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Introducing a Verbal Command





With all this training, the dog is already passionate about hunting, but for us that is still not enough. The dog must be truly passionate about searching. For this exercise, an unmowed meadow or a fallow, overgrown section of land is ideal. After a short period of playing without searching for the sock toy, have the dog lie down. Walk away through the meadow with the toy in hand, visible or not, depending on the dog. The dog has to stay. Try to leave behind you a lot of track scent by crossing your own track a few times. While walking, drop the sock toy in a bush or clump of grass without the dog seeing, and continue to walk in a zigzag pattern. After that, go back to the dog. When you see that the dog is already looking at the meadow with interest and is full of hunting fever, let the dog go free for hunting. Just before releasing the dog, while standing or kneeling beside it, make a throwing movement with your arm and, a moment later, in a tempting and cheerful voice, give the dog the command to seek. It is important to do this right from the start of training.

The verbal command will tell the dog it is free to hunt; the arm movement gives the dog an idea of where to search. It is not necessary to teach the dog more than that. If we want a dog to show a certain behavior when no drive is active, as when the dog is required to search for something it has not seen thrown or moving, then we must be able to stimulate the drive with a command.

In the case of a future search and rescue dog, this command absolutely must be connected with a visual command, because we need to be able to show the dog a certain direction to search. That’s why we make the connection with the movement of the arm, which we also make when throwing a ball.

That way the dog learns to be stimulated into a drive by a command. In the beginning of training, the sock toy (as prey) stimulated the search drive; later on the command will take over. During search exercises without the toy being thrown, you can see whether the earlier exercises were done well and whether the dog was searching mainly with its nose. If the dog was searching with its eyes until now, then it will have problems searching without seeing the toy being thrown. In spite of that, the handler should not help. The dog learns best by trial and error. After the exercise is over, after prey sharing and putting the sock toy away, eventually you can play with the dog with a normal ball. The sock toy, the substitute prey, comes to have an enormous value to the dog, because it is used only occasionally, and eventually only for real searches.

If the dog locates the sock toy without problems, then this exercise can be stopped after two or three repetitions. Of course, search playing should be done in different situations. As always, every exercise should end with the last acts of the hunting behavior: the carrying, playing together, and prey sharing.

Figure 5.3 We like to work with an item the dog can shake to death, as it would prey. A tennis ball in a long sock works well.

 

Introducing Rubble Walks

While we are increasing the dog’s enthusiasm for searching, we can normally start teaching the dog to work in debris, that is, to accustom the dog to walking over rubble, entering dark cellars, climbing over damaged staircases, and so on. To minimize risk, the dog always walks and works on rubble off leash and without a collar or choke chain. This will prevent the dog from getting hooked on something by its collar. A dog on leash could also easily be pulled down and injured if the handler stumbles or slips on the rubble. Dogs can, when they have learned to walk over rubble, even walk over broken glass and other sharp materials, but don’t put them off-balance with unnecessary commands, by working on leash, or by touching them.

 

A dog with a good bond to the leader of the pack (the dog handler) will follow the handler through or over rubble. With proper behavior from the handler, who should not show any insecurity, these first walks over rubble will be very interesting for the dog. Any insecurity that is visible in the dog can be changed quickly to security by showing the dog the sock toy. The dog’s immediate switch in attitude upon seeing the sock toy is proof that its negative behavior was caused by the handler. Avoid acrobatic balancing acts during the first few walks. The dog has to be prepared for its future task in the right way. At first, lead the dog over the rubble in a route that the dog can manage without any trouble. Later on, the dog has to learn to walk in front of you, as will happen during searching.

Building Confidence

During training, author Resi Gerrisen took her six-month-old Welsh Corgi Cardigan out to get her used to strange terrain and materials: “To my great fright, I discovered that on the third floor of the house where we were, a big part of the floor had disappeared. Only some floor beams still lay across there at a distance of about one yard from each other. These beams were at their widest only about four inches (10 cm). The gap between the floor beams was so great that my dog, with her short legs, couldn’t jump over. I had to control myself not to call her back when she, very happy and free, walked to the opening of the floor. She had walked along the edge and was walking over the first floor beam she encountered to the other side. Even more frightening, there was no wall at the end; you were looking down a depth of about thirty-three feet (10 m). She approached this edge a bit more carefully, and she was going to lie on the edge to have a look down. In my imagination I could already see her falling. But no, she stood up, turned around and came quietly back to me, again over a floor beam. If I had reacted in this situation with fright or panic, then my dog would have become much more inhibited. Even when she got older, she still went very confidently over small beams, as she had before.”

Let the Dog Set the Pace

In the past we thought it was important to teach the dog to walk slowly over the rubble. Our experiences with actual search missions have shown that a dog can work out the right tempo on the rubble for itself and should not to be restricted by us, not even during the first walking exercises on the rubble. We also noticed that dogs trained this way from the beginning search intensively on real rubble, never jump into deep cellars, avoid moving pieces of rubble, walk around dangerous obstacles, and don’t take risky jumps. In short, properly trained search and rescue dogs won’t injure themselves in the rubble and do their work happily and without frustration.

Figure 5.4 The dog decides how it wants to play. The handler’s role is to support and motivate.

 







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