Your Dog Can Indicate But Won't Search - Here's Why

In this video, Ed addresses a critical problem he's seeing in the detection dog training community—trainers are prioritizing passive indications over their dog's ability to commit to searching for target odor. This backwards approach is creating dogs who can perform beautiful alerts but lack the fundamental drive to actively hunt and locate odor independently.

Ed breaks down why search drive must be established first in detection training foundations. A dog that won't search aggressively or commit to finding odor is useless in the field, no matter how perfect their indication looks. The search is the foundation—the indication is simply the communication at the end of a successful find.

This video explains why modern detection training has gotten off track by obsessing over passive alerts before building strong, independent search behavior. Ed discusses the proper progression for developing a detection dog: first cultivating intense search drive and odor commitment, then shaping the indication once the dog is reliably hunting for and finding target odor.

Whether you're training for sport scent work or professional detection, understanding this fundamental principle will transform how you approach your training program and ensure you're building dogs with real working capability, not just dogs who look pretty at the source.

Three Day Foundations of Detection Seminar

K-9 Detector Dog Training

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When people have specific training questions we recommend that they go to our website and post those questions in the ASK CINDY on the front page of leerburg.com. Cindy has been training dogs since she was a teenager and has competed in several dog sports at a regional and national level. She was also a vet tech and owned a boarding/training and grooming business for many years as well as breeding working Dobermans and Belgian Malinois under the kennel name Kaiserhaus.

Questions posted to ASK CINDY are answered almost every day. They are also recorded in our systems if a dog owner has additional questions Cindy will review the previous Q&As and this helps her give better feedback and assistance.