Videos of young dachshund puppies tracking fresh deer liver scent

By John Jeanneney

We use deer liver drags in our early puppy work, and we call it “early conditioning” rather than serious training. The scent lines produced by the fresh liver drags are easy for the puppies to follow and the puppies develop an enthusiasm to use their noses to find something good to chew on.

In early work on fresh, easy lines we prefer the liver drag to a fresh blood line. The liver leaves good scent but there is no fresh blood on the grass for the puppies to stop and lick instead of moving ahead. The pups also learn to identify the deer liver scent on the ground with the good chew on that same liver that we have left at the end of the line.

Deer livers are easy to collect during the hunting season. Most hunters seem ready to leave the liver for the coyotes, so I scoop it up, along with the heart, and carry it all home in a gallon Ziploc bag. I collect the blood at the same time for more advanced work.

There is some good scientific research to support this sort of early conditioning. When very young mammals, from human babies to baby mice, are stimulated in a certain way, the brain circuitry responding to that stimulation grows denser and more efficient. It’s possible, in theory at least, to improve future brain function beyond the level of simple genetic inheritance. This seems to work for us!

To see what our puppies have been up to go to our puppy journal at http://borntotrackpuppies.blogspot.com/

A blood tracking dog as a canine athlete

Joeri in a hot pursuit of a cottontail rabbit.

Active blood tracking dogs should be treated as canine athletes. Unfortunately, sometimes handlers focus on intensive training on artificial lines, yet they forget about other necessary components required for the optimum performance.

These include physical conditioning and a proper diet. If you want to have a canine partner with adequate level of stamina and enough endurance to take 2-3 deer calls a day, you really have to take a good care of her and condition her in advance of the hunting season. In our case we run our teckels on rabbits all summer. It really conditions them physically and mentally in preparation for the deer tracking and field trialing season. We don't recommend it for inexperienced young dogs as you really want to focus them mainly on blood tracking. But once they know what they are doing and have 1-2 successful deer tracking seasons under their belt, running them on rabbits should not be a problem. It will do more good than harm.

This is a list of resources with good information on physical conditioning and proper diet:
Optimum Performance. Getting the Best out of Your Dog. by Robert L. Gillette, DVM, MSE
Effect of Diet on Hunting Performance of English Pointers by Gary M. Davenport, PhD, Russell L. Kelley, MS, Eric K. Altom, PhD andAllan J. Lepine, PhD
Performance Dog Feeding by Arleigh Reynolds, DVM, PhD, DACVN and Jill Cline, PhD
Does Diet Affect Field Trial Performance by Martin Coffman D.V.M. & Eric Altom Ph.D
The Nutritional Requirements of Exercising Dogs by Richard C. Hill