Hi Everyone,

I have a question for those who have any knowlegde on the subject. My Dutch Shepherd is a trained Narcotics and Cadaver dog. My question is this. Is it a good or bad thing to train a cadaver dog to track? I have just barely started working on tracking for Schutzhund and this question came to mind. I stopped the tracking until I can find out the answer. If I have to chose between tracking and cadaver, I will choose to continue to work on the Cadaver. Any thoughts? Thanks.

in my limited experience (with cadaver work) it is two separate training ventures. My 25X Schh3 dog Eagle, who is several-times FH and 99 pt FH Championship, LOTS of V Schh3 tracks under his belt - in fact V is his normal score even under the worst conditions in Schh tracking. He is also a trained cadaver detection dog. He did not have a problem cross-training.

molly

Geneva,

I agree with Molly. My wife is training her young Dutch Shepherd in both Cadaver & SchH Tracking. Her previous Cadaver dog was initially started in SchH style tracking, then switched to Cadaver. No problems either way, just train the two completely separate.
Good Luck.

Hi Geneva
I have a Mal that will be dual purposed in Cadaver and Air Scent. We will be testing for certification with IPWDA/Cadaver in June of 07 since she will be at the age requirement then.
I taught Cadaver first and worked on runaways for airscent. Once she certs in June I will then further the airscent discipline. She will be trained to do a recall/refind in airscent and she performs a passive sit for Cadaver.
The jute tug is her reward of choice for both and she lives for the game.
I also am getting a Dutch (this weekend) that certified in Narcs and tracking with his previous handler, but does not do well with gunfire so he was washed from the LE program he was in. He will be trained in Cadaver and I will keep the tracking current also. Since he is "bite" trained I probably will do the tracking for fun and deploy him for Cadaver. I do not like to use protection dogs to find lost people. That is my preference and may be different for others.
Good Luck and keep us posted on how everything is going.

How about your problem is that you have trained the dog to do narcs and cadaver. Pick one or the other, the tracking and particularly sport tracking is irrelevant.

I would have to ask what the problem would be?
I did not train the dog to do narcs and cadaver, the dog is already trained in narcs so he will be trained on cadaver. I will not be using the dog for narcs at all.
I think I am missing some point here maybe??

What's wrong with the dog's being trained in both Narc and Cadaver?

 Quote: Geneva Sieffert

What's wrong with the dog's being trained in both Narc and Cadaver?

I'm always a bit leary of training one dog in multiple detection disciplines. My personal belief is that Cadaver/HRD, Disaster/USAR & Explosives should all be single purpose disciplines. My reasons are this:

HRD: You are searching for a deceased human being, or possibly forensic evidence thereof; it is important that you get it right. Family members are often counting on you, sometimes criminal cases are going to influenced by evidence you may (or may not) find. The scent profile of HR is complex and constantly changing, therefore is not always easy to teach.

USAR: In a disaster situation you are looking for LIVE people first, there is a very limited time frame and ofen very limited resources available to save those that are missing, but still alive. Not a time to have dog's that are intereted in cadaver or any other scent for that matter.

Explosives: I think we all get the point on this one.

Are dogs capable of learning more than one scenting task? Sure. I just believe that most of the time there isn't much reason to have one dog cross-trained in many disciplines. Reliable performance is not easy to achieve with a single dog-handler team in one discipline, let alone multiple ones. I've seen single dogs 'certified' in Trailing, Cadaver (Land & Water), Narcotics, Evidence & Patrol Work...I'm not necessarily doubting their certification, but I do wonder about their day-to-day proficiency. Again, JMO.

I agree with this on the Disaster and Explosives dogs 100%.
I understand the complexity of the HRD scent profiles and changes and I could not agree with you more on the difficulty.

I guess my question would be, What if you take a narcs dog and train him on HRD because you are not going to be working the narcs part of it..ever, with this dog?
This is my situation:
The dog needs a place to go, has enough drive and is young enough to "teach" something new.
Is it feasible to do this?
I am not trying to train an "Omni" dog. Two disciplines is as far as I go, however all my dogs are single purpose dogs right now and they are all doing well. The worst possible scenario is that I have to place the dog in a home with people that can handle a high drive pet.

yes you can re-train a narc dog to do cadaver work, and that will work fine, especially if you don't intend to work him on narcotics again - dogs can be re-trained and his experience doing narcotics detection, will help him in the re-training for cadaver detection, even though the indication might be different (or might not if the narc was done with passive indication) - you never want an aggressive indication on cadaver, so if he does that with narcotics, the indication needs to be retrained as well.

molly