I have a couple of basic questions re: scent training but I am going to put them all in one post rather than several.

I have been training with my 8 mo.old puppy for about 10 days now. This is not the dog that I had planned on training for detection, however she is doing very well so far.

We have trained 10 sessions about 8-12 repetitions each exercise. We are now to the point of hiding the item (marijuana scent.) I have progressed to several different rooms, increasing the difficulty and time spent to find the article. (hiding the article under carpets,in the couch, under pillows, under the refrigerator, etc.)I have also begun adding distractions.(My GSD in the room eating a bone. Doesn't even distract her. She goes over to her to see what she is doing and immediately continues her search.) I think I am ready to add the passive response.I was going to use the down, which she does sometimes on her own anyway. One of my questions is, can you train a passive response when we move the search to vehicles? The dog obviously can't down in a car or truck.So how would she alert? By scratching?

My second concern is I have been rewarding with food rather than a toy. She has a pretty good prey drive but her food drive is over the top.I have read that rewarding with food can sometimes cause the dog to hit on food in future searches.I don't understand this because you are training to find a particular scent, (the narcotic) not the scent of food. I am not placing the food reward with the article I am giving the food reward afterwards. When she locates the find,I mark it with very exciting, upbeat, verbal praise. I then take her to a back room, throw the food in there as her reward and close the door. I do this because I have to lock her out of the other rooms when I am hiding the item. After the find she automatically runs to the back room and waits for me to come and get her to start the new search. Sometimes when we finish our session instead of a food reward we will play ball.I try to alternate the reward between play and food.I will eventually wean away the reward, so the find is the reward.

3.) If I am sitting at the computer or watching TV she will come over to me and bark wildly in my face and paw at me.When I ask her to show me what she wants, she leads me over to the refrigerator. That is where we keep our training items. Do I correct her for barking/demanding to play our new game or should I be happy that she is so enthusiastic about wanting to play?

Lisa go to this link http://www.alphak9.com/seminars.html it gives you direction on how to order DVD's of the how to in scent training from one of the best in the business Randy Hare. There are also some short videos of his training. IMO you need this or go to one of his handler courses which he gives all over the USA and Europe for too many reasons to mention here.

Hi Norman,

I am taking one of Randy's seminars,however it is not until September, alittle long to wait.

Better to wait in order to train correctly than to hurry for problems (yours and the dog) later on.

Norman,

This dog is like a practice dog, so to speak. We are just having fun. I will be getting a dog in the future to train for that specific purpose. I do have several different books and info from Elite K9. Is there something in my technique that will hinder my progress in the future?

Nancy,

I did not know I shouldn't keep the item where she could smell it. I will find a better area. That's the kind of info you normally don't find in a book. Thanks for the tip. I was actually torn re: the sit vs. down.I chose the down command only because I really want to reenforce her down, but I see your point. I will use the sit instead.

 Quote: lisa harrison

The dog obviously can't down in a car or truck.So how would she alert? By scratching?

I would personally avoid the scratching. If your dog scratches up a car and doesn't turn up the dope, you've got a potential liability on your hands. And I agree with avoiding a down because Carbon indicates with a down and I also wish that I had used the sit as well. He's too large of a dog for that to be functional in tight places.

I was taught to teach the dog the indication on the boxes first, before moving to other areas. But I think you're going to need to go back to the boxes to teach the indication anyway, because if you're rewarding by going into another room, your timing is going to be way off on rewarding the indication and it will slow learning down. After a dog's fully trained, you can reward elsewhere after the search is completed, but doing it while the dog is learning is going to slow things down. And your dog has learned that the reward comes from a certain place (the back room)instead of from you. So what happens when you try your training in a different location that has no back room? Try doing some searches in a friend's house and you'll see what I mean. I think the same confusion might happen when you move to vehicle searches, too.

And if you have a dog that's more motivated by food than by a ball then what happens if you have the dope scent in location A and the food scent in location B? If the reward is already in location B, why go to location A first? You can train that, but it's slower since the dog's natural inclination is to go to be as close to the reward as possible.

In training at Triple Crown, we did have a couple of ball-crazy dogs that would indicate on backpacks or jackets that had balls in them...but how often does that happen in a normal atmosphere where there aren't 20+ trainers around that all had balls on them? Food is usually more a more common distraction in the real world. I was taught that high ball drive is an essential element if you want to do any real narc work. Can you build up your dog's drive for the ball and eliminate the food? If you can do that, it seems to me that you'll be saving yourself some future headaches. And there's always footstep tracking in which a great food drive is an asset!

All just my thoughts and opinions that are constantly evolving. Good luck!

Amber it is essential to desensitize your dogs to any distractions, including but not limited to tape, food, balls bitches in heat etc... On one of Randy’s videos and I believe it is on his web site a dog is at a box and while actively indicating, a bucket full of balls is dumped over him and he does not even look and the balls but continues his active indication. This dog was trained with the ball as his reward. That shows you can still use a ball and if the dog is trained correctly it won’t deter his indication.

 Quote: Norman Epstein

Amber it is essential to desensitize your dogs to any distractions and that including but not limited to tape, food, balls bitches in heat etc...

Of course it is, but the examples I was using were during inital training when the dog is still learning...not proofing. I don't see the point in setting a dog up to fail with too many distractions initially. And I was also talking about using balls as a reward vs. using food when training. I didn't mean to imply that dogs shouldn't be proofed against distractions.

IMO, the purpose of distraction training isn't necessarily to "proof" the dog off specific objects. The purpose of it in my training program is to narrow down for the dog what actions bring him the reward. He learns that a ball, food, other animals/dogs give him little satisfaction, but finding the odor source (in my case a human, not narcotics) provides him quite the opposite.

My dog will likely never encounter his own toy being slapped on the leg of a bystander in a real search, nor is it likely that a ball will be dragged along the ground in front of him and banged around in a nearby barrel, but ignoring that type of distraction in training sure tells me that his mind is only on one thing - finding the victim.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-zHyHxru9s

I second Norman's suggestion to look into Randy's method. The above video represents our adaptation of Randy's method to disaster search training.

Edited by Konnie Hein (01/02/2009 12:11 PM)
Edit reason: spelling