September 17, 2008 - Mika, you have to choose!

Mika is no longer training for agility. As the dogs in the class advance and the students become lazier, Mika has given up agility to save her narcotics skills.

Students are leaving cocaine scented items around the building and every time I turn around, Mika is hitting in the scent. With agility being an off-leash sport, she is free to access the narcotics training equipment on the parameter of the room, mere feet away from the agility obstacles she is meant to be climbing.

Often, I don't know if the items are scented. Is she sitting to indicate drugs or is she giving a false indication because she is hoping for a ball reward? If I give her a reward and the item is not really scented, I am teaching her that lying pays off. If I don't reward when the item is really scented, I teach her that the scent doesn't always result in a reward. This chips away at the dog's drive to find the source of the scent.

Tonight, after getting frustrated that Mika was hitting on drugs instead of focusing on agility, I put ring gates up to barricade the narc equipment. Even 4 feet away from the source she was still hitting the scent. With no ball in hand to reward her, Mika decided to take matters into her own hands. She literally jumped 4 feet in the air to the source of the scent and snatched the tennis ball from the scented pvc tube, knocking over the ring gates on her way back down.

So much for off-leash agility!!!

In other news...
Mika did her first car scearch for narcotics. She searched the outside of 6 cars and found the two places where cocaine was hidden.

September 7, 2008 - Sadie Finds Her Voice

It used to be that sweet little Sadie stood by quietly watching. She seemed content to take it all in and watch from the sidelines. Not anymore.


Every morning and most evenings we take the dogs tracking. To begin a dog in tracking I stamp on a patch of grass in the shape of a square. I am crushing the grass and leaving my scent behind. Then I place bits of food where I have walked. This is called a tracking box. The goal is to teach the dog to first search for the food and over time to search for my scent with the knowledge that following the scent ultimately brings a food reward.


The next step after tracking boxes is to lay out a straight line track and teach the dog to follow the track, laced with food. Later the track becomes more complex with turns and articles left behind, such as keys, for the dog to find along the track.


Sadie is in the tracking box phase. It took her a couple of weeks to eat from the tracking box, and now, she is doing a tracking box 4 times a day.


I alternate the girls in tracking. First I lay a box for Sadie, then I lay a track for Mika. With Sadie's new found excitement for tracking, I now have two whiny dogs, both barking in jealousy as the other takes her turn. Miss Sadie is turning into a monster, just like my Mika.


You should see the two of them as I lay the food in the box or on the track. Both licking their lips, whining, with streams of drool pooling on the ground around them. Talk about your Pavlov's dogs!

Septmeber 3, 2008 - From Pee to Yippee!

Mika reached a new level in her narcotics training. She found a tiny drug scented sponge the size of a thumb nail hidden away inside a rock wall at school. This was particularly exciting because we weren't planning on searching. She happened to stop and potty in front of the rock wall while some students were getting ready to send their dogs on a search of the wall. She went straight from peeing to indicating drugs. What makes this exciting is that it's the first time she did a secondary reward search.

Up till now she's been search for her own reward, ie a drug scented ball. Once she finds it she gets to have it to chase and hold. This is called a primary reward. Today she scented an item that she couldn't directly have as a reward so I had to be ready with a ball in my pocket to toss to her as a secondary reward. We will begin to transition her to secondary rewards only because in the case of actual drugs, you never want them to ingest the drugs so naturally they need to learn not to mouth the source of the odor.

Election 2008 - They decide!

I got Mika a new toy from the clearance rack at Pet Smart. It was a democratic donkey. Now, it's a headless donkey.

Oh no, do you think this means my dog's a republican...!?!

September 2, 2008 - Doggles!

Just got a pair of Doggles for the girls to wear while tracking. Eventually I will tape over each lense with black tape to block out light. This will force the dog to track solely by smell and not by sight.

For now, we are just getting used to wearing them... :)

September 1, 2008 - Mondays at the Park

It is ritual that we go to the park on Mondays and spend most of the day training the dogs outdoors in tracking, field search, obedience, swimming, and more.

The park is great because the dogs get to meet new people but it's not too busy on Mondays so we don't get a ton of interruptions.

Here's a fun clip of Mika at the Park. She likes to climb on the playground equipment. Check it out....

(Watch at the end as she starts to take off for the tall grass in the background. She flies down the slide and is ready to launch into a field search, even though that's not what I planned.)

At Last...A New Post!

Sorry for the hiatus. Things have gotten really intense here with two dogs plus a client dog I am training for two weeks. Most days I am up at 6:00 a.m. and train till 1:00 a.m.

My client dog is a Miniature Pinscher named Charlie. I love working with him because he is my surrogate Klaus. No one can replace Klaus, of course, but he is similar color and size and it's fun to be around that Min Pin attitude again.

Charlie has some issues, for sure, but he is a cool dog. He tried to bite me when I put him in a "down", but we're working through it.

I don't have a photo of Charlie yet, but here's one of my Klausy, compliments of my dad....