Making Scents of Tracking: Q &A’s

Q:  I have a puppy that I am tracking and the puppy won’t stop on articles; he seems to want to continue tracking.   You use a lot of articles.  How do you get the dog to stop on articles? 

Silly puppy that wants to move instead of stopping….so silly, right?  I had this problem as well and what I was being guided to do was to restrain the dog until the dog stopped….and what I was unintentionally teaching the dog was that if they needed to stop, I would tell them by putting pressure on the leash.  When they did what I wanted, I would release the pressure on the leash.  What this turned into–for me–was the beginning of line handling where I was giving the dog information about the correct direction/behavior on the track.   That plan got me a TD and TDX but wasn’t working for me as I was working on urban stuff, so I ended up finding a new plan.   

Here is what I do with articles now…

For articles, I don’t ask them to stop on them without food on the article usually for about 6 months to a year.  In the very beginning, I will put food on/in it so that it is interesting and the puppy may pause to eat or wait on me to get up there to open it up.   And I use a lot of articles….way more than other folks that I have seen tracking.  Even today with my trained dogs I will use 1 article about every 20-40 yards.  So, on a VST length track that could be about 30 articles.  

So, in this case, as you get close to the end article, I may have put food on/in the article and as I get close to it, I would be getting ready to jump in front of the puppy and continue to feed on the article so that we are building value for the article and the puppy can’t move forward because I am in front of them….and I don’t have to use the leash to manage stopping him.   If I use a start article, I will put a ton of food on it and then pick the article up while the puppy is eating so that the puppy doesn’t learn to leave the article while it is down on the track.  

Then after they are getting that, I will slowly start to transition the responsibility to the dog to stop on articles….and at the same time I am taking food off of the track so that the only thing they will find out there are articles with a piece of food on it and I will come up and pay on the articles when they find them….this teaches the dog to stop and stay at the articles when they find them; this is the article indication that I use now with my dogs.  I have used a down, retrieve, etc….and I have finally settled on this freeze because it works for me in scent work as well as it reduces the physical stress on older dogs and I hope to track with my dogs until they are really, really old….and I use a TON of articles on the track. 

Q:  You use a lot of articles on the track.  I don’t want to demotivate my dog by asking them to stop on articles.  What are your thoughts about articles being demotivating? 

I am not sure that it is possible to make articles more rewarding than motion and/or tracking drive.  The good news about tracking is that we don’t have to try make these items equal value…but they do both have to have value.  I haven’t had an issue with dogs being unmotivated by the articles (stopping at articles and being unwilling to continue, leaving the article slower than they approached it, refusing to work when they see an article).  It is much more common that people contact me asking for help to get their dogs to stop on articles.  So, I am not sure that the issue is that articles are inherently demotivating.  What I posit is more likely is that the dogs are unclear on why they need to stop on articles or why articles have value.  

If you are struggling with your dog indicating articles, you may want to consider this approach.  With articles, I pay pretty liberally when they get to an article and I pay as long as the article is on the ground so I have a chance to pay a few times if I want to at each article.   When I am introducing the concept, I will often pay for 30-45 seconds at each article.  It doesn’t take too many of these 30 second payments at articles to figure out that articles are worth investigating if not stopping for ;o).

If they miss an article, I don’t go back to it nor do I hold them until they find it.  In fact, if they miss it and are searching for it, I will often pick it up and then they lose the chance to get those cookies.   I do this action because I only want the dogs earning rewards while they are tracking…not while they are sniffing something else, getting “lucky”, guessing or running around like an idiot hunting for food ;o).   If they miss it, they miss it; no big deal.  Missing articles doesn’t happen too often because they know that articles are the way to get their cookies and they want their cookies, so they have “drive” to find the articles that are on the track.

I use a lot of articles for a lot of reasons…but the main one with urban tracking is that it is simply hard.   I understand a fair amount about scent…and yet, I don’t have a dog’s understanding of scent.  So, I often set up tracks that are much harder than I thought they may be and instead of the dog struggling and me wanting to “help” through the line, with my voice or body, the articles help me make sure that the dog gets rewarded on the track by the articles (not by me) when they solve puzzles…and hopefully I am getting rewards in the places to strengthen their problem solving and willingness to work hard to earn the thing they want.   

….and at the end of the day, we are training something we can’t see; we can’t see scent.  We know where the track was because we put it there…and on a track with any sort of age and non-veg surface or complicated scenting conditions, it is VERY plausible that the scent is no longer where the footsteps were.  Sure, I could bind the dog to the track, and I did a lot of that in the beginning….and we didn’t progress very far.   The binding the dog to the track approach does work for others…and it wasn’t working for me.  So, our lack of progress was very likely due to my mechanics on top of the other factors.  With this approach to articles outlined above, I can take the mechanics of leash pressure/no pressure out of the equation and I have to focus on track laying in a way to work on the skill/task that I am hoping to teach/practice.  

Q:  OK, I am sold.  How do I start to transition my dog who is already tracking onto multiple articles? 

If you are considering transitioning a dog to multiple articles, I encourage folks to start simple with a set up like this one:   lay a simple straight track and give it a try…if it is a 100 yard track, perhaps you put a start, end and an article about every 20 steps/1 yard…that would be 5 articles (Start (zero steps), Article 1 (20 steps), Article 2 (40 steps), Article 3 (60 steps), Article 4 (80 steps) & Final Article 100 steps.  

Depending on where your dog is in their love of articles journey, you may need to put some food on the articles to encourage them to stop in the beginning.   Then when you hit each article (start and end included) pay for 30 seconds with the article down (or if you can’t tell how long that is, count to 30 while you deliver cookies to the dog).  As you pick up the article, drop a few cookies on the ground to give you a chance to get back behind the dog.  When the dog is done eating, it can head off to the races and find its next article.  

…….it won’t take too many of those experiences for the dog to have a different feeling about articles than it may have right now ;o). 

Happy Tracking!

If you have any questions you would like some answers to, please send me an email at greatdanesmegan@gmail.com.