I've recently joined a SAR team, my hound does very well, he just needs some work on ignoring physical distractions, but other than that, we just need to work on increasing time and distance. He has taken really well to trailing and has been easy to work with. All of the dogs on this team so far have been trailing, scent discriminating dogs.

I also have a mix breed who has awesome drives and is super high energy, it's a matter of finding something to do with her energy. She has done well with detection games. I wanted to try air scenting with her, and I've done a couple of run aways or hot trails. The problem is she gets too excited over the person running off, and even during a short trail (distance and time), she becomes too frantic and can't figure out how to find the person when she cant see them. When she loses sight of the person, she starts darting off in various directions and just looking around hastily to see if she can see the person.


Any suggestions or resources to just get her to slow down and think would be greatly appreciated. Kali is a very intelligent dog, she just gets ahead of herself sometimes!

Possibly the person running off is going out of sight to far for her level of training and she hasn't quite learned how to use her nose for the situation.

Make shorter hides closer to the PLS (point last seen) for this dog.

So, I have had the person walking with a nature trail path, I had them instructed to only take about five paces then hide behind a large tree. I was in a position with my dog where she could see what direction the person ran, but not where they hid. When I release her, this is when she becomes frantic and just darts around until she sees the person.
If the person is too close, she can just run around until she sees them. I agree that I don't want to do a trail that is too long because I know she isn't ready for it. But I need to find a way to determine what is too far and what isn't far enough and how to handle her during that distance.

One of my previous instructors like to hold on to the dog until they stopped anxious behaviors(spinning, barking, whining, dancing, etc) before releasing them to search, but I fear that this would diminish the dogs drive to complete the search.

Have you tried hiding her toys around the house?

That would at least get her using her nose.

At the same time there are the rare dogs that just don't get it but I've yet to meet one.

She does very well with hidden either toys or food at home, or even places that she isn't familiar indoors and out.

I want to use her for air scenting, but maybe I should start it like tracking with a treat on each foot step just to teach her to use her nose to get her to the person??

Pfft or maybe just use her for some sort of nose work-HRD.

I appreciate your responses

She may well do good on HRD but without a very intense desire to search I don't think I would look at here as a serious dog to do real world scent work.

There are a number of nose work events that you can do with a dog.

They might be worth looking into.

Here at LB there are a number of DVDs that can show you that.