Post by oksaradt on Apr 18, 2011 11:57:44 GMT -5
My training program with Thorpe is more relaxed than it was with Murphy. When I got Murphy, Tempe had passed away six months prior and I had no idea how long Dax’s health would hold out. As it turns out, I had about 8 months more with Dax before she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In the past, I was resolved to waiting until my working dog was 3 years old before working searches with them simply because that tends to be when Airedales mature. With Murphy, I held off requests to search until he was 18 months and then it was with the caveat that he wasn’t certified. With pressure looming, I stuffed a lot of training into him and it paid off with some finds. I think the price was Murphy was forced to mature faster than most. Yea yea, I can hear some in the back rows saying, “this is a dog, for crying out loud!” To me, my working dogs are my partners in searches and my employees. When we had to take Dax off chemotherapy because it was attacking her heart, she still wanted to help me do “pick up” on Murphy’s problems. I’d promised myself that Dax would get a decent “retirement plan”, so once diagnosed with cancer she became more pet than working dog, spent most of her sleeping hours in my office, and got to kibitz at Murphy’s training as was her right. The main difference with Murphy is he has a lot less sense of humor than Dax, Tempe, and now Thorpe. When all you work with is “dead people”, a sense of humor is essential.
Murphy’s faster paced training paid benefits in that he got to learn buried from Dax when he was impressionable. I do believe in dogs training dogs in a lot of venues. I’d set up a six inch buried field on my land five weeks ago with the intent of working it in a month. Eight holes have four historic level teeth laid flat at the bottom of a shaft approximately four cm in diameter (think of a quarter). Four holes have an inch of rib bone at their bottom. Three shafts are blank. Three shafts have distractions: puppy kong toy, dog cremains, and a deer bone. I filled each shaft with water and let the water drain away then filled each hole with clean sand. The sand was something new I wanted to try as I consider this buried problem more training than test. I used bricks as outer markers to give intersections of invisible lines to aid in targeting measurements. The shafts are six feet apart to increase overlap difficulty.
A month came and went, so I invited one of my team mates to come out to try the buried field with me. We’ve been having very strange weather, much warmer than normal, and the county I live in is one that’s suffering severe drought conditions. The day we could make it, the day before had been warm and I was hoping for a chilly morning. It was not to be. The soil temperature measured 74.2 F and the air measured 72F at dawn. Our window was very short and by the time we got to this field, temperature was now our enemy instead of our friend. Four dogs worked this and we had the gamut of skills. Murphy worked the entire field with one false hit that I’m thinking was due to overlap with the wind direction. I was working this semi-blind. I had set up the field after all and my team mate had a map to keep me from rewarding for anything bad. I was basically using Murphy as my guide to tell me if the field was workable. In retrospect, I’ve come to realize that Murphy is rapidly moving to Dax’s level of what’s workable for him may not be so for less-skilled or prepared dogs. That’s a good thing for historic, but maybe not so good for a typical search because what Murphy considers viable strength of scent could be a lot less than another dog, i.e. a scent pool in a shallow depression might be a bigger deal for Murphy to work through than a less sensitive dog.
With that in mind, I’m looking at easing back on Thorpe’s training to where he can be my area HRD dog and Murphy would become the trace specialist. Put them together and they should make a nice team.
Murphy worked the field first (to see if it was workable). Looking at the weather charts, he got the temperature window where ground and air temperature were equal. After that, the problems got progressively harder. Wind speed was 15-20 mph from the south per nearby weather station. Humidity was 48%. Thorpe went second and I used this to also work on his directionals (I just use “back” and “this way”). I hook on a long-line and let the dog drag it mostly, stepping on it when I want to enforce the directional. Other than that, the dog’s job is to find the scent. It’s not my job to show him where it is. As Thorpe is struggling with this, I remember I commented to him, “Dang, Thorpe, Murphy was doing this type of problem at 9 months of age.” (Thorpe is now 17 months old….that got me to thinking about the pace of my training program.) Thorpe did ok, not great, but a step in the right direction. If we ever get rain, I’ll work him on this problem set one more time to see what he can do in the best conditions.
The last two dogs had worse conditions still with the last dog basically getting imprints on some of the shafts when we’d have clouds pass overhead.
Side Note: I really like the sand filler for the shafts for training. If the dog’s nose was getting close, I got a minor visual if I was close about half the time. For training, the handler needs the occasional stroking that their dog “isn’t broken.” If I was using this to train other people, I think I’d come out the day before and add some water to each shaft to make it a little easier at first. For testing or blinds, I could easily blend in the natural soil to eliminate the visual a handler could use. The vegetation is currently water-starved crab-grass. If we ever get rain again, the grass growth would hide the shafts for me easily.
DECOMP BURIED
Part of the reason we didn’t get to work the skeletal buried set as quickly as I’d like was I wanted my team mate to work her dogs on a buried placenta in another area. I wanted to move it as both my dogs had worked it twice and both picked up on it from 30-40 feet away with me being about an additional 50 feet away. Both her dogs got to work the area, so soon after that I moved it. I used clean post-hole diggers to originally dig the shaft the placenta was placed in at 24 inches. To recover the source, I put on latex gloves and and used a plastic shovel to carefully get down to it. At about six inches above the source, I noticed flies began to show up. At this point I used only gloved fingers to excavate. When I pulled it out, decomposition had made it the texture of pink spongy like material, very delicate. At this point there were now at least fifty flies on my dirt pile. I had pre-dug a new hole in some of my woods. I’d selected an area that I knew would be a challenge for my dogs. I dug a 27 inch deep hole in a wash surrounded by small trees. The wash was about a foot below ground level at the point I dug a hole. The area has lots of dead branches, dead leaves, lots of tangles, and is basically the typical search environment I get called out on for area searches. So after recovering my spongy like placenta from the original hole, I walked about about 200 feet away and plopped it into its final resting place. Decomposition is slowed down in a buried environment that insects can’t reach to around 8 times longer to decompose. I’m fairly sure this placenta will be liquid and not recoverable within a week longer. I gave this buried three days to age and my scent to dissipate from the area(for those arm chair quarterbacks that think my dogs tracked to the buried.) I picked the worst time for them to search, around 1630 in the afternoon. The sun shine that came into the area was on all the leafy tree trunks. The air temperature was surely warmer than the soil (soil here was 64F) and air temperature was 77F with wind speed of 1-8 mph and Rel Humidity of 28% (so relatively dry). Murphy and Thorpe both got the same area to work. Thorpe was locked away in my Xterra on the other end of my land, so no cheating. Unlike the skeletal, this was a case of “scent is everywhere – where’s the source?” Murphy went right into the area after covering an acre prior. Murphy was about 80 feet in front of me. I entered the woods and kept walking past him. I noticed he was brushing away leaves in the right area and thought, “well, this was too easy.”, but then he moved back out. The main difference between Murphy working and Thorpe working was that Murphy picked up scent from this source a good 50 feet in every direction while Thorpe picked it up about 20 feet in every direction. There was a trench in the soil about 10 feet NW of the wash, and both dogs spent a long time there as it was a scent trap, collecting scent in the depression, but no source. Neither dog indicated there, so I was happy with that. Both dogs checked up every tree because the sun on the dark bark was pulling the scent up in thermals. Here experienced played a role as Murphy discounted the trees as (I’m assuming) the scent got weaker as it went up. Thorpe really wanted to alert on a little cedar tree some four feet from the burial. Now, the temptation of any handler is to help their dog at this point and in doing so they can stunt the dog from then on. The point of this problem was for it to be difficult and to both observe how each dog worked it and how they solved it. I need to be able to recognize the behavior my dogs exhibit when working such a problem. Handlers that don’t do this can easily pull their dogs off a buried.
Murphy solved this my getting more scent on the dead branches over the buried, following this down into the leaves, then he brushed the leaves aside, pawed twice over the buried to release more scent, and shoved his nose down into the depression he created. With that he could not be pulled off the source till rewarded. I was 30 feet away and slowly walked in then asked him to show me the source. He tapped the loose dirt with his paw and I rewarded. Time worked was 18 minutes 11 seconds. Not bad when I looked at my stopwatch as it had seemed like an eternity.
I shoved the dirt back into place with my foot, found a long dead branch, pushed leaves back over it and pushed some dead branches back over the area. I gave Murphy lots of play time both to reward him for a problem well solved and to air out where we’d been. This was my excuse to play ball with my dog. My concern now was that Thorpe would track Murphy or use my scent for the find, neither turned out to be an issue. Murphy and Thorpe traded places in the Xterra.
Thorpe grids an area a bit differently and we are still working through a fascination with scat. (Murphy had a similar fascination at this age, so it was/is an annoyance more than anything.) Thorpe cleared the open area over longer time than Murphy, but that was partly his trying to define what I saw as the search area. Entering the woods, Thorpe approached from a different direction and began to exhibit scent behavior once he passed the wash and turned back. Air temp was now up to 80F with wind still varying from 1-8 mph though it seemed still in the woods. Thorpe’s area of interest was smaller than Murphy’s as defined by how far he’d pursue scent then turn back on his own. As with Murphy, I followed and then passed going beyond where Thorpe was searching to see if my presence would draw him away from scent. Once in scent, Thorpe was in his own world. Thorpe had a glassy-eyed, distracted nature about him and his nose went up every tree in the area and he climbed several to convince himself the source was not there. When he committed to the cedar, 4 feet away from the buried, then I interceded and told him “ehhh---closer’ then shut up again. It’s always nice to watch the drive to solve the puzzle in an adolescent dog. I should note that Thorpe was off-lead and the scent was keeping him in the area. To the east of us was a road with 45+ mph traffic driving by. To the west of us were two dogs barking for our attention and getting ignored by both of us. Thorpe left the cedar and went back to checking up trees for about a minute while I watched leaning back against a fence. He met eyes with me once, so I said, “closer” and shut up again. He then narrowed down in the wash harder and checked along the dead branches. I soon heard the “hoover” nostril-flapping noise that I love to hear in any scenting dog. Thorpe brushed the leaves aside and the fresh dirt was like a hidden egg at Easter. He dug twice. Normally, I would scold, but I didn’t want even an “EASY!” to be a clue. He shoved his nose into the depression much like Murphy had then alerted. Time to find was 18 minutes 59 seconds, again it seemed like an eternity. The major plus here is he stuck it out. I have to think part of this is because he was genetically wired to love the scent of decomposition.
On a side note, Thorpe is getting 20-minute on-lead obedience lessons at the town park when I’m not on-call. We end each session with him having to climb picnic tables then crossing over to the playground which is shaped like a pirate ship with slides instead of cannons. He prefers the straight slides to the twisty one, but will take that if I go first and he can ride down pressed against my back. He thinks this is great sport. One of my students and I parted ways soon after I got Thorpe because she felt my asking him to leap out of a crate and into my arms was dangerous. After all, Murphy had to have elbow surgery at 18 months and it was implied that I was to blame. If allowing Murphy to pursue scent down a sandy drop is my fault in causing a minor fracture that’s common in 18-month oversized dogs of all breeds, then so be it. I think she was put out that I told her, “look, if you want to dictate how a puppy is raised, get your own.” Tis a wonder I didn’t break a bone or two when I was growing up considering the number of trees and roofs I jumped from.
Anyway, hope the scent work helps.
Jim