I work for the State of Alabama as a Conservation Enforcement Officer. I was recently donated a 14 week old female GSD. I want to train her in tracking, the purpose to find hunters in the woods or lost hikers and the like. I also want her to search for evidence articles such as guns, spent shells, hidden game, etc.

What's the best way to start her tracking? TTD or FST? Should article searches be a seprate tracking function?

Thanks in advance.

Chris Champion

Teaching her to track would be good, but you always need a starting point, and or scent article. If you teach airscenting, you do not need any of these things. Also, trailing works great for finding evidence and cadaver. The best thing is to have a dog that does all 3. A good way is to start with the tracking and move on to airscenting.

Hello, you must start with foot step tracking, but you may want to start with ED's training tape tracking thru drive it will show you a lot of info. one thing is a lot of the dogs started in TTD are washed out of the program and all are males but if your bitch has drive have a lot of fun playing hide and seek that is the hole game she can possily do some search and rescue work but teach foot step tracking first to the highest level you can before going to air search.

Rabbitsheriff!

It does not matter which search you learn the dog first. It is tree different exercises. What you need is a dog with preydrive. If your dog has it, it is simply a question of learning her the different search methods. TTD is the most preferred as long as the dog is supposed to find people. And there is no problem that the dog will also find articles along or in the track for you.:-)

If one wants to do both tracking (trailing) and search, you should always teach the tracking first. Dogs who learn to search and airscent first usually have a harder time resorting the the tracking part. (I am sure this is part of Ed's video?)

Correct me if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that the name or term Tracking Through Drive was 'coined' by Ed when he came up to Canada to watch and video tape the R.C.M.P. teaching dogs to track etc.

Footstep tracking is not TTD. Dogs are often 'washed' out of the TTD 'program' because they do not have enough drive to sustain them. If you want to do all what you mentioned in the first post....then you better have a dog that has enough drive to sustain it!

Generally in TTD you do not have a 'scent pad' but instead you 'cast' your dog to find the track. Articles are introduced early onto the track. When I started out doing the TTD with my pup, he was great at it. He would stop at each article , play with it a bit and continue on. As we progessed in the tracking his article indication became less 'obvious' to me. He still indicates but often it is subtle and his goal is the end of the track. I am now going back and working on the articles to get him to indicate 'more'.

After you have a good foundation in tracking or trailing (as many who do TTD like to call it) you can start introducing the search.
Dogs tend to 'airscent' naturally, and thus pick up on this very quickly. If they are trained in the tracking first, and they 'loose' or cannot use the airscent they will automatically resort to the ground scent.

When I started my dal, we started airscenting and TTD at the same time using different comands so he would know what I expected. Now he uses both on his own depending on the conditions.

Kevin stated that all TTD animals are male... no one followed up on this. Did I misunderstand? Why? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Liz

Hello, Liz, I meant in the tape by Ed on the RCMP dogs are all males and half or more are washed out because of lack of drive you will probably have a hard time finding a female with the drive to do this work in the feild of police work overseas we had Sentry Dogs with a couple of females that we used we found people by air scent, sometimes situations arose and the dog came into contact with the nationals in that country and you would find out that you would need the hardness of a male in a forreal situation because the females did not have the fight that the males had not saying that some of our males had a lacking in fight drive glad that they were not my dog he had his share of fights with twenty-five bite situations.We also had one to have real kills protecting his handler. But all were great dogs as far as I am concerned.

Well, actually at the Gary Murray seminar I was at (I believe he was involved with Ed during the taping of the video for TTD with the RCMP) here in Canada. Anyway, Gary said that they use males because they have more of a tendency to 'search' out, use their nose, and wander to do so etc.

So, I suppose you could say that he has to do with drive but....it is more about the males 'nature' and in bred instinct to be the one to wander to find etc.

Now, males are larger (generally) so that can be an advantage in 'real' work as well.

I should add that we do have a female gsd working for the R.C.M.P. in Vancouver. In fact, she is being honored with the hero dog award this month at the Canadian National.