Assuming that it is tracking four or five times per week, the puppy continues working at this short distance for perhaps two weeks. Of course, each dog learns at its own rate. What is most important is that the pup completely master the scent pad and the short track before proceeding.
At this point the handler begins to increase the length of the tracks. He also begins to walk more and more normally as he lays the tracks, so that now his footsteps are separated by the usual distance rather than lying heel to toe. He increases the length of the track very gradually, and he still leaves a bait in every footstep. Only when the youngster works a fifty-foot track continuously and with intense concentration does the handler begin to reduce the number of food drops.
Up to this point in training, the young dog has probably taken little notice of either the track scent or the air scent left wafting about in the breeze by the tracklayer. Instead it has been single-mindedly preoccupied with sniffing for and finding the food scent. Now we must teach it that, although the food will no longer be distributed evenly all along the track, the key to getting from one bait to the next is following the track scent.
At first, when the handler is laying a track, he just omits a bait every now and again, so that the pup occasionally finds footsteps without food. Progressively and very carefully, the handler omits the bait more and more often, and the puppy begins to use the empty footsteps to guide it from one bait to the next. Now the young animal is beginning to learn the most important lesson that we have to teach it about tracking: It must search for and follow the track scent.
Gradually, we ask the puppy to work a longer and longer distance between baits. However, and this is the important point, the distribution of the baits along the track is random, meaning that the pup can never predict how far it will have to travel in order to reach the next bait. For example, a beginning track will have food at footsteps one, three, four, nine, eleven, twelve, fifteen and so on, while a more advanced track will have food in footsteps one, seven, twelve, twenty-one, twenty-two, thirty-five, thirty-nine and so forth. Because the puppy does not know whether the next bait is three paces away or sixteen, it keeps its nose down and searches intensively.
Over a period of several weeks, both the overall length of the tracks and the distance between the food drops gradually increase, until the puppy is tracking a distance of perhaps seventy-five paces and in the process finding only two or three baits.
We may still work the puppy on three tracks each training session, but only one of them is as much as seventy-five paces long. The other two are very short, and intended mainly for practice on the start and a few feet of very intense tracking. This too we randomize, running the short tracks and long ones in different order, so that when the pup starts a track it never knows whether it will end in ten feet or 150 feet.
Each track ends with a large food drop that rewards the pup for its work. Because we are depending upon food to motivate the youngster it must, of course, be brought to the tracking field keenly hungry. If for some reason it has little interest in tracking on a particular day, we immediately take it away from the field. We do not feed it that day (it can have water, of course), and we repeat the same track the next morning. We leave more than the usual amount of food at the end of the track, and if it does fine work we feed it well.
At this, the teaching stage of tracking, absolutely no corrections are made. The young dog is not scolded, physically punished or corrected or even told “No!” Instead, the handler helps and encourages the puppy in every possible way to understand what he desires. In short, the teaching phase of tracking concerns itself with preventing rather than correcting errors.
By the time that the dog has mastered straight tracks of about seventy-five paces, tracking exactly and with concentration from footstep to footstep, it will usually be old enough (six to seven months) and well motivated enough so that light corrections will harm neither its character nor its delight in tracking.
The handler now begins to give the youngster a little more leash as it works. Rather than walking hunched over right on top of the animal and meticulously guiding it down the track, ready to point to the footsteps with his hand any time the puppy veers a few inches downwind, he walks upright directly behind the pup on several feet of leash.
Whenever the dog deviates from the footsteps, the handler tells it “Phooey!” and pops the line gently. (We do not use the word “No!” because it is too strong and inhibitory in nature for tracking training.) At the same time he steps up next to the animal’s head and uses a finger to direct it back into the footsteps. The instant the dog recovers the track and moves forward exactly on top of it, the handler praises it soothingly and moves back behind it again.
GOAL 2: The dog will follow the track precisely through turns, without casting or circling.
Next the young dog must learn that the track will turn, and that it can turn with it and follow it in the new direction. This concept is difficult for both the dog (who has become quite certain that tracks always travel perfectly straight) and the handler (who must learn the knack of letting his dog solve a problem on its own but without allowing it to practice faulty tracking). The dog, for its part, must indicate loss of scent immediately so that it does not overshoot the turn and lose the track. And for his part, the handler must learn to read the signals that his dog gives when it detects that something has changed in the track.
Many trainers teach turns gradually, beginning with curves so slight that the dog scarcely takes notice, and continuing until the dog is making acute turns of more than 90 degrees.
But turns can also be taught as a “loss of track” exercise in footstep-to-footstep tracking. In this sort of exercise we expect the dog to negotiate a 90-degree turn right from the start. We prefer this method because, in order to make precise turns, the dog must learn to stop when it can no longer smell a footstep directly in front of it and check with its nose to its left and its right until it finds whether the track has ended or merely set off in a new direction. It is very important that
• the dog realizes within a foot or two that it has lost the footsteps
• it signals clearly and unambiguously that it has lost the footsteps
• its handler recognizes its loss of track signal, praises and encourages the animal to carefully check all around it for the new direction of the track
Otherwise the dog will often fail to stop the instant it overruns the turn. Its loss of track indication will become indistinct, and it will learn the habit of over-shooting turns and circling back to find them again.