Keeping your tracking dog in shape!

by John Jeanneney

Now that tracking season is over, there’s a real risk that your dog will get soft and fat. You can’t keep him in shape by working  training line a week, and his excess energy may make him a difficult companion in the house. Exercise is needed for both dogs and people, and this is especially important as we get into middle age.  At 78 I like to think that older dogs and handlers are the most experienced and skillful, but we do have to pay attention to muscle tone and tummy tuck-up.

We all have worked hard to teach our tracking dogs that hot deer lines are a No! No! We are not ready to turn are dogs loose in the off season and run the risk that they will bump deer and forget what they have been taught. Depending on your own age and condition you can jog a few miles with them or “road” them from your ATV. Better yet train your dog to roam about off lead as you search together for sheds or trim out your deer stands for the upcoming season.

Taking a walk in the woods with your tracking dogs is not as simple as it should be. Labs and curdogs will usually stay fairly close. Hounds, including dachshunds, have a greater tendency to range out too far. Your dog must handle, stay in contact and explore the area within a 100 yards or so. If there is a problem with recall, the best solution is a remote (electronic) collar used gently and intelligently. If the dog drifts out and doesn’t respond to your voice, give him a buzz with the vibrator on the collar and follow up with a low level electric “nick”. The dog must have a clear idea of what “Come!” means before you begin this collar training. You have to work upward from the lowest electric nick levels until you find what is just powerful enough to get the attention of your dog. The sensitivity of individual dogs to electrical “stimulation” varies. Once your dog learns to associate the buzz of the vibrator and the mild electric shock, you will be able to communicate by vibrator alone. This means that you can let the dog work out around you without calling him and spooking any wildlife you might be interested in.

Long walks with your tracking dog in interesting terrain are something that will keep you both in shape for fall. Think how steep those hills are going to be if you let that belly fat build up. A word of caution for small dog folks:  Avoid dusk, after dark and early dawn outings. These are the hours when coyotes are on the move. I know of three cases where coyotes killed small dogs at night. One was my own Jack Russell, who was a great underground dog if not much of a tracker.

Some handlers are reluctant to let their dogs do anything but track wounded big game. What if the dog bumps a deer and forgets everything he has been taught? Actually mature dogs are more discriminating than we sometimes realize. For a smart, versatile pointing dog like a Drahthaar there is no contradiction between hunting birds  and tracking wounded deer. Dogs are very aware of cues. When the tracking collar and leash go on at the hit site, this is their signal to focus on the scent line of wounded big game.

Dachshunds and beagles can be used for both tracking and rabbit hunting. We consistently do this with our dachshunds. In both activities they use their running muscles and their noses. On rabbits they learn to work checks and backtracks; this enhances their blood tracking skills. For dachshunds competitive AKC field trials on cottontails are another activity to keep a tracking dog sharp and in shape.

Susanne Hamilton's Buster (FC Clown vom Talsdeich) 

is an outstanding blood tracker and winner of two 

Dachshund Club of America National field trials.

When you are dealing with versatile dogs, from dachshunds to Drahthaars, you do have to determine your priorities. If tracking wounded big game is going to be the most important activity, it is best to introduce the puppy to this sort of scent work first. As the young dog understands that tracking wounded big game is the most important thing in the world, he will learn to ignore rabbits or birds when tracking on the long leash. A Drahthaar may end up not being as high headed and wide ranging as a pheasant specialist, but he will perform both jobs well.

The more you work with your dog in different  hunting activities, the more the dog/handler cooperation will carry over from one activity to another. This brings to mind the career of Clary, my second wirehaired dachshund, and my most versatile dog of all time.

With Clary, I could not begin with training for tracking wounded deer. In 1971  this has not been legalized yet in any of the northern states. We started by hunting rabbits, squirrels and raccoons.  Clary was a puppy sensation until her first birthday. Then she crashed into six months of adolescence incompetence until her brain began to function well once more. At 18 months she rediscovered her old self confirming all my early hopes. Clary would run rabbits in daylight and ignore them at night when coons were our game. During the day she quickly sensed whether I was hunting pheasants or rabbits, and she would quarter closely or range farther out as the situation required. This early introduction to small game work is not what I would recommend today for every dog, but in Clary’s particular case it was not a problem.

When a DNR official with law enforcement credentials legally requested that I track a wounded deer, Clary took a bloodless  four hour line a quarter of a mile to the deer. Clary was then four years old and had never chased a healthy deer or tracked a wounded one. Yet Clary immediately sensed what I wanted her to do and acted as if she had been “blood tracking” all her life. Her earlier experiences of cooperation in hunting with me carried over to this new task.

In the case of most breeds a tracking dog does not have to be a specialist for just one thing. If you work with your dog year round, he will understand you and cooperate better during the tracking season. And he will stay in shape.

Clary von Moosbach with her dam Carla vom Rode. By the way, Carla was the first dachshund imported by John from Germany; she was born in February 1965.

Well trained German teckels - perfect field obedience

Today will be a busy day so we are just going to post a short video of well trained German teckels. This is an example of perfect field obedience, and, yes, dachshunds can be trained.

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.

http://www.huntsmith.com/articles/the-whoa-post-redux.html

http://www.huntsmith.com/articles/the-whoa-post-redux-2.html

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!

The Whoa Post for Blood Tracking from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

North American Teckel Club events - part 1

North American Teckel Club held its Zuchtschau and other events (blood tracking tests, obedience tests, training sessions etc) on May 9-12 at Rockaway, NJ. For us the results were disappointing.

On Thursday the lines were laid for the first test in 95 degree heat. Then it rained hard, and the next day only Andy Bensing's Eibe was able to work this line. She took two hours to painstaking track what was left of deer foot and blood scent. Her focused attention never wavered. John was one of the three judges who gave her a prize I (92 points), and he thinks that Eibe is an extraordinary dog. Huge congratulations to Andy and Eibe!

On Friday there was another tracking shoe test for three more dogs, Steve Durocher's two teckels from Canada and our Joeri. None of these dogs could do anything with the line, which had been rained out by another torrential downpour. All three dogs failed. John withdrew Joeri after 20 minutes and about 250 meters in order to avoid wasting the judges' time.

The tracking shoe test, with its natural deer scent from the interdigital glands of the hoofs, seems to motivate dogs better than straight blood. However, the drawback is that the tracking shoe test line holds up less well
under heavy rain.

In other events, such as the Companion Dog Test (Begleithundpruefung) Joeri did very well. He was the only dog who did the exercises off-lead. The water retrieval tests with a dummy and a dead duck fascinated him. After passing these tests himself, he delighted in retrieving the dummy and duck for the other less enthusiastic dogs who left the retrieval object out in the water. This was all very fine, but we would have preferred to have a good score on the blood tracking test.

Since we don't have any pictures from the performance events, I have included pictures from today's John and Joeri's obedience training session. It included healing off-leash, down and stay, and retrieve.

Dachshunds and field obedience

Yesterday we received a nice e-mail from Anne Bauersachs, who is a daughter of Rosemarie Bauersachs, a breeder of our Joeri vom Nonnenschlag. She said: "Our local DCN group sometimes organizes a hike with our teckels. At the August hike about 30 people and more than 20 dogs were hiking in the morning. The picture shows from the left: Jannis, Florie, Darja, Jette, Justus, Isidor, Corrie, Kleo; all “vom Nonnenschlag”; Jannis, Jette and Justus are Joeri's siblings."

In Germany a great deal of emphasis is placed on field obedience, and the picture shows dogs which have been trained to "stay". So often we see that American handlers of blood tracking dachshunds do not train their dogs to handle when they are off-leash. Since in many states blood tracking dogs can be worked only when they are leashed, their field training off-leash does not get enough attention. What a shame! Dachshunds can be used for so many hunting tasks, but they need to be properly trained to "come" when called. Read more about the dachshund as a forester's dog in this article John wrote in 2004:

A Forester's Dog

By John Jeanneney, 2004

Early in the last century the ideal image of the dachshund depicted “a forester’s dog”. To be sure foresters were not the actual breeder/developers of the early standard dachshund. And by the early 1900s most dachshunds in Germany were actually household companions of town and city dwellers. Yet the identity of the dachshund, its mystique, was tied to a vision of a loyal, responsive dog, who accompanied the local forester on his daily rounds of inspection of the forests and game under his jurisdiction. There were a few, supremely fortunate dachshunds who actually lived this life.

It was the role of the forester’s dachshund to extend his master’s awareness of what was going on in the forest. The nose and inquisitiveness of the dachshund, the vision and the intelligence of the man came together in a superior symbiosis, a mixed pack of two working together.

The dachshund ranged out, but not too far, 200 meters at most, and he checked back frequently with the forester. Voice and body language expressed what the dachshund had discovered: Perhaps the wild boars were back again, rooting out the young transplants in the pine plantation, or the old fox den was reoccupied, its entrance graced with the bones of a roe deer fawn. This was the idealized role of the dachshund: a devoted and responsive working partner.

A hundred years later we don’t see much of this in America. We have “obedience trials” where well-trained dachshunds follow the commands of their owners. And we have field trials where many dachshunds exhibit little obedience at all. There is little that brings obedience work and field work together into a “complete dachshund.” For example, one of the most talented field trial dachshunds of the 90s was an imported wire who also earned AKC Obedience tiles. He failed to win several field trials because he did not recall after his run and was unavailable with other brace mates. Somehow, there was a difference between “obedience within eye contact” and obedience and responsiveness in the wild, brushy yonder of the field trial grounds

This was not an isolated experience. All too often at field trials the dachshunds with the most “hunt” are the ones most difficult to control. They would not be very useful in actual hunting. The handler would spend more time hunting for his dog than hunting for game. Here, I write from personal experience.

On the whole the minis seem better than the standards when it comes to field obedience. Their smaller size reduces their range a bit and this helps. But more is involved.

One of the best examples of field cooperation is to be found in the multi species pack made up of Teddy Moritz, a Harris hawk and two or three longhaired miniature dachshunds. The key to their success is that they all work together almost daily. Each species knows its role, and they work together as efficiently as a small pack of wolves. When the hawking season is over, the Harris takes a vacation. The object of the hunt shifts from cottontails to groundhogs, and a greyhound crossbred known as a lurcher replaces the hawk. The cooperative pack work continues.

Some of the same psychological and social dynamics come into play when a handler works with his dog to find wounded game. The dog learns very quickly that he has a nose and line sense very superior to that of his handler. Handler and dog come together as a working team when the handler learns to trust and respect his dog, and to praise him for his accomplishments. This can evolve into an intuitive bond not unlike a good marriage.

One of the keenest pleasures of living with a dog comes with the enrichment of our own consciousness through the senses and perceptions of another, very different intelligent species. As well as we can we must bridge the gap between our dogs and ourselves without giving up our respective identities.

If we hunt game regularly with our dogs, working cooperation comes easily. We recreate the primitive circumstances that originally brought dogs and humans together. Of course, most dachshunds owners cannot to this. They will seldom or never have the opportunity to solve hunting problems together with a canine companion. Still it is possible to use the pack instinct, hard-wired into our dogs, as they cooperate with us in other activities. In the wolf pack the alpha male does not boss and micro-manage other pack members all the time as to what they should do. Often Alpha allows other members, with particular gifts and specialties, to take over. As human alphas we should not approach every joint venture with our dogs as a matter of “command” and “obey”. Sometimes alpha authority is required, but the best times transcend this. We can experience this in agility, and human tracking as well, as well as in hunting. There can be a carry-over to field obedience from activities that have nothing directly to do with hunting. Formal obedience training is one of these, but it is not enough.

We must recognize certain obstacles that stand in the way of developing a cooperative pack relationship with our dogs. One of these is immaturity. The “silly puppy” stage of early development is something that we must outwait. Little can be done but to offer affection and firm, gentle guidance. Then just as we emerge from the young puppy phase, we run into the stubborn rebelliousness of adolescence. Those who have parented teenagers are best prepared for this. Don’t expect your dog to emerge as a reliable partner in much of anything until he is a year old at least. A dog’s youth is the time to lay the foundations of trust for the future.

Another obstacle to establishing close relationships with dogs is having too many of them. Those of us who breed dogs seriously lament that there is never enough time to establish a working relationship with each one. The German forester, with his solitary canine partner, did not have this problem. Developing his dachshund was a natural extension of his daily work.

In the 21st century few of us can live and work with one or two dogs as a part of our profession. We have to make difficult compromises; sometimes we have to realize that a policy of equal time for every dog means that we will never have a “forester’s dog” relationship with any of them. For example if you have ten dogs, you may find it hard to focus “unfairly” on the most promising of the two to five year olds. Dogs do not enjoy seeing certain pack mates get more attention. Still this is not cruel as it would be for a human child. Dog society, like that of wolves, is hierarchical; dogs accept inequality as part of the natural order.

As mentioned earlier a practical starting step to a special cooperative relationship in the field is gentle obedience work, not just indoors or in the yard, but also during walks in the woods and countryside. Dachshunds can learn what “Come” means through the use of a 30 to 40 ft long of plastic clothesline. The challenge begins of course after the clothesline phase is over. When the dog is out at a distance of twenty clothesline lengths and out of eye contact, his sense of loyalty and cooperation may not kick in as we would hope. Space-minded as they are, dogs do often go through a stage of feeling that there is a “sphere of cooperation”, outside of which they are free to do anything they want.

NATC Field Obedience Test Sept 2006 - John with Billy healing off leash

By closing the distance with the dog, and by firm command, the dog can be brought back into cooperative control. This is not always easy, especially when you don’t even know where to find your dog. But it can be done; long distance recall training has been accomplished for many centuries. It requires patience and some running; a horse helps.

Two modern technological developments make it easier to establish control and co-operation, and they can be used without brutalizing your dog or destroying your relationship with him.

The first is the beeper collar, which was developed for pointing dogs. For older human ears it is easier to hear than a bell, but another great value is that it is less intrusive for the dog. When the dog is on the move the beep is issued only once every ten seconds instead of every second when the dog is stationary. I find that it is very useful to tell me where the dog is so that I can reestablish communication. At fifty feet, even out of sight in thick brush, a dog is more likely to listen to me than at long-range shouting distance.

The second item is the e-collar or electronic collar formerly referred to as the “shocking collar”. You don’t have to shock your dog, although the potential to do this certainly does exist. The e-collar, by that other name, has inspired visions of a torture tool or a slightly less than lethal electric chair. This is akin to being against motor vehicles because they have the potential to cause great pain and suffering. Modern e-collars have adjustable levels of “electrical stimulation”. In training you work at very low levels, somewhat milder but more sustained than the sensation of a static electrical charge when you have been walking a wool rug on a winter morning. In training I never use a “stimulation level” which I have not tried on myself first.

In the field when I call and am ignored, I transmit a signal to the e-collar, I may hear a surprised yelp, but no more than that. In any case I want to see the tail wagging again within thirty seconds. The tingle on the dog’s neck seems to impress him more than shouts of “come”. I don’t think that the dog is impressed by any pain; but he is aware that Alpha has “Big Magic”, establishing Alpha’s presence even though he is a 100 yards away.

The beeper and the e-collar are no substitute for the psychological base created through hours of cooperative work and gentle, close-in training. Correctly used these tools are extenders and facilitators because the obedience class approach, in itself, is not enough to turn a spirited hunting dog into a cooperative partner.

Even in Germany the old fashioned German forester is long gone, but developing a “working pack” relationship with your dachshund can be done in other ways. Use the methods of firm and structured discipline combined with lots of praise. Present, as much as possible, formal discipline in a broader emotional framework in which you and your dog do things and explore together. The sphere of cooperation will expand because the dog loves to please his pack mate. There is more to the human/dog relationship than command and obey.

NATC Field Obedience Test Sept 2006 - a long down; at the top Sherry Ruggieri's Auggie, at the bottom our Billy