Articles

The articles should be hand size or smaller, and a variety of fabrics–including leather and cloth–should be used. Old socks that are knotted work well, as do gloves. In many trials, the articles given the tracklayers by the organizing club are simply small flat squares of leather. For the purposes of training, leather scraps are available from shoe repair or craft shops.

The articles used for training should be about the same value (lightness or darkness of color) as the vegetation, so that the dog does not learn to search them out with its eyes instead of its nose.

^{Von Stephanitz strongly advocated the use of police tracking dogs as “detectives” that could track a human away from the scene of a crime and even identify that person among a group of others. (From von Stephanitz, The German Shepherd Dog, 1923.)}