lay the line.
Eibe’s Performance on this Line:
 
As it turned out, Eibe had no trouble with the thin blood and the minor trouble I went to in laying the line in the above way was not necessary. The thinner blood made her work a bit harder at places, but she did not need me to "save" her anywhere. I did notice, however, that at the points where I refreshed the hoof, she would speed up indicating the tracking was easier. This is common sense and might not seem noteworthy to the reader, but it led me to a thought I had not considered before. What are "Hard" conditions for my individual dog? In the future I will experiment with increasingly difficult conditions even to the point of ridiculousness, but I will always have a planned safety to save the day before she actually quits.
 
With this idea of saving the day in mind, I had a similar experience just a few days ago on a 1100m training line that had been washed away by a thunder storm less than an hour after I had laid it out. When I went back the next day to try and run that line it was nearly impossible for my Eibe to follow it. I had refreshed the hoof every 100 steps on that line but Eibe took ten minutes to go the first 30 meters, and that was about it. After about 20 more minutes of very systematic searching on her part she got frustrated and picked up another incorrect natural line and just started to track it. I corrected her verbally with "NO", and she went back to searching. As luck would have it, she then searched down a logging trail that crossed the line in an area near where I had refreshed the hoof. She picked up a small piece of the line which led her in a direction where she wind scented a wound bed with a small piece of skin in it. When she found the wound bed and lay down on it, I do not know who was happier, Eibe or me. I praised the heck out of her and gave her all the meat in my pocket as a reward and called it a day. I mention this experience not to point out how wonderful my dog is (although she really is quite wonderful and amazing ), but rather to show how having a plan, and having things well-marked can pay off big time in training.
 
As soon as I saw that the line I had laid was almost imperceptible to Eibe because of the rain, I formulated a new plan. I decided to see how long and efficiently my dog would search when there was almost nothing there to find. I hoped to learn something about my dog. I could do this safely because I knew there were several locations not too far away where I could give the dog an opportunity to successfully find something if things got too difficult.
 
So I did learn that my dog will search for 30 minutes without wavering; she learned that if she stops searching and tries to follow "junk" I will catch her, but that if she just keeps trying, even when she wants to give up, she will eventually be successful on the original line. That's all good stuff!
 
Next installment.....
 
The "Star"