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.

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!

Earth Day Thoughts on Canine SAR

By remarkable coincidence, I received an email from AKC's Companion Animal Recovery program with a story on their support of canine SAR. The relevant part:

The K9 Alert team is now 15 dogs strong and includes handlers and volunteers who specialize in a wide variety of essential SAR categories such as wilderness search and survival, collapsed structure search, swift water safety, confined space safety, human remains detection/cadaver recoveries and emergency first aid for humans and k9s. In addition to an extremely demanding call-out schedule, partially governed by requests for service through the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the members are required to train weekly in their specialized areas.

Weekly trainings mean that on average, each of the fifteen handlers plus their support staff drive fifty miles round trip to a training (at conservative estimate) every week. We'll call that twenty people, for a total of a thousand miles, fifty weeks a year. Usually they're driving pickup trucks, SUVs, and minivans to tote equipment and a biggish dog.

In general, the creed of the SAR dog handler is "If we save one person, it's all worth it." I started wondering, though, how much particulate matter the 50,000 miles added to the air. There's a correlation between auto pollutants and the death rate of asthmatics. Is creating a large-area SAR team killing more people than it saves?

The alternate plan is for every county to have at least one dog that the county officials in charge of SAR can call on immediately. Why is that a problem? County rescue squads don't generally want to be responsible for helping to train a dog, and a large part of the work in training a SAR dog is in procuring and training the decoys. Not every county has someone with the drive to be a handler, or the money for it.

However, we seem to be coming to a crisis point in gas costs, and counties may have to rethink their approach to SAR. A well-trained dog is an incredibly valuable tool, greatly increasing the chances of finding the victim quickly. States may have to consider standardizing the SAR dog's standards if they have not already as more members of large-area teams look into joining local rescue squads instead. As large-area or statewide canine teams disband, some counties are going to find themselves without nearby scentwork resources, and they may have to devote some of their budget to getting a squad member or two trained before they can have a canine of their own.

The other change would be in the dog training itself. Currently, it's not uncommon for a canine squad to allow specialization: a few track/trail dogs, a few air-scent dogs, a cadaver dog or several, perhaps a disaster-response dog. Callouts take into consideration what each dog is trained for, and so only water-cadaver-trained dogs are called to a drowning. It is possible to train a single dog to do most of those jobs in a reasonable amount of time -- think of police dogs who are expected to do some trailing, intelligent bitework, obedience, and drug detection, and are expected to be effective and reliable on the last after six weeks of intensive training. If a SAR-intended puppy is taught to track and air-scent first, with a side order of basic agility and crowd-friendly obedience, and is then introduced to trail scent, cadaver scent, and the idea that people may be buried under objects, she will be competent to face most of the likely scenarios for a county team, and she'll be ready to deploy by the time she's two years old, possibly sooner. Air scent will give her the abilities and concepts needed for cadaver and/or disaster search; air scent combined with tracking will provide the concepts needed to decipher a trail up to several days old.

If states were willing to fund regional trainings quarterly and statewide trainings and tests annually, this might be feasible. Of course, the counties would also have to get behind it. Emergency response setups vary from state to state; some are largely volunteer organizations, some depend on the fire or police organizations to do first response as well.

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

Recent Tracking Ventures

I have tracked with the boys lately. Honest! Not a lot, though.

Dustin is well-indoctrinated by now. He knows the routine of finding the article and downing on it, and if we end up taking off a week or three for any reason it doesn't really faze him much. I'm beginning to vary the distance between articles, which gets his nose down a lot more solidly. If he can count on a set distance, he tends to meander out to about that distance and then circle until he hits what he expects to hit. If he can't, he starts actually following the line of crushed grass and whatever bits of my scent are in it. This is, after all, the point! "Good track!"

Bruce has changed. Before his case of parvo, he'd figured out the line of scent and the down on the articles, and he liked the game because it earned him cheese AND he was using his nose. Now -- he's forgotten the game, I think, during his quarantine layoff and general rebuilding, but that doesn't seem to be all of it. I'm not sure if the high fever affected his brain and nose or not, but he doesn't seem to be as keen. Pre-parvo he followed my husband's scent down the driveway and back just for fun. Now he seems more oriented on vision and taste (he's barfed up the other half of a pair of socks, now, and should be feeling better than he was...) and less on smell.

On the other hand, this could be the general battiness of adolescence. He's seven months old and acting like a complete doofus about a great many things. People? Grr. People who have given him treats in the past, including in the past five minutes? Still Grr. I'm trying not to make a huge deal about this in either direction. He's allowed to Grr at people approaching the car without my permission. Otherwise, I'd rather he didn't fuss at houseguests, random pedestrians, and the PetCo staff, and I do tell him so in a low-key way.

Learning by Example

Some dog breeds are known for learning by watching others of their type. Border collies, for instance, have been trained for generations by getting plonked into the sheep fields to work with older border collies. Quite a few of the herding breeds are trained for the job with instructions that start off, "Well, you put your new dog out there with your old dog..." which makes life difficult if you're training your first one.

However, little Bruce is no herding breed. I'm not too sure what he is -- he looks a bit like a working-line Lab as he gets older -- but he's definitely not built for sheep or cow control. He's living his life with shepherds, though, and he likes to please the humans, so he's doing his darnedest to be a German Shepherd Dog regardless of his genetics.

This isn't always obvious, but he gave away the game yesterday. Sunny taught Dustin to bark and whoop with excitement over an impending ball game, it seems. McCoy likes to have a good yawp now and again too as we approach the door and I juggle toys for the pack. Bruce decided yesterday morning that he, too, could join in the noisy fun. He threw his head up and bawled like a hound.

And then he looked around with a puzzled expression on his face. "Who did that? What was that strange noise? I certainly never made such a sound!" After a moment's thought, he barked the way he has lately, which is to say he made a fairly threatening sound which imitates a shepherd's alert-bark. I'm onto him now, though. That's not his real vocalization. His mutters, whoops, and that bawl -- those are real. I may have to find him a hound-dog buddy to chum around with, just so he can learn there are dogs other than shepherds in the world.

Parvo Convalescence

Our parvovirus victim Bruce is recovering well. He's still isolated from his sister, as the virus is supposed to be extremely thick in his stool right now, and so he's still living on a concrete surface which is regularly washed down with bleach-water. If there's one thing we DON'T need, it's a nice rich layer of parvovirus on our property.

I'm still feeding him boiled chicken and rice, this batch with a potato added for some extra minerals. He's still getting a spoonful of yogurt, as well, with each meal, though sometimes he skips that bit. By now, though, he's beginning to get regular puppy kibble as well, and some of the gizzard blend I give to everyone else. It's full of nice immune system boosters like vitamin C and echinacea, and it doesn't seem to be hurting him any.

In fact, he's acting perfectly well these days. This morning we engaged in his own personal version of fetch, which is more like playing catch with a toddler than anything else. He doesn't bring the toy back. He flings it back. His aim is decent; it's usually within a couple of feet of my ankles. He runs in crazy circles and shuttles between tosses. He's getting exercise and we're interacting, which is pretty much the point, so this is an "If it ain't broke, don't break it" situation. Formal retrieves are for formal retrieves. Games should be games.

This morning he also demonstrated his other unusual talent, or pastime, or however one wishes to look at it. He is a first-class mumbler. I was treated to a soliloquy roughly half an hour long this morning because, though his pen is roofed over, the roof was not up to holding out the rain we were having and there was a waterfall where he wished to relieve himself. I didn't understand a word, mind you, but the gist was clear enough. Teaching him "Speak" should be very easy! Eventually the rain let up, the waterfall faded to a dribble, and he deposited a pile at the greatest possible distance from his food and bed. I approved and cleaned it up. He really is doing his darnedest to be a good boy. We'll both be happier when all the contracted work on the house is done.

Parvo Followup

Bruce is home! I now call him the solid-gold retriever. He's going to have to be all kinds of good boy now, but he's alive and he's eating a little, and he's very, very glad to see his people again.

The scary part is now keeping him whole, healthy, and away from his sister for a bit. Apparently parvovirus stays in the system and is shed through fecal material for a good two weeks after the puppy recovers. We've put up an isolation pen on concrete so we can clean up after him easily and thoroughly. Bleach kills the virus. Very little else does.

We have all sorts of enticing but mild goodies for him, too. Boiled chicken with rice, yogurt, very tiny pieces of steak -- he seems rather pleased by all the smorgasboard, though still quite peckish. We're working out a rotation of who cares for him at which time of day (two sets of pills) and how we're going to keep ourselves disinfected. I'm hoping to do a little obedience with him during our snuggle sessions, just to give him something to think about besides the squirrels which will no doubt tease him from beyond the fence.

Tracking Update

Both dogs are still on baby-level tracks, though they're out to prove to me that they're ready for harder ones.

I ran Dustin on an hour-and-a-half old track, two turns, fifteen paces between articles, at noon. Aside from some distraction to watch a pedestrian passing the yard, he did quite well. He is sharp-nosed enough to work it partially as a trailing problem, though, and was clearly working along the edge of some shrubbery a couple of feet from the track at one point. A couple of feet, I can live with, provided he's going the right direction.

Bruce worked a straight line, only three articles, two hours old. Since he also followed my husband's track to see what had been going on with the garbage the other day -- also two hours, on the macadam driveway, for no better reason than his own curiosity -- I was confident he'd do okay. He can't always remember to down on the articles, but he finds them himself with a good low nose. Not bad for having done this perhaps ten times. I made the articles fewer and farther apart not for the sake of my back, though it appreciated stooping less, but because the pup attention span seems to be better on the track line than it is for downing. I'm willing to adjust to the pup.

Returning after a Dry Spell

How much does a dog forget? Some of that depends on the exercise, some on how often the command has been used before. It's been three weeks exactly since I last tracked with Bruce and Dustin, but we tried it this morning.

Sometimes health concerns (in this case, a strained muscle in me) interfere, and sometimes weather (in this case, highs in the high 90s, which is Too Darned Hot) interferes. The nice thing about scent training is that it's so instinct-based the dog is unlikely to forget altogether. He may not remember what your words mean, but he will probably remember something of line-of-scent and find-the-thing on his own terms. For you, it's largely a matter of re-attaching the labels.

To my surprise, Bruce jogged over to his tracking flag, discovered there was an article beside it, and lay down on it. He'd worked five little puzzles before this, downing on an article a grand total of twenty-five times before. For whatever reason, though, he remembered this was the way to earn cheese. He also sniffed out the first two articles on the track very nicely. The last two were less nice. It turned out I'd laid his track right through Pee-and-Poo Central without realizing it, and his distraction threshold is still very low. He's not quite five months old, so we just plodded on through with lots of "Look! There's one!" and cheese and belly rubs. On a long track, this would have been dreadfully frustrating for both of us. On a forty-short-step track, it's not a big deal. On the next one, he'll probably be a more focused boy, as now he knows the reward for getting to the end is so much cheese even he's not sure he can eat it all.

Dustin, too, did pretty well. He had eight articles, missed one plastic one -- and that for the excellent reason that he was too enthusiastic to stop for it. He still has a slight tendency to zigzag to read the news, but that's fading as his fondness for the puzzle is growing. He actually worked better after the layoff than he did when we've worked every day for a week, and there's probably a lesson for me in that. I had him do an air-scent search for the missing article, which puzzled him a little but which we did get sorted out, and then we did some agility-type fun. Now that I know he can get there, I'll have to get a picture of him on the roof of the outbuilding. This time I didn't have the camera handy and only asked if he wanted to get the stick that was up there. From the right angle, this could be a rather impressive shot.

Perhaps I can teach him to clean the gutters...

Puppy Socialization and Exercise

We took the puppies to a pet-food shop, one of those nice places that lets you bring in non-people-eating dogs, yesterday. It was something of an adventure.

Bruce is bold about new places and things. He happily browsed toys, smelled the smells, helped Wanda dig a stray cookie out from under a display, and was all kinds of confident -- except with new people.

Wanda is a little shy about new places, worried about cars in the parking lot, and anxious about stairways. However, new people interest her, especially little new people. For whatever reason, our little Dingo-bat likes children entirely out of the goodness of her heart. This is a good thing.

Both of them back-trailed to the car -- through a door, across an underground lot, lots of cement, about 20 minutes after we'd gone in. I was impressed with their noses. This is variable-surface tracking waiting to happen. However, if Bruce wants to use that nose for a living, he's going to have to learn to like what he finds with it! I intend to take him lots of places and carry along a stick of cheese. "Here, will you offer this to my puppy?" If strangers equal cheese, and cheese tends to lead to friendship, then strangers will be potential new friends instead of scary, scary monsters. He liked the cashier who was feeding him goodies just fine.

Wanda demonstrated a new talent this morning. She jumped on the bed. That doesn't sound like much in a casual mention, but the height of the bed is roughly three times the height of her shoulder. It only took a little scrambling. I'm thinking that her ancestors probably include a Jack/Parson Russell Terrier or something equally springy. Since she's so springy and Bruce is so comfortable hanging out on the rocking ottoman, I'm inclined to say either one would be dandy at agility. I'm hoping to knock some basic equipment together soon so that they and Dustin can start using it with me. Great exercise for them, running up ramps and such, while I get to hold still once they're doing it right. I call that a plus.

Wanda has also made a great cognitive leap: she has learned to fib. My longest command is "No sticks in the house." I usually enforce it by closing the door in front of the puppy until the stick is dropped at the threshold. Bruce has figured this one out and leaves his twigs and things outdoors. Wanda, on the other hand, wanted to keep her stick a couple of days ago. She looked at the closed door, looked at me, and then stared ahead with an expression of concentration as she worked the twig entirely into her mouth. Then she looked up at me again with an innocent expression that said plainly, "Whut schtick?" I cracked up -- but didn't open the door. Eventually she realized she hadn't put one over on me and spat it out.

Productive Training Session

I laid two tracks at roughly 7:45 pm, one for Dustin and one for a puppy. I didn’t decide which puppy until later – the one I could get to lie down on hand signal/command with less fuss, which was Bruce, pictured.

At 8:30 (the earliest I could expect to have track scent stronger than trail scent) I took Dustin out to work, and he happily found the starting article by the flag to lie down on it. Though he seemed to need to think about his reward a little (cheddar cheese) and decide whether he liked it, he went on willingly from there. The turn I’d made went straight into the wind by the time we ran it, and Dustin indicted with a high head that he could find all the articles easily enough from there. I reminded him that “Track” meant “Work the line on the ground” anyway, and he obliged. Released from work at the end, he danced off, gave himself a play reward, and discovered the end of the puppy track. He scooped up the cloth glove, showed it to me just to prove he’d found it, danced in a crazy circle, and dropped it on the track again.

I love that he can tell when we’re not working anymore, and that he has such a tidy mind.

I took Bruce to his track next. This was his second. The first had been a mess; he forgot his down, panicked because he didn’t know what I wanted, and his sister ran over to take the rest of the game away from him. The object of the game at present is only to get him to equate discovering an article and lying down on it with reward. Last night, he discovered the first article and puzzled over it, then dropped readily when I asked him to. He sniffed out the second article on his own, natural line-follower that he is, and flopped. I was impressed.

We did both miss the fourth article of the five. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but could tell the scent was concentrated in the right sort of way, and fell all over the place, down here and there and everywhere, and I had a lesson in not using brown leather articles at twilight near brown leaves of similar size while working an inexpert tracker. Still, I expect the next time will be at least as good and possibly better.

Next time I’ll put another out for Wanda, just to see what she makes of it. She had an obedience lesson for steak scraps in place of a track this time. She’s become less grabby at long last, and so I can now get the basic positions (stand, sit, and down) and a passable heel, front, and finish. Of course, getting those without a handful of scraps would be something else again, but the patterns can be obtained and labeled. She’s clever enough.

Both of them are nimble for their age, possibly an effect of their wild first eight weeks. I’d love to start them on the safer bits of agility, ramps and step-over jumps, and they’d enjoy it. First, of course, I have to build the ramps. At present, they make up their own courses around the yard and over sleeping adult dogs.

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?