My Trailing Methodology
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Methods. I have trained my own trailing dog with the highly successful, proven tracking methods practiced by the Royal Mounted Canadian Police (RCMP), the Dutch Police (for hard surface tracking), world class schutzhund competitors, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) United States Border Patrol Search and Rescue Division: BORSTAR. These are some of the most respected groups in the world of tracking. I honestly feel that a blend of all of these — in addition to learning scent’s ability to travel over time due to climatic and terrain conditions — is the perfect way to make the ultimate search and rescue trailing dog. There will be an additional tie-in, in the aged trails section ahead.
I best learned how scent behaves when I started running my completely blind trails with my dog. Through solid foundational training, I could trust her body language communication— and ultimately, in a very reasonable amount of time, start completing the trails. Every training log I do includes a GPS track on a topographical map — with the subject’s track (in blue) on it, and my dog’s track (in red) superimposed over the subject’s track. This is really where the handler starts to make their learning 3-D in regards to scent movement. Everything with me comes in threes, and the list that applies here is: teach your dog, read your dog, then trust your dog. You cannot trust a dog that does not have quality foundational work.
Known and unknown trails. My ratio of known to unknown trails is roughly 75 percent known to 25 percent unknown. There are a variety of ways to set up known trails to get different benefits out of them, including flagged, explained routes and spotter assistance.
On flagged trails, you know exactly where the track is — and the handler can immediately notice the moment the dog’s body language changes. This is where you can learn to read your dog and teach your dog. I run these trails until the dog has a solid grasp on the task.
Explained routes are good because they give the handler confidence when the dog is working in the right direction but they don’t know exactly where the track is — so they trust their dog’s communication more. When you finally print up the topo map with the GPS tracks on it, you can see how the scent was truly behaving.
Spotter assistance is when the person out with you knows where the trail goes, and either can tell you where it goes as you move through it, or can tell you when you have shot X distance past the turn or drifted X distance from the track.
All of these methods (and then some) are really useful for enhancing your understanding of scent movement and trusting your dog. The unknown trails are difficult first and foremost because nearly every handler’s confidence goes down the tubes when we don’t know where the track goes — therefore we tend to not trust our dog. But there’s nothing but bad news to come when we become insecure about what our dog is doing, or if it’s right.
Remember that the very best trailing teams complete approximately 70 percent of their blind trails. That’s even questionable to me: how much time are they being given, and for what age and what length tracks? But nonetheless, this is super hard stuff! Leading statistics say the best tracking / trailing dogs are only going to be scent specific 80 percent of the time. These are the best teams — true specialists out there training hard and training right all the time. Amazing resources, but not robots! I forget that myself sometimes.
***This text may not be used or reproduced with out the author’s permission. This text is copyrighted material.
