I am going to offering a variety of on line tracking classes. At first I had some misgivings about teaching tracking in such a format. It is challenging enough as it is. However I gave it some thought and I m looking forward to tackling the challenge. I put together my list of courses last night and it was a challenge to break the skills down into individual courses. I generally try to teach my green/young dogs some of the more advanced skills right from the start. I am careful not to over challenge them but I also want to take advantage of the fact that they don't know that something is an advanced skill yet. They are too new to the task to make assumptions - such as "tracks are always on grass". I will try to do a little of that in the classes but most likely less than I do with my own dogs.
Six month old malinois learning that he can track on asphalt as well as grass. It isn't pretty yet but I accomplished my training goals of showing him that tracking is tracking; it has nothing to do with what surface the track is on. You can see at first that he thinks this is an attention exercise. As he gains experience the harness will help him determine the difference. I laid the track in my sock feet so as to help him have some extra scent to follow (don't laugh; I laid a big chunk of Steel's VST tracks in my sock feet). I didn't want to lay food on the track but I also wanted to reinforce the track a bit so you can see me tossing food out in front of us. My only goal at this point was to reinforce a behavior of him sticking his nose to the track. He cant help but smell the track while he is getting reinforced. I have a few additional techniques to develop his hard surface tracking but this worked okay for the first time.
Oh he is too cute. Does he have a name yet or are you just calling him "6 Month old Malanois Puppy".
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