| Training Article Search
Posted by Jerry Bradshaw on September 19, 2008, 10:07:06
I am curious to see how other trainers train the article search exercise, what alert you prefer, and how you differentiate the context from tracking and outdoor narcotics searches when teaching the exercise concurrently with those specialties.
For example, in doing a narcotics search outdoors, the dog must ignore trash that might have human scent on it (say searching behind a drug house for a buried hide), whereas in an article search the dog is looking for novel items (weapons, wallets, other personal items)which probably have varying degrees of human scent on them. This can cause some conflict if the dog is learning both exercises at the same time, because the target in one exercise is to be ignored in the other, so the dog really has to differentiate on command and not context. The same conflict can occur in tracking, when at the beginning the dog is casting to find the track and encounters objects on the ground.
I personally prefer to wait to teach this exercise until the dog has a lof of experience in tracking and will search outdoors for narcotics strongly, as it is less critical to the dog's overall mission in my opinion than tracking and drug searches, and then it can be introduced and taught without experiencing a lot of conflict.
I prefer to use a down on the object which I teach seperately from the searching, first, to create a backward chain of behavior.
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