The Tracking Club of Wisconsin is a Licensed Club of the American Kennel Club
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Nosework For Your Dog
© 2003 Ed Presnall
Published in the AKC Family Dog Magazine
Stepping from your car you see the excitement start to build. Watching, your dog intently sniffing the breeze you can sense the long recessed instincts arise within him. Snapping on the harness, you attach the 40-foot long lead and watch your partner drop his muzzle towards the ground and start slowly moving along an unseen line. Your dog is now following a scent so faint that no human is able to recognize it, yet almost amazingly your dog leads you through the field by following with his nose what you can neither see nor smell. With feelings of amazement and admiration for your working friend, you follow along behind him. You assist as part of the team by sometimes questioning yet always assuring your partner.
As you work together down the track your dog indicates a special treasure such as an old glove, a scrap of leather or a wallet. You congratulate your dog, accept the treasure and reward your partner with a game or an enjoyable walk through the field, back to your car and to awaiting friends.
As stated in the AKC Tracking Regulations, "Tracking, by its nature is a vigorous non-competitive outdoor sport. Tracking Tests should demonstrate willingness and enjoyment by the dog in his work, and should always represent the best in sportsmanship and camaraderie by the people involved."
Lois Ballard of Stratford, WI, the owner and trainer of several dual champion Mini Wirehair Dachshunds, states “tracking as a non-competitive sport, allows me to work with my dog, preparing for the varied scenting conditions and surfaces that may be encountered at a tracking test and instills the confidence needed to work as a team with my dog”.
The sport is not judged with either a stopwatch or a scorecard, but on a pass/fail basis. Is the dog working? Did the team negotiate the track and find the glove? These are some the questions a judge must answer during the evaluation. As a trainer and judge, I see that participation in this sport is not some "ivory tower" description of the sport, but is what the exhibitors and their dogs live and breath. The activity is non-competitive in the light that it is the team of the handler and dog as they work a track and not one team against another as in most other canine sports.
The regulations further state that "The purpose of a Tracking Test is to demonstrate the dog's ability to recognize and follow human scent, a skill that is useful in the service of mankind." As we all have seen, our canine friends scenting ability can be utilized to search for survivors, evidence, lost children or criminal activity. For most it is simply an enjoyable game to play with your friend. Spectators and participants in tracking tests get to see or experience a level of communication with the dogs seldom matched in other venues.
As you watch your dog "track" across your yard or down a practice track we all wonder what the dog is following. Scent as defined by Webster is "an emanation from a substance that affects the sense of smell" or "an odor left by an animal or person by which it is tracked in hunting". Your dog has the advantage in this sport with its ability to differentiate between approximately 1,000,000 different scents using its 100 million or so olfactory cells versus our ability to only differentiate between several thousand scents using our 5 million olfactory cells.
Dana Vaughan PhD, a canine biologists with the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh and a long time breeder and trainer feels that tracking encompasses a “practical approach to dog training based on a scientific bent which incorporates not only animal behavior (and, by “animal”, I am including the handler!) but also the physics and chemistry of scent”.
As a person walks through a field, his or her scent is embedded into the grass, dirt and brush. The scent is a combination of body odors, individual chemical makeup of the person, the fabric and texture of their clothes and footwear, soap, perfume, deodorant, hairspray, smoke odor and even their body mass. The basis of the individuality of each person's scent is thought by scientists to come from a natural skin lubricant called sebum. Scent and its lasting effect is affected by weather conditions; dry, wet, cold, warm, snow, rain, fog, mist, sun, wind, age of the track, altitude and the type of ground cover.
Tracking tests are open to all breeds of registered and Indefinite Listing Privilege (ILP) dogs. There are hundreds of clubs across the country approved to host tracking tests. Contact a local club or tracking judge for information on lessons and events in your area. More information on the sport is available at the AKC web site at www.akc.org.
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