We start our beginning dogs on a "trench track"
with bait in every footstep. Is training the young dog to track footstep to footstep (as in
Schutzhund) the best approach, or should I be focusing more on developing his trailing skills?
I personally do not believe true tracking is the best way to catch crooks. I prefer off-lead
trailing. However, I have found that the trailing dog will trail better if he has a good education in tracking FIRST and then be allowed to trail. When the trail becomes difficult he also has tracking skills to help him work out the problem. Trailing is much faster and there is more scent evidence available to the dog while going over varied terrain.
If he indicates on evidence (articles) along the way, that's great but I will just mentally mark the location of the article and continue after the crook. After the capture, or loss of track, I will do an evidence search while doing a back track.
Most of my experience has been tracking and trailing in medium to high density residential
neighborhoods where the bad guy had less than a one hour head start and the majority less
that 20 minutes. To be successful in these circumstances I prefered to orient the dogs to
that time frame and paid a lot of attention to pavement. A dog with a strong orientation
to looking for ground disturbance scent and human contact scent, as in a schutzhund dog or
a purist tracker, is not as successful as a trailing dog who is oriented to the "human
raft" scent evidence as described in Bill Syrotuk's
Scent and the Scenting Dog.
For those instances where we encountered longer delay situations I did some experimenting with hounds and GSDs who were oriented to longer delays, and were more oriented to the human contact scent. These dogs did a much better job on the long delay tracks than our trailers but they did not catch many crooks because the crooks were gone by the time we got there. They did, however, bring us to houses, stashes of loot, and other things that were good leads for follow-up investigators (e.g. when you track to the same house after five separate burglaries the detectives have a good lead). These dogs were better at locating nursing home walk-a-ways and lost children where a scent article was available. The program did not survive on a dollars vs. captures review. In a more rural setting they may have been the best way to go.
It is a different matter in more heavily contaminated sidewalks and parking lots. I find this much more difficult. Most of my efforts have been to set the dog up with a cross track that is in the same time frame or fresher, then denying forward progress if he attempts to pursue the wrong track and praise if he chooses to follow the correct track. I have set most of the advanced cross tracks to coincide with a turn in the track so that the dog is more easily enticed onto the false track. I have done this to cause the dog to pay more attention to the individual scent as opposed to just following a trail. I've come to the conclusion that just giving a lot of positive experience is best.
For Schutzhund tracking, it is best to stay right to the track in a 'deep nose' posture. Teaching the young dog scent discrimination typically proceeds naturally and fairly quickly at least to the degree needed for AKC VST or Schutzhund FH. The pup will tell you when to back off on the bait if you are alert enough to read the pup's behaviors and not persist upon sticking to a strict regimen. As soon as I read that the dog is focused on the track itself, I remove all unnecessary baiting.
Each judge has his or her own interpretation of the rules, and each has their own tolerance. I have heard of points lost because the dog's down was not in-line with the direction of the track or that the dog was not directly over the article with a paw on each side. That is picky.
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