The New Training Page

Hey, loyal readers! There is now a website for Sun Treader puppy training. It includes links to several other information sources, including Glendhenmere Kennels, the West Kentucky and Atlanta German Shepherd Dog clubs, and an informative article on dog breeding. On the Contact page is a link to Dekalb County Animal Services with a picture of one of their adoptable puppies. Enjoy!

Getting Back To Work

Tracking has been irregular lately. I'm trying to get the most possible good out of the fewest and shortest possible work sessions, generally between prying the rugrat off my leg. Luckily the rugrat likes watching the dogs do stuff outdoors while he sits in his stroller, and tracking makes a happy change from ball-chasing.

Today was hard-ground cold, which is somewhat unusual down here, so I decided to try a polishing technique that some people use as a primary technique. My dogs are mainly trained to find articles and down on them, and then figure out that there's a line of tracks between -- a sort of connect-the-dots approach that I learned from Mary Adelman. My critique of it, at this point, is that the dogs tend to get gung-ho and launch from each article, or blast past turns and then circle to correct, rather than keeping a close nose from start to finish. Today, since it was too cold for ants to get on the food, too cold for the mice and squirrels to be foraging (and in this yard full of nut trees, it's pretty obvious when they're not out), and generally bright and clear otherwise, I went ahead and put a bit of cheese or dried gizzard into each footprint of a short track for Dustin.

Mind you, I mean a really short track for Dustin. Putting food in each footprint means doing a deep knee-bend at each pace, and it's hard to manage the food bits unless you're barehanded, so forty paces with an article every ten paces was all I could manage, along with a turn at fifteen and thirty-three paces. Then I went in and tended to the child, and ended up running the track about two and a half hours later.

Dustin happily snoodled up the goodies in the scent pad beside the tracking flag and headed off down the line. I slowed him down and showed him that the first footprint had cheese in it. He sniffed, stared, pondered -- and lay down on the human-scented article before consuming it. And on the next one. And the next. All told, he put his elbows to the ground (though didn't always bring down the back end) some forty times.

I couldn't fault him for it, either. Since the goal is to have a dog who will do the VST, which has articles of many different materials, I start off with an "Anything could be an article" approach. I have four Schutzhund-appropriate leather articles from Morgan Struble, and treasure them, as I'm far too poor to go cutting up any good leather I happen to have or buying bitsies. Business cards from Mary, gone ratty in my elderly wallet, seemed appropriate for use. So did a laminated ID from the Four Rivers Canine Search, Rescue and Recovery days, fair game for such use because it gave my now-departed Sunny's breed as "German Sherhrud." That may just be my favorite typo of all time, as Sunny certainly didn't conform to the GSD standard as written by any organization in any country. One of my articles is a dead 9-volt battery; another is a large alligator clip, which is nice for holding together the business cards, badges, and defunct ATM cards until they're due to be dropped.

Today, of course, the track was full of things I had handled. As far as Dustin was concerned, they were all quite tasty scent articles.

Focusing Energies

I've been off getting published, and so have not been posting much. Sorry! I'm also doing a quick typo check of the second edition of The German Shepherd Dog Handbook by Dr. Mary Belle Brazil-Adelman, which is coming out for general purchase soon.

I've also stopped tracking with Bruce for the moment, and am letting him do a little general maturing. He is, very gradually, rediscovering object permanence and focus, both of which would be a help. I'm wondering if anyone else has discovered serious mental damage in their dogs from a case of parvo and its related high temperatures.

Dustin is more rewarding, and I've been working him at least a couple of times a week lately. He's still prone to drifting off on other interesting things, but he'll mostly stay on the line if the payment system strikes him as good enough. Luckily, he'll still work for Charlee Bear's treats. Today I laid a track for him in our outrageous grass (the lawnmower's part replacement is apparently lost in shipping) while all was still wet and ran it once it had dried out. My shoes are still sodden, but he did quite well on finding all the articles and was willing to keep going. He also didn't unload his bowels on the track, which I greatly appreciate.

I'll post the third part of Scentwork for Showdogs soon. Meanwhile, if you're trying it, practice, practice!

Puppy Training Video

Puppy training may not be what everyone else watches this video for, but it's what stood out to me. See all that food? See how early this little rugrat starts her training? And yet she still has a unique personality.

The Video

Organizing Puppy Training

As I may have mentioned, a couple of months ago my spouse and I pulled a couple of half-Golden (or, since we know almost nothing of their mother, perhaps I should say Goldish rather than Golden) puppies out from under a pile of old fence at our new house. The world has not exactly been beating down our door to adopt them, though there have been a couple of nibbles. There are a lot of homeless dogs out there right now, not to mention homeless people.

Now, of course, the pups are almost four months old. Gone are the days of the growling little monster and the catatonically terrified heap of fuzz. That, in fact, lasted about as long as it took me to dish up a little yogurt. The little tykes are now quite sweet. They are crate trained. They have at least a vague grasp of useful words like Sit, Down, and Let's Go. They've proven themselves to have some talents worth developing. Bruce is a natural for putting his nose down and following a trail. His sister is born to do tricks.

Aside from a few cautious ventures onto well-scrubbed floors and around our biggish yard, though, they haven't been out much. I wanted to keep them close to home until I was fairly sure their vaccines had taken. However, 2-4 months is a lovely time for them to learn all those basic useful words mentioned. Lots of praise, lots of cheese, and lots of chicken have given these little tykes the idea that words can relate to actions. It's a good concept and far easier to build in a puppy than in an adult dog. Wanda is learning "Bump!" too, as she is small enough that she'll never hurt anyone by jumping up on purpose, and having that in her repertoire leaves open the possibility of Hearing Ear or other assistance work. She's a nice size for it and exceedingly smart.

However, the vaccines should be in there by now, doing the job, and it's time to start some real work for them. We'll be going more places soon, learning that there are a lot of people in the world and not all of them smell or look the same. We'll be learning that there are dogs other than the big German Shepherds these two are now used to, and that there's more than one cat in the world. And hopefully along with this we're going to learn that "Sit" still means the same thing even in a crowd. Dogs can be very context-dependant. It's why I don't care for collar-yank training, actually -- if the dog learns that "Sit" means "I'm going to yank up on your collar and shove down on your rear" then he doesn't learn what to do off-leash and out of reach, and his handler doesn't learn how to correct the error in translation, either. Too, a physical correction if the dog has genuinely forgotten (and quick, how well do you remember what you learned in third-grade social studies?) doesn't improve memory. It just makes the handler look unreasonable.

If everything settles in as it should, then when we reach that teenagerish stage when the puppies start wondering "What happens if I don't?" we'll still have communication. That's a big conceptual leap, the idea of disobedience, and in some fields (scent work, for instance) a concept the dog really needs to have. Humans can be really, really wrong about what the nose can and cannot determine. A dog who's sure the world comes to an end if he disobeys can fail to communicate all sorts of things, such as that the drugs really aren't in that locker or that the person really is up that tree, just because the handler is so certain of being right. The teenagerish age is when my dogs learn a whole new set of useful words: Today, All the Way, and What Was That. In order, that means to do it faster, completely, and less creatively.

Did you notice an option not yet mentioned? I do use "No." It's for chewing electrical cables. It's for being about to knock down something very heavy or otherwise dangerous. It's for actually doing something that could be lethal to the dog. If I'm not chanting it constantly, they know this is the Never Ever word. If I say it for getting up from a sit, either they discount the word or I've created unnecessary anxiety. "Phooey" works fine for small mistakes, and who among us is perfect?

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.