Handling the long line

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.

^{We begin a young dog or puppy by placing a bait in virtually every footstep of a very short track. This very close association between food and the tracklayer’s footsteps will lead to footstep tracking.}

^{The handler should be in no great hurry to move back away from the dog to the end of a thirty‑foot line. This handler works on about twelve feet of line–long enough to make the animal work on its own but short enough so that the handler can step forward and help the dog at any time. (Photo by James Pearson.)}

^{Air scent drifts with the wind, and a dog tracking into the wind tends to make the turn early, or “undershoot.g”}

^{A dog tracking with the wind tends to make the turn late, or “overshoot.” It is therefore important to teach the dog to footstep track, relying upon track scent rather than air scent.}

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.