can ay breed be trained for tracking?

[chloe]

hi all,

forgive me if i sound silly but im a newcomer and the owner of two dogs a staff mix bitch and a year old dog who goes by the name of jimmy. he is 50% bull mastiff 25% bulldog 25% rottie. he is mainly white with some tan patches, does this render him useless as a tracking dog as he is too visisble?

any advice gratefully recieved. how would i go about starting some training myself or can you reccomend any groups in cambridge area for begginers? or should i forget about it lol

 

[Pete E]

In the late 1800's and early 1900's, the various british "bull terrier" breeds were very popular in South Africa with plainsgame hunters. Not only were they expected to track wounded game but also either pull it down or at least hold it at bay when it was found.

The vast majority of dogs are capable of following a scent trail of a wounded deer to one degree or another, but some breeds that specialise in it excel (especially on older or more difficult trails) and have a more natural ability.

With regards your dogs, if they are capable of basic obedience, I would certainly give them a try for blood trailing. You may have to work out a "style" of working that suits you and your dogs, but as long as it works, who cares?

I would highly recommend the book "Working With Dogs For Deer" by Niels Sondergaard which covers the subject very well, albeit with a very Continental approach....

Regards,

Peter

 

[Jagare]

Most breeds can be trained for tracking. As Pete E said read the Sondergaard book. Nothing wrong with the very continental approach .
Give training a go you might be suprised how well the dog do's.
Next time Stone has a dogs for deer day put your name down for that.

 

[devilishdave]

Deer Dogs

As a very experianced stalking friend of mine put it the most important criteria for a tracking dog is that it has a nose.

Dave

 

[MarkH]

All dogs have a nose
What you need is a dog with steady frame of mind ie the dog knows whose boss.
Rule 1. Command and control first, all all thing will come good in the end.
Rule 2. Avoid taking a hound of the lead be that a bloodhound or a lurcher.

Mark

 

[chloe]

thanks for the encouragement guys. i will get hold of the book the dogs definately have noses but im not sure whats going to happen till i get out there i guess...

going back to te colour of the dog (mainly white) is this a disadvantage? has anybody put a camo vest on thier dog to make it inconspicuous?

i gather from other posts that im going to need some deer blood and a bit of deer skin (does this have to be fresh or is a bit of hide ok?) or hooves. any tips? now where abouts can i acquire them? lol i was thinking of asking at the butchers that stock venison to get me some blood ect from wherever they get thier venison from, if i pay them?

and a silly question, does all deer blood smell the same to a dog? does it matter which kind of deer the bood comes from?would it affect the dogs ability to track other kinds of deer diffrent from the blood he is trained to track?

are there any people on here from cambridgeshie at all?
cheers chloe

 

[Jagare]

Use hooves. Don't go dragging deer skin about. I use cattle blood as i can buy that from the supermarket here. I understand thats a no,no The UK though. Source some deer blood. The colour of the dog is not important.

 

[stone]

Chloe
in my experience, it will not matter what colour your dog/s are
as you are aiming to track a wounded or dead animal and using a tracking lead i would imagine,
the Sight ,sound and possibly the scent of both you and the dog getting close to that wounded deer are going to be what the deer is going to be more concerned about than colour , a dead deer won't really care
as for blood, hooves , skin and a little trail laying and tracking demonstration then if you can drive or hav some one to drive you and pick a sunday morning
i will gladly help you out , but i am in warwickshire not far from the NEC
the rest is upto you
regards
stone

 

[paintandpins]

scent and colour

Chloe,

The colour does not matter when it comes to visibility and though the dog does not need one for comfort, e.g. heat retention reasons, you could always consider a camouflage coat if you find your having problems.

Interestingly the area where colour can affect the animals ability to track is in the actual detection of scent itself. The pigment colour in the olfactory areas is closely associated with the ability to smell. Most albino humans and animals have a defective ability to smell known as partial anosmia. For many animals anosmia lessens the chance of survival, if you are not high up the food chain then having little or no sense of smell means someone who is will get you . How rare are albino deer?, top predators such as tigers, leopards often have a poor sense of smell. Hence the use of ripe bait, it isn’t that the leopard likes rotten meat over fresh its just easier to give him something he can smell.

Dogs which have an extraordinary ability to process scent (macrosmatic) have a richer dark brown pigment in the olfactory areas and produce a brownish mucous , which is so important to smell processing. Ours (humans) is clear and our olfactory pigment a kind of yellowish pigment.

The above is of course a very sound reason for retaining the richness of pigment in working dogs because as stated albino and certain breeds of very light coloured/ white dogs may have partial or almost complete impairment of smell.

Just out of interest other physical areas which effect a dogs ability to smell are dogs with short noses which are subject to respiratory difficulties and the size of the dog. Very small dogs may not be as proficient as larger dogs because their brain size and olfactory areas are smaller.

In practical terms this does not mean that most dogs can not be trained to track deer if other factors such as intelligence and motivation present. It just means that like various human talents some will be better at it than others. The key is regular practice which will improve the working ability of your dog and the discriminatory quality of his nose.

 

[Thar]

Hi Paintandpins

I read you post concerning colour and scenting ability with interest, my dog is dark liver, so she should be a cracker. However I have owned an English Pointer and he had a majority white coat. This breed always has a lot of white but also has an outstanding nose; this would seem to contradict your theory with regards to colour and scenting ability.

Any thoughts

Best rgds

Tahr

 

[paintandpins]

Hi Thar,

I wish these were my findings!! No such claim to fame.

I seem to remember from my training that it was a guy called Moncrief who carried out the research on the correlation between pigment and scent. He produced papers on the chemical senses ,if my memory is correct and not in its normal state of confusion, and it’s sound research .

Like most information regarding scent and in particular how a dogs nose works it has to be taken in context. Under ideal identical conditions the difference between a great scenting dog and a good one may well be down to pigmentation, however we are dealing in terms that most of us cant comprehend . Lets face it a pure white dog with little scenting ability and peanuts pushed up its nostrils will still be way above what us mere humans can manage and that’s the problem, most of don’t think in a world of scent, we cant. The difference pigmentation makes to a dog and its performance may be great to the dog, and significant to our requirements but would we notice unless the anosimia was severe.
An example being we are happy if the dog can find a deer which has run a couple of hundred yards leaking all its bodily fluids. Research has shown that in some cases the dog s sensitivity to some chemicals is 100 million times better than ours. Now how difficult is it for that afore mentioned dog to find the deer with an ability like that at its disposal, even a dog with a poor nose may manage it and we still couldn’t, but we would tell every one how great our dog is and relatively speaking it would be, but would it fail if conditions were difficult?.

Remember as well it is the pigment in the olfactory area we are taking about. It would be interesting to see how many top dogs, even if predominantly white had dark heads for example, has there ever been a pure white champion? Also any pigmentation on a dog would indicate the possibility of having the darker pigment where it is required in the nose.

The thing about pointers, any specialised scenting dog for that mater, is that they start off ahead of the field in scent detection the fact that an individual animal had lighter pigment in the nose may , even though it reduces its ability , still leave it more than capable of doing the job we require where as a white toy or pastoral breed for example may not .

You take the front spoiler off a formula one car and its performance will drop significantly but it will still leave the boy racer in his corsa standing at the lights and with a good driver hold its own in a race (I think, but I don’t know much about cars, I’m sure you get my point) . Like I said the thing with scent is in some respects we still don’t know how it all works, lets just hope it keeps doing so and we have fun being with them ,whatever breed they are, when they are doing it

 

[Pete E]

Very interesting stuff. I've not heard of the association between pigment and scenting ability, but I believe that an all white coat in the bull breeds is supposedly associated with deafness...IIRC Plummer mentions it in a couple of his books...

As far as scenting goes, I read that scientists at Aeroflot, the Russian airline, had great success in breeding a "strain" of sniffer dogs with considerably enhanced scenting ability by introducing Jackel blood into their lines...I don't recall the crosses involved, but the main draw back was that the offspring proved very hard to train, so I am not sure whether the expiriement continued or not...

 

[devilishdave]

All dogs have a nose


Mark

That was his point

 

[devilishdave]

thanks for the encouragement guys. i will get hold of the book the dogs definately have noses but im not sure whats going to happen till i get out there i guess...

going back to te colour of the dog (mainly white) is this a disadvantage? has anybody put a camo vest on thier dog to make it inconspicuous?

i gather from other posts that im going to need some deer blood and a bit of deer skin (does this have to be fresh or is a bit of hide ok?) or hooves. any tips? now where abouts can i acquire them? lol i was thinking of asking at the butchers that stock venison to get me some blood ect from wherever they get thier venison from, if i pay them?

and a silly question, does all deer blood smell the same to a dog? does it matter which kind of deer the bood comes from?would it affect the dogs ability to track other kinds of deer diffrent from the blood he is trained to track?

are there any people on here from cambridgeshie at all?
cheers chloe

Another little gem is that a good dog is never the wrong colour referring to Lurchers in the context but it carries over to any breed.

Almost any dog can be used for tracking, I use a Black Lab and he is a natural I trained him in one outing and from there he just seamed to know what to do.

I have a Lurcher (sight hound) and to be honest when searching for stuff not necessarily deer in thick cover she often shows up the lab. She doesn’t get any real scent training other than fetch games and is a natural scenting dog.

I started of by shooting a deer, suspending it for the graloch then bleeding it in to a plastic zip lock bag. I add a fair bit of salt to the blood to stop it clotting and dilute it with normal water at least 50 /50. You can freeze some for later if you want.

I got one of the dogs favourite treat and squirted a circle of blood around it. I walked 15 or so meters dropping blood every foot or so and at the other end more of the dogs to treat circled with blood. Once he gets that start again and let the dog go further with bigger gaps between drops and go over some obstacles and keep extending the trail until you are going a good few hundred metres.

My Lab has had a couple of successes with deer that had ran up to 70m in thick cover that I don’t honestly think I would have found (we have not lost one yet, "touch wood"). I might add the deer were well shot in the heart but low in the heart. It is well worth the effort and a massive buzz when the dog pulls it out of the bag for you.

Edited to add, put the blood in a Lucazade sport type bottle so when you up turn it and squeeze it the blood spurts out and gives a reasonably realistic effect. And is good to carry the blood in. Just put in the fridge if you intend going out again in a few days or freeze it if longer.

Dave