Baiting all the way through the turn

Our first task is to make the dog realize that tracks often change direction. However, in the process we must avoid having it circle or practice faulty tracking in any way.

The handler lays three short tracks of about fifty to seventy‑five paces each. All three have normal, well‑laid and well‑baited scent pads, but two of them turn one direction–right, for example–and one of them turns the other direction. The handler baits every single footstep through the turns, beginning about two yards before the turn and ending perhaps two yards after it. Each of the tracks ends with a food drop, and after the end of the last one the handler romps and plays ball with his dog for a while.

He starts his dog on the first track, keeping it on a very short leash, and makes sure that it is moving very slowly and carefully when it encounters the baits lying before the turn. As the dog moves along from footstep to footstep eating each of the baits, the handler steps up very close to it on the inside of the turn. It if has been well prepared and has learned to footstep track accurately, the dog should easily follow the turn around. But in the event that it begins to overrun the turn or go in the wrong direction, the handler is right there to help it by stopping it with the leash and then pointing out the new direction of the track with his hand.

The handler works his dog through the last two tracks in just the same way, and then plays with it and takes it home.

The next day he reverses the directions of the turns on the three tracks, so that now two of them turn left, and one turns right. As always, he is ready to help the dog before the animal gets into any difficulty.

As the days pass, the handler continues training on these series of short tracks with continuously baited turns, until the dog follows them steadily and precisely. However, the handler constantly varies the lengths of the legs of the tracks and he begins to increase their length as well, so that the animal never knows whether it will encounter a turn within three yards or thirty. In addition, the handler also occasionally picks a day to throw in a long, straight track of 150 or 200 paces in place of the normal series of three short tracks with turns in order to gain some length and add variety to training.