Schutzhund: Theory and Training Methods

Compared to obedience and protection training, tracking is relatively uncomplicated. A good tracking trainer is not successful because he employs some complex or mysterious technique. He is successful because he spends the time to develop a rapport with his dog on the tracking field—training religiously four, five or even six days a week.

Most of all he is successful because he enjoys the work. He regards tracking training as an opportunity to spend time with his dog. Early every day the two can be found alone together on the tracking field, enjoying the morning and each other.

GOAL 1: The handler must have the ability to progressively teach his dog the skill of tracking.

Important Concepts for Meeting the Goal

1. Motivating the dog to track

2. Teaching the dog to footstep track

3. Handling the long line

4. Reading the dog when it indicates loss of track or a change in direction

5. Planning a progressive training program

During the initial stages of training, the handler never scolds or corrects his dog on the tracking field. Tracking must be a lighthearted, enjoyable occasion for the animal.

The handler must provide the dog with strong incentives to track. The reward system we use varies with the characteristics of the particular dog and is designed to mesh with the animal’s strongest and most dependable drives. Regardless of the type of motivation used, the teaching progression remains basically the same (that is, first straight tracks, then turns and articles and last proofing and problem solving).

If the dog is started by using its natural desire to seek its handler out, an assistant is needed. The assistant holds the dog while the handler walks away, calling to the animal and encouraging it with, “Come! Come on! Let’s go!” After just a few paces, the handler steps out of sight behind a building, hedge or fence. There, hidden from the dog’s sight, he begins laying a track. Using stakes or flags to show the assistant where he has gone, he scuffs the ground heavily and walks perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards in a new direction and then hides himself among some bushes or trees or even lies prone behind a tall clump of grass.

The assistant then puts the dog on its handler’s scent, walking around the barrier to the beginning of the track and encouraging it with, “Seek! Seek!” Some dogs will immediately fall to using their nose in this situation, and begin to drag the assistant off up the track toward the handler’s hiding place. The assistant walks with the animal on a short line, encouraging it to stay right on top of the handler’s track, pointing to the handler’s footsteps with his hand and preventing any circling or exaggerated quartering. When the dog finds its handler, its reward is a joyous reunion and a play session.

This method is a very old one, and seldom used nowadays. Because the track is so fresh (only a minute or two old) the dog tends to depend on drifting body scent to take it to its handler. In this way it learns to air scent rather than actually track footstep by footstep. This is especially true because of its generally high level of excitement, and the fact that it tends to search with its eyes for its master as it goes, which keeps its head up. Both of these factors interfere with the sort of head-down, slow work that we desire.

Therefore, we commonly use this method only as a way of starting very young puppies in tracking. The purpose is not so much to teach the pup to track as it is to teach it to rely upon and believe in what its nose tells it, and also to teach it that scent work is great fun. Accordingly, we normally perform this hide-and-seek game only with a puppy that is from ten to fourteen weeks old, and the assistant simply turns the pup loose once its handler is well hidden. The puppy is allowed to work its way to its handler any way that it can, and the assistant just walks along with it to make sure that it does not travel in entirely the wrong direction.

As we have already pointed out, for teaching competitive tracking most trainers now use food to motivate the dog. Some trainers advocate introducing the animal to tracking by having the tracklayer pull a drag of smelly meat. A drag can easily be made by using an old pair of hose. The food (overripe herring or tripe is used in Germany) can be put in one toe and the tracklayer trails it behind him as he lays the track. At first the drag is used throughout much of the track, then gradually just a few feet at a time, and eventually not at all. To reward it for following the track, the dog finds a substantial quantity of food at the end (not the drag meat, which is by then a little worse for wear, but its regular food or some favorite treat).

Glen Johnson describes in his book an excellent structured program using food drops as the dog’s reward. The method can easily be adapted to Schutzhund tracking, and is especially useful with a dog that is not a natural retriever (not “ball crazy”). The animal is taken off its normal daily ration of food. One-half of the quantity of food normally given to it in a day is instead fed to it on the track in evenly divided amounts and at specified intervals along the track. Every seventh day the dog receives a healthy portion of food and the handler does not take it tracking. It is important, of course, that the food given on the track be nourishing and of high quality.

The now classic method of training competitive Schutzhund tracking dogs involves combining the use of food and a retrieving object—like a ball or a kong. The method is similar to Johnson’s, and might be called a modified food-drop approach. However, the food drops (or baits as we call them) are more numerous, much smaller and placed at irregular and unpredictable intervals along the track.

We begin a young dog or puppy by placing bait in virtually every footstep of a very short track. At the end of this track the puppy finds a large food drop and also its ball or some other toy, and the handler spends time playing and romping with it after every tracking session.

Through this method, the dog gains a strong desire to track, and yet learns the habit of methodically searching out each and every one of the tracklayer’s footsteps.

For these baited tracks, no assistant or tracklayer is necessary. The handler does all the work himself, leaving the animal tied up or crated, laying the track and dropping baits, and then returning to his dog and running the track with it.

In order to maintain the animal’s desire and enthusiasm for tracking, the dog is always brought to the tracking field keenly hungry. The handler takes it out of the car or truck and ties it up or puts it in a crate where it can watch the track being laid. While the handler lays the track he calls to the dog and teases it. In addition, before he goes to lay the track he untangles and spreads out the tracking line and harness so that he can quickly put them on the animal when he returns, as any sort of delay at the start of the track can diminish the dog’s enthusiasm.

Much of the work of teaching the dog to footstep track is accomplished by laying short tracks with a small piece of bait in each footstep. However, the handler also plays a great role by maneuvering the dog down the track in such a way that it works the whole distance from footstep to footstep. Footstep tracking does not just automatically happen. Because the dog is excited, it tends to be too headstrong and, rather than carefully checking each footstep, it will rush off down the track, missing most of the baits in the process. The handler’s job is to prevent this by walking very close to the animal, holding it gently back and using his hand to point out each footstep and bait to the dog so that the animal moves slowly and does not miss even one.

As soon as he possibly can, the handler stops pointing out the baits and the footsteps, and lets the dog practice locating them on its own. However, he still remains very close to the dog, keeping a short leash (two to three feet) and using it to guide the animal straight down the track and also to keep it moving slowly, steadily and exactly on top of the footsteps.

When he begins to reduce the bait on the track he does so very slowly and gradually, taking great care to ensure that the dog still takes scent in every footstep.

It is important that the dog begin working on its own as quickly as possible. If it learns to follow a track by letting its handler show it every step, the dog will never develop the ability to work out a track on its own. Instead it will, as many dogs do, learn an amazingly clever way of reading its handler in order to tell where the track is. These animals track very well as long as their handlers know where the track is. When they do not, as in Schutzhund II and III, the results are disastrous.

As soon as the dog begins to show a good understanding of tracking, the handler should begin to give it a little more leash, and thus the opportunity to work on its own and solve the track independently. However, the handler must make sure that the dog solves it the way we want it to: by tracking precisely from footstep to footstep. The handler can accomplish this by working carefully with the line. When the animal begins to veer away from the footsteps, he increases his resistance on the line, so that it is harder for the dog to move forward. When the animal comes back onto the track the handler decreases resistance, so that the animal finds it easier to move forward when it is tracking correctly.

The handler should be in no hurry to move back away from his dog to the end of the thirty-foot long line. Many trainers advance with their dogs to the point that the animals are correctly working full-size Schutzhund III tracks before they ever use anything longer than a six-foot leash for training sessions.

However, when he does judge that it is time to move back from the dog and let more line out, the handler must do so very gradually. Also, he does so dynamically. For example, he might let the dog go out twenty feet ahead on an easy leg of the track. But later, when he anticipates a challenging change in terrain or some other difficulty he will gradually work his way back up the line so that, if the dog has any difficulty, he will be close by to help the animal.

In order to make it easier to keep track of how much line he has given the dog to work on, the long line can be knotted at fifteen feet. When working the dog on twenty or thirty feet of line, the handler should keep the line taut to keep the animal moving forward, to improve his sensitivity in reading the dog and to keep the animal from entangling itself in the line.

In Schutzhund II and III tracking tests, the track is not laid by the handler, but by a tracklayer designated by the hosting club. In spite of this, the handler will sometimes have a sketchy idea of where his track goes. Sometimes he will even be able to see footprints. However, quite frequently in competition the handler will not have the faintest idea where the track leads—whether the first turn is to the left or the right, whether the second leg is 100 yards long or 300, etc.

This does not mean that the handler cannot do anything to help his dog. On the contrary, how he chooses to follow the dog will make all the difference in terms of whether or not the animal commits itself to the track. For example, when the dog is having trouble on a turn, the first thing that it will do is indicate loss of track. Then it will begin to cast about for the new direction of the track. If the dog moves off uncertainly in the wrong direction, showing in every line of its body that it is making a guess, and the handler blithely steps off after it, the handler will soon find himself being taken for a walk. On the other hand, if the dog commits itself confidently and surely to the correct direction, but the handler refuses to budge—stops it with the line because he lacks trust in his dog or is unable to read the animal’s indication that it has found the track—then the animal will quickly decide that it must have been wrong, that the track must lie in the other direction. This will not only result in failure of the track, but it will also harm the dog’s track sureness and confidence in its ability. Therefore, it is vital that the handler be able to read his dog, that he have the ability to see unmistakably when the animal is on the track and also to recognize when it is lost.

During training for turns, the handler should take notice during each practice session of how his dog indicates loss of the track. The most common indicators are: tail raised or wagged, nose and head elevated suddenly, obvious confusion or circling, etc. When he returns to his vehicle after a training session, the handler should make written notes in a tracking journal about how the dog made its indications of loss of track or changes in direction. These observations will become essential when the animal begins working unknown tracks and the handler must rely entirely on his dog’s capabilities in order to get it through to the end of the track.

In tracking training one idea is paramount: The dog must always be successful. It must always obtain gratification (by completing the track correctly and then receiving its reward). Furthermore, the dog must rely entirely on itself to solve the track, rather than depending upon its handler to get it through any difficulty.

Therefore, the handler must carefully monitor the dog’s progress. He must accurately evaluate what the dog is capable of doing today and also predict what it will be able to do tomorrow. Each time that he takes the dog out to track it should be with the specific purpose of improving their performance as a team. Sometimes he does this by laying a track that the dog can easily manage, so that the animal practices tracking perfectly and gains confidence. On other occasions he improves performance by preparing a problem for the animal, some small change in one of the variables that determine the difficulty of the track—wind direction, frequency of the baits, age, changes in terrain or vegetation, etc. However, the handler must accurately predict what the dog is capable of doing on any given day so that the animal is neither discouraged nor forced to depend upon its handler to get it to the end of the track. The challenge is to plan each track in such a way that it is difficult enough to teach the dog something, but not so difficult that the animal cannot solve it itself with minimal intervention by its handler.

For this reason, it is often useful to keep a tracking journal. The handler records in it the conditions, length, age and general difficulty of the track, and then also records exactly how the dog negotiated it. By looking back through his journal the handler can take note of trends and important changes in performance, and also identify specific problems he might not otherwise notice. For example, the journal might reveal that the dog has difficulty with tracks over thirty minutes old in temperatures above 75°F, or that whenever it is on a particular medication its performance drops markedly.

GOAL 2: The tracklayer must lay well-designed tracks and then remember exactly where they lead.

In much of the training, the handler acts as his own tracklayer. Later on, in the advanced stages of training, the tracklayer will be a training partner who lays mystery tracks so that the handler can practice relying upon and trusting his dog.

The tracklayer has much responsibility for the success of a dog-handler team in both training and in competition. He must be able to lay all sorts of imaginative and ingenious tracks for training, exploiting natural features and vegetation to educate the dog. He must also be able to lay a series of regular and consistent regulation Schutzhund trial tracks.

When track markers are not used, he must be able to map out and/or remember exactly where the track leads. This way the handler training his dog knows when he can say “Good dog!” and when he must say “Phooey!” And in trial the judge also must be able to depend upon the tracklayer to correctly answer the question, “There, where the dog is going now, did you walk right there or not?”

In Schutzhund I competition, in which the handler lays his own track, he can obviously be of immense help to his dog if he has the knack of remembering exactly where he has walked.

Important Concepts for Meeting the Goal

1. Laying straight tracks

2. Laying a clean track

3. Mapping and remembering tracks

4. Laying regulation tracks

It is only when we begin teaching a dog to track that we realize how difficult it is to walk in a perfectly straight line without sidewalks, fences or roads to guide us. In order to do so, the tracklayer must pick out not just one landmark toward which he will walk, but two. These objects should be noteworthy and memorable and separated by as great a distance as possible—a tree near the end of the track and a bam in the distance, for example. The tracklayer lines them up with each other somewhat like the sights of a rifle and then, as he walks, he keeps them in the same relation to each other. He will know he is beginning to curve when one of the objects begins to change position relative to the other.

The importance of perfectly straight legs to the overall track is that, if we have two flags marking each end of a leg, and if the tracklayer traveled a perfectly straight line between them, then we always know exactly where to find his footsteps. If, on the other hand, he curved as he walked, we can be wrong by as much as six or seven yards on a long leg.

The tracklayer must take great care that he leaves behind him a well-defined and uncontaminated path of track scent for the dog to follow. For this reason, he makes a “jump start”—leaping to the place where he will make the scent pad so that the track leads only away from it. By the same token, when he has finished laying the track, he should leap away from it. This way the track will finish cleanly at a dead end, with nowhere else to go, so that a dog who tracks very precisely is not confused by being stopped when the track has not yet ended.

When he walks back around to the starting pad from the end of a track he has just laid, the tracklayer should walk well clear of his track, and also downwind of it if at all possible, so that the dog will not be confused by scent blowing to it from upwind. The tracklayer must keep in mind that he lays a track coming back as well as going out, and take care not to contaminate the training track he has just taken such trouble to prepare.

It goes without saying that no one should cross or “cut” the track before the dog works it, and also that it is best that the piece of ground used for training be empty of all traffic for twenty-four hours beforehand, or even longer in lush or wet conditions.

Before he even begins to lay a track, the tracklayer surveys the ground available to him and, keeping the dog’s ability and stage of training in mind, he picks landmarks and sketches out in his mind the path he will walk. He does not simply begin to lay the track and hope to find landmarks along the way at about the right places and the right distances for the dog’s ability. Instead, he plans his legs and turns in advance so that they will be recognizable and distinct and conform to the dog’s level of expertise.

As he walks the track, he may or may not mark his path with tracking stakes or flags, depending upon the length and difficulty of the track and also the availability of landmarks. It is always best to use as few flags as possible, because the dog soon learns their significance and uses them to help it navigate instead of relying entirely upon its nose. For the same reason, the tracklayer should be a little subtle in his use of flags. For example, rather than marking all his turns with one flag right at the apex of the turn, he should instead use two. He places one well before the turn, and one well after, with a small clump of grass or an anthill marking the exact location of the turn itself. Otherwise the dog will soon begin to make a turn anytime it encounters a flag.

Color-coded clothespins or pieces of ribbon can also be used to mark the track by clipping or hanging them in the vegetation, but only if the vegetation is well up off the ground. Because these markers are impregnated with the tracklayer’s scent they are essentially articles, and if they are merely dropped on the ground or hung in the grass, a well-trained dog should indicate every one of them.

As he walks the track the tracklayer should make mental notes and rehearse the track over and over in his mind. He should be able, before he starts his dog, to close his eyes and summon up a mental picture of every turn and leg of the track and the landmarks and flags that mark them. It is helpful for the tracklayer to sketch a quick map of the track once he is finished laying it, especially if the track must age for an hour or so before the dog will begin to work it.

It is also advantageous to occasionally lay tracks in soft dirt, heavy dew or light snow so that every footstep is visible to the handler as he handles his dog down the track. This kind of track is our best opportunity to run proofing problems in which we ask the dog to negotiate extremely demanding bends and curves and even spirals.

Laying the track itself is at least half the work of teaching the dog to track.

In trial, a stake is used to indicate the beginning of the track. To the right of the stake the tracklayer makes a scent pad by trampling the ground in an area approximately one yard square. He then proceeds to lay the first leg of the track in a straight line. When he reaches the location of the first turn, he pivots 90 degrees right or left (according to the judge’s instructions) and proceeds without hesitation in the new direction. The tracklayer should walk the track at a normal pace and with his normal step. He is very careful to drop the articles directly onto the track. In a trial, the judge normally indicates where he wants the articles dropped and where the turns are to be.