I've started training my dog for the blind search at home. I can now send him from 10 feet away he rounds the blind and I reward him. What are the potential drawbacks of teaching the blind search this way? This is my first SchH dog.

Thanks!

Jackie,
You are much better off teaching a dog to do the blind search as an obedience exercise without the helper ( just like you're doing now <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> )

Drawbacks of training it as an Obedience exercise are that some dogs will make the circuit around the blind in a larger circle than it needs to be - after all, if there's nothing in the blind, why will the dog hung tighly around the blind?
Hanging a ball/toy from a hanging tree inside of the actual blind as a reward will make for a tighter, faster blind search.

Of course, if someone is training a Rottie in this situation, the dog will just knock the blind down to get the ball..... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

I agree with Will on this...

Our club trainer doesn't like to train running the blinds as an ob exercise...but it made sense to me and that's how I trained my dog. Hung a ball from a clip on a string tied to the inside apex, putting it at about the level of a human's head; randomly hung the ball in the blind vs holding in my hand.
Result: a dog that tears to the blind, looks *up* into the blind (so a judge will see the head movement <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> ), and if the ball is not there, continues on to me so I will throw it from my hand. Took only a few sessions to get that behavior and it carries over to the protection field.
Now, the club trainer is still trying to get his high prey dog to run consistantly around an empty blind....and when the dog does it, he runs relatively slow, probably knowing this is not going to profit him.

This is the way I figure it: the whole process of running blinds and finding the "bad guy" requires the dog to go in and out of certain drives. When the handler sends the dog to a blind the dog must stay in pack drive and obey a command. It's an obedience exercise, so why not teach it that way?

When he rounds the blind, and it's empty, it's still an obedience exercise: he's given the command to "hier" and then another command to continue to the next blind.
If that one is a hot blind, the dog's nose will tell him before he gets there and (with the right genetics), he starts to switch out of pack drive into aggression. Then during the B&H he is given a heel command and has to switch back into pack drive to obey.
Make sense?

My training buddies and I train this as an ob. excercise with the reward being the bite. It takes 3 people to do this. I send the dog, who is attatched to a long line. The third person stands behind the blind and pulls the dog so the dog has no choice but go around the blind. Once the dog is around I give the command "heir" and send my dog to the helper, who is hiding in the blind, and she gets a bite. Now this is only the basic form using only one blind but it has had great success with my dog. She picked up on it quick. She learned that she must search the blind to get her reward. Now this might not work with all dogs considering the degrees of prey drive, but for my dog the bite is the ultimate reward for anything. So we use this according.