Back to Tracking after Hiatus

We're working again! Now the toddler is old enough to scout along and take an interest. He may be a serious mantracker by the time he's old enough to do it for real; he likes to range ahead and find the articles before the dog does.

Dustin didn't forget much while he was working a track every month or two, at least. He still prefers to work on oak leaves rather than grass and still hates to work on pine needles. He is beginning to dislike his mini-tracks and look at me as though it's time for the articles to be more than 25 paces apart. I may have to expand out of my couple-acre yard for him.

Bruce still hates to lie down in wet grass and still likes to track. He tried to steal the puppy's track today after running his own. He's houndy in his preferences -- finding an article, no matter how marvelous the reward, is still not as great as going on down the line and into the wild blue yonder. He still needs the occasional anchor point, though, or he'll forget what he's after and crusade on squirrel scent instead. Something has to keep him on the same line.

Then there's the puppy, called variously Bronwyn or Bronnie. She was in a box of puppies in the Wal-Mart parking lot, officiated over by two young men claiming to have pit-bull/bullmastiff mixes "worth $200" but they were only asking $20. I picked up the coal-black one, who was going limp with heat exhaustion (this was August, and the security guard had chased them out of the shade by the door, and they weren't about to retreat out of the main thoroughfare for the next nearest shade), petted on her a little and discovered she was sweet, and handed over $20. I thought finding her a new home once she was hydrated, wormed, and obedience-started wouldn't be all that hard.

Hah.

However, even on very fresh trails, she sticks her nose down and finds footprints. I found this interesting. She's very keen to learn as much about the world through her nose as possible. She's also a climbing, jumping, rough-terrain fool. So, lacking any better ideas, I've started her on formal tracking. She's not showing any signs of being an AKC breed or some reasonable approximation, though she's emphatically too small and narrow-muzzled to make bullmastiff ancestors deeply unlikely, so we probably won't be titling. Perhaps we can do some SAR track-trail certifying instead. I also started her on the game of Find My Old Wisdom Tooth, which she likes a lot. Pseudo is on order from Sigma. The pipe dream is that she'll be good enough at all this that someone will go do SAR work with her. I don't expect to be deploy-able anytime soon.

Herding Sheep

Dustin and I went to work sheep for the first time in months and the second time in a couple of years -- poor dog. We used to go several times a week.

This time we went to a different farm with a different variety of sheep, smaller than we were used to and much, much faster. They wouldn't let Dustin work in his usual method, which resembles something out of the movie Babe, cuddling up to them and whispering his directions into their ears. We spent a certain amount of time racing up and down a very hot long pen before Dustin settled to his satisfaction that these were stupid sheep, he wasn't going to get near them, and he could still control them through action at a distance. Once he got the hang of being able to move them from fifty feet away, in fact, he seemed to rather like it. For the first time in his life, he could tell that "Walk up" meant, as I told him, "Not me, them!" because I wasn't anywhere near the silly creatures either.

Most people who try to trial on sheep use a lot of Scottish (or, given how German most German training commands really are, pseudo-Scottish) phrases like "Away to me!" and "Come bye!" when they're working. Most people then forget which is which, or stand there yelling out "Way! Stay! Lay!" and wondering why the dog isn't obeying those three loud Ay!s from a hundred yards off. Dustin and I do try to learn our ways and byes, but we do far better if I tell him what I want in plain English. "Bring 'em. Put 'em there," with a point of the stick, generally gets me a flock of sheep brought up to me and then stuck wherever "there" might be. Pushing the dog over this way, then over that way, as though the sheep are a little ball bearing I'm trying to trap in a hole by tipping the field, generally gets me sheep everywhere, an annoyed dog who figures it's all my fault with perhaps some justice, and a laughing coach leaning on the fence.

I say cooperation works best, regardless of linguistic origins. It's not like the dog cares whether I command him in English, German, or Choctaw. If he were herding German-style, there would be very few commands or large gestures. Too, if I'm just saying "Push 'em through there," I tend to say it calmly, which the dog and sheep all respond to. Come to think of it, so do herding judges.

PAWS bill in House and Senate

The full text of the Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety Act, Senate form, is available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:SN03424:@@@P. Enjoy. It's an exercise for logicians. I mean, the exercise parts seem reasonable though unenforceable, seeing as we don't have enough USDA employees to inspect our slaughterhouses, never mind trying to determine the appropriate amount of exercise for a Pekingese. The weird part is the beginning, defining a high-operations breeder as someone who produces more than 50 puppies a year for sale as pets AND owns at least one intact bitch over the age of four months.

So, if you own an intact bitch over four months (personally I don't like to spay that young) but produce fewer than 50 puppies per year by her (oof!), you should be fine. Likewise, if you don't own even part of a reproductive bitch but successfully pull more than 50 puppies out of a hat, you're fine. Presumably that last is meant to put rescue operations in the clear. However, also, if you produce more than 50 puppies but they're not being sold as pets -- work, say, or show prospects -- it sounds like you're still in the clear. Since anyone can claim they're producing working or show prospects, this pretty much defangs whatever is left of the bill. It's in large part a dead damn waste of ink and time. The only real hazard in it for most respectable breeders is for those who take the extra care of their dogs to co-own them, which can increase the number of puppies you produce in a most unfair manner if you co-own ten of your dogs for their own safety.

Now, if we were funding the USDA to actually enforce the already existing animal welfare laws and giving them the artillery necessary to go after Joe Redneck's huge and heavily-guarded chicken-wire puppy mill operation once they're done cleaning up our food supply, that would be great. As it is, this bill makes a lot of mild-mannered law-abiding retirement-age dog fanciers who adore their critters very nervous and accomplishes very little else. It also, incidentally, completely overlooks catteries.

Update from the Blogger

Well, the good news is, I'm no longer trying to work out the logistics of tracking while pregnant. Bad news is, tracking with a baby in a sling, especially a baby who is outgrowing the sling at such an amazing rate, is still a logistical puzzle and a half. However, there are a few nice linkies in the blogroll to keep everyone happy, and I can get back to obedience work anytime I can get a couple of hands free.

And yes, the baby is fine. Born at 8 lb 12.6 oz and gaining roughly a pound a week (!) so he's pretty clearly a healthy sort. By the time he's two he'll have to carry me if he wants to cuddle. For now, he's merely on the brink of needing a new baby seat and a new rig for me to carry him without arm fatigue. Everything seems to top out at 20 lbs, and he can't hold his head up reliably yet.

The dogs are adapting well. Bruce and Dustin are keen on being big brothers, though they really wish the little one would learn to throw a ball or something fun like that. I tell them to be patient. The older male is more the doting-uncle type, and the female is utterly uninterested in this threat to her status as supreme ruler of the home. Dustin has, at least, settled down a bit in his role as Diaper Alert, since for the first few days he was something of an Adrian Monk about it all. He's nearly given up hope that the baby will ever be properly housebroken.

Train For What You Want

There are a few deceptively simple rules of dog training. The one that seems to be easiest to unintentionally mess up is "Don't teach the dog something that isn't what you want her to do." Some of it is that you have an active little brain sitting beside your left foot, soaking up all sorts of information you don't even realize you're telegraphing. Some of it is that we're working on pretty complex tasks without realizing that, either. Some of it is simply that we don't sit down and define our goals before we start.

For instance, we may have the goal, "I want a tracking championship from the AKC for this dog." This is laudible. We trot out the door, tracking articles tucked into armpit, tracking flags clutched in grubby little fists, and -- now what? We have the dog, the harness, the long line, and probably four contradictory books to work from. We have a buddy or two who's managed to teach a dog something at some point. We have a dog sitting nicely saying, "You want me to do what?"

Now it's time to clarify the goals. The tracking champion has to complete a TD, a TDX, and a VST title to get the overall title. Each requires a few different skills. For the TD, the dog needs to be able to work a quarter-mile of track with three to five changes of direction, aged 30 minutes to 2 hours. The track is laid by a stranger. The dog must find the article (a glove or wallet) at the end without going too far from the actual line of footprints, working on a long leash, with the handler able to say encouraging things. The TDX is longer, with up to seven changes of direction, and older -- three to five hours -- with cross tracks by other humans. Both are primarily on vegetation, though the TDX may have obstacles such as street crossings. The VST is a different sort of problem altogether. It may run down sidewalks or streets, through buildings, and into other terrain with no vegetation, and it contains scent articles of several different materials.

Full information may be found at akc.org, but the PDF files with the details are currently balking at working with my computer -- go figure.

Remember, according to Syrotuck's research and to most dogs's behavior, a track on vegetation at one to four hours is a very different thing from a trail at thirty minutes, or, oddly enough, five hours. To earn the title, your dog will have to work both sorts of scent. Dogs who start with trail scent tend to have problems switching to track scent (though not all of them do), so you will probably want to start with track scent. Since it's primarly crushed-vegetation scent, you will then have to work out a system for getting your dog to care about it.

Likewise, you're going to have to get your dog to care about articles. This is different from police and SAR searches; your dog doesn't get the person at the end, just a glove. For a shy dog, this is great. For a person-oriented dog, a glove is nothing worth a quarter-mile of sniffing unless you make it so, and he's probably not going to feel any need to show it to you if you don't teach him that's what you want. To pass the VST, he's going to have to find all sorts of peculiar objects that smell of the tracklayer, possibly including a water bottle or soda can, and he's going to have to distinguish those in a way that makes you stop to pick them up. After all, the person on the end of the leash also has to pass the test. A rewarded down on the article, trained in early, is essential.

So what do you need? You need your dog to know the difference in reliability between ground scent and blown scent. You need her to have a strategy when the scent changes direction. You need a good solid indication on an article, keeping in mind that dogs tend to revert to their first training -- and if it's that tracks don't have articles on them, she may not remember to stop later when they do. You need her focused on the act of tracking, not the person at the end, because there won't be a person at the end. You need her socialized to different terrains before she has to work tracks in them, because asking her to track in a city before she's seen one simply isn't fair to her powers of observation.

Nope, I don't have the CT of my dreams yet. We're working on it, one article and turn at a time, one trip to the city for sniffies at a time, one change of altitude or crossing of driveway at a time. My last dog probably could have earned one, if I'd been able to take three or more weekends to quest after it, but those were the SAR days, and we stayed available for missing-persons calls instead. She worked with a low nose; she worked in the tracking-scent window; she did very well on VST-style problems. In one exercise we tried, she had to find gum wrappers rolled up to the size of toothpicks and planted in sidewalk cracks -- and she did, once she realized that was the goal. This also solved the Law of Custodians, which is that one will come along and clean up your tracking articles as your problem ages even if nobody has done so in the previous week.

For the next few posts: details!

Commands and Communication

"Training your dog's nose" may be an inaccurate title. The average dog knows how to use his nose just fine, just as readily and easily as you use your eyes. The trick is not in teaching his nose; it's teaching him a vocabulary.

My last scenting dog, Sunny, started off with "Search" to find airborne scent and "Find another one." The latter was useful for tracking: find another thing with the tracklayer's scent on it, and another, and another -- surprise! Those footprints in between link them up. From there we developed "Track."

What I didn't specifically train for some time was article search without a connecting track. However, one fine day, I needed to have a key in my car to run the air conditioner and another to lock it while I was not in it. In finally shutting everything down and leaving the car, I lost one of the two keys. Several hours later, returning to the car, I discovered this. Note: gray plastic-and-steel key, gray parking lot, nighttime with depth-perception-destroying sodium lights. I went home and collected Sunny, then went back.

I showed her my keyring and told her "Take scent," a command she already knew. Then I pointed to the ground as though we were tracking and said "Search" as though we were air-scenting. She looked puzzled for a moment, thoughtful for a second moment, then put her nose down and began casting around.

A few sweeps of the nose later, she took a few steps straight ahead, looked back at me to say quite plainly, "Is this what you wanted? You need new glasses," and lay down on my key. Twelve feet from where we'd started, it had been completely invisible to me. To her, it stood out just fine. Since we could communicate pretty well, she had figured out the key was probably what I'd had in mind, and since I use positive training, she was willing to take a chance on guessing.

When evaluating a training system, whether for scentwork or otherwise, it's worth asking, "What else can I get from this?" In this case, by working from a "Find another one" tracking system from Mary Adelman's method and also making sure my dog knew air scent was a useable and viable option, I "bought two, got article search free." Later, when we took up trailing, which relies on air scent deposited along any surface to which skin rafts can stick, it was far less work than it would have been starting from scratch because my dog knew about scent flows and footprints. Extending the metaphor, we took trailing at a discount.

Track, Trail or Airscent on in!

Welcome to the new home of Sniffydog! I am moving away from sniffydog.today.com for a variety of reasons.

At present, I am working a young German Shepherd Dog, Dustin, in AKC tracking. He is working himself in air scent while I research the military's Silent Scout training -- a post later on this subject, or possibly several. My past experience includes training another GSD in tracking, trailing, air scent, and cadaver while helping friends train their German Shorthair Pointers, Bloodhounds, Labrador Retrievers, Belgian Malinois, and mixes thereof for one or another thing off that list. I am the sort of person to capitalize proper breed names most of the time.

For practice, I also snatch up the nearest rescue to test a new training method on. If it'll work on the baby chow mix or the elderly and traumatized GSD, it will probably also work for your dog, and possibly even on your cat, rat or horse. These methods usually involve setting up a situation to get the desired response, labeling the response, and rewarding with food, praise, petting, and more food.

My main research fallbacks include (but this is the short list) Mary Adelman, Lou Button, Susan Bulanda, and Stephen Budiansky. Further "highly recommended readings" will follow. So will the occasional wacky post on canine misadventures around the house.