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"