I'm so happy with last night's training that I just want to share :) (I really should create a blog)
Last night we trained at this place that is part Christian youth camp and part fairgrounds. What a spooky place.
There's a hotel there (shut down) named grace hotel. I call it suicide
hotel. Seriously, this place is freaky!! Anyway, the property is
wooded, runs along a good sized river, has an open ball field, trails, the
suicide hotel, several cabins and some half built structures. We
trained outside while the hr dogs worked inside the suicide hotel.
It was cold as heck, about 23 with a below zero windchill. The wind was blowing pretty hard.
My mentor, D, wanted to test neiko on a high ridge problem. Meaning, the vic is
hidden somewhere along the bottom of a ridge and we search along the
top. Based on the air temp, time of day, weather conditions etc. you
may use a hide ridge search as part of your strategy. Last night, the
wind was blowing in to the ridge/hill so the idea was that it would
blow the scent cone to the top of the ridge. We would walk along the
ridge and hope that neiko would pick up and follow the scent downhill
and find the victim. That was the hope anyway!
I gave the search command (which I call "GO GET EM";) as we started up the trail and hill to the east. Neiko took off searching ahead of us. He took a right where some human remains were
hidden, however since he has not been trained on that yet, he didn't
know what to think. I let him investigate for as long as he wanted (so
long as he didn't try to pick it up or anything, ew). After a min or so
he went back to searching. He ranged pretty far and was out of sight
for a while. My mentor started to get a little worried but I wasnt.
Neiko ALWAYS checks in with me. I knew he wouldn't stay gone for long.
He is my boomerang dog. Sure enough he came running back to check in with me in no time.
Once
at the top of the hill, we started west along the ridge. Neiko ranged out
again in search of the scent. He didn't show any behavior until we came
across a little path. The path went down hill and up hill over to a
half built house. Neiko followed the trail over to the house and
investigated. I almost thought there was someone other than our group
hidding out in there because neiko was pretty interested. However, he
seemed to rule it out eventually then came charging back down the path
following it all the way downhill. He had the scent and made the find.
Mischa went next and pretty much followed the exact same search pattern that Neiko did. This basically means: Humans 0, Dogs 2. (this is why they say "Trust your dog!". So, we started to
talk about what was really going on with scent. Despite our best
intentions to have the dogs catch the scent at the top of the ridge,
what was really going on was the building at the bottom of the hill was
causing the scent to eddy. Our vic, DO, was hidden on the stairs
right up against the building so he was protected by the wind. Whatever
scent he was throwing was circling right around him, near the back of the house. Some of it did escape and was being pulled up the path that
neiko had followed (scent will follow the path of least resistance).
However since the wind was blowing really hard, it was pushing that
scent up the hill along the path and pooling again at the half built
house. Each dog had to figure out that the scent was stronger downhill,
then work out where DO was hidden.
So it turned out to be a harder problem than we expected but both dogs
worked it out beautifully. D had not yet seen neiko work so far away
from me before or work out such a long/difficult problem. So he was
really happy (as was I!)
The 2nd prob, DO was hidden through the woods, down a hill, across the
ball field, and behind some pine trees. Pretty tough problem for a newbie. Neiko dinked around a little and found some critter poop to
eat, went potty and so on. He didn't search nearly as nicely as the first problem which was
irritating but he eventually figured it out. Once he hit that scent
pool he became rocket dog. I really need to get a video of it sometime.
We were walking down the hill toward the field when he picked up the
scent. He raced off to the south until he ran himself out of the scent
pool then made a quick 90 degree turn straight in to the scent and
turned on the after burners all the way across the ball field, straight
thru the pine trees and found DO. It was very cool to watch. Of course, rocket dog returned to me just as fast for the flying 4 paw bang indication and about took my liver out (or some similar organ). One of these days I'm going down hard. I know it!
Anyway, the moral of the story is that everything is going great! What a relief! He's such a visual dog that I was worried about him being suitable for SAR. We ran in to a few bumps with that, but after a couple weeks of training him to use his nose, he's coming right along. Pretty exciting stuff!