I have a few problems with training my SAR dog. How do you balance obedience training and motivational search training?

Question

I did look for an answer in your website before I began this email.  I have a 7 month old GSD.  He is a male about 65 lbs now.  I am currently training him as an SAR scent dog.  He has some tracking imprinting as a pup and still likes to track today, which I let him do.  Most of the training I have began in basic obedience and "find" which he goes out no further than 25 yards and returns (recall). It took 7 weeks to teach him to speak on command and I used food and toys for motivation.  Now that he barks, on command, I need to fine tune it.  I am having problems with distractions.  Is it his age? 

    Recently, he has started having distraction problems and I want to focus and work through him with that. I try to minimize the distraction and add minor distraction in a little at a time.  Other dogs are his biggest distracters, so we have to work away, for now, from other SAR dogs and then I hope to increase the distraction over time with success. His distraction and reaction to other dogs in non aggressive, he just wants to play with them.  He had, what I believe to be, great socialization between 8 and 12 weeks.  He is the friendliest, SAR dog I have ever seen. Non-aggression is important in a SAR dog, but so is focus, so I need help.

    Also, I have not done a lot of leash training and am having some battles on leash with him.  I don't want his experience on lead to be all bad with him pulling, which seems to be right MY problem. His nose is to the ground on lead and he goes!!!!!! I believe a lot of it is his age and drive, but I have to draw the line somewhere, not sure where.

    I am working with a SAR team, and there are trainers that can spend time with us on distraction issues but not so much his pulling while on lead, and other obedience skills.

    At some point I want to have all the basic obedience skills in place, but don't want to interrupt the motivational searching he does.

    How can I best balance these two?  Will a obedience class with other dogs before he has learned more basic skills be a waste.  He is 7 months now, and has a high play and toy drive.  He obeys well in the home and yard and when focused on searching.  Areas away from home, seem to cause more distraction problems for him.  Walking on lead is rough, and I feel like most of the problem is me.

    What part of your training guide should I start with?  Your one puppy training guide is from 8 weeks to 8 months. Since he is so close to the end of that age, should I be looking at another DVD?  Any thoughts on the balance of obedience and motivation search training and what DVD's would work for me would be appreciated.

    Thank you,
 Jacqueline

Accepted Answer

Jacqueline,

You should be focusing on obedience training and drive building right now – not on searching. This is covered in these two DVDs:

Basic Dog Obedience

Building Drive and Focus

I suggest that you read the training articles I have written on “tracking thru drive” (TTD) – the articles are on my web site.

Your dog is too young for TTD – this should not start until its 12 months old. There are two reasons for this. You need to be very careful about over exercising a young dog (so you don’t cause bad hips) and they don’t have the mental maturity to focus long enough for TTD.

S&R groups in this country almost all screw up the training by teaching area search before tracking. Feel free to tell your friends I said this. I have written about it in my articles. When you teach a dog to air scent before you teach it to track you have created your own problem for tracking. When you track - once dogs have learned to run around with their nose in the air looking for odor it's about impossible to teach them to look for lost tracks on the ground – they always pick up their nose and air scent. This is why the vast majority of S&R dogs in this country cant track for crap.

With a 7 month old dog you can be doing Foot Step Tracking - then switch it over to TTD later.

There is a lot of information on my web site. Read the Q&As and the archives of my web board. If I were you I would be focusing on marker training, (covered in the dvd) and pack structure right now.

Regards,
Ed Frawley