TRACKING TRAINING WITH AN
ENGLISH SPRINGER SPANIEL
ON
by
Leena
Hokkinen, Finland
Do you own an English
Springer Spaniel? Have you ever trained blood tracking with your Springer? If
you haven’t I recommend you to do so – you might be surprised, Springers do
have a good nose. You must remind that you can never force your dog to track;
the whole tracking training must be based on dog’s willingness to find the
track and follow it.
I’ve been training blood tracking with my
English springer spaniel Boris just for fun. And it’s the dog that is having
fun and I just love to look how he enjoys the whole thing. My role is mainly
follow Boris and keep quiet and most of all let him work independently.
Boris has always been very excited about the blood tracking.
Anyhow I made a trail on
Saturday 21st September. The length of the trail was about 700 meters
and it had one bloodless section and also one 90 degrees sharp turn. I made the
trail to an area I knew was abundant with live game.
At the end of the trail I set a dead rabbit.
On Sunday 22nd
September when the trail was enough old (about 20 hours) I took Boris with me.
The weather was quite windy and dry trail very good so you know. This was the
second time this year we trained so Boris was very excited. Boris had his
tracking harness on and I attached the harness to a six meters long leash. Boris
is very powerful dog so I had to slow down his going. Boris started the trail
very well in spite of the windy weather and one berry picker just near the
trail. When he had proceeded the trail about 300 meters until the 90 degrees
sharp turn he had difficulties to find the right direction of the trail. I let
him find the trail about 2 to 3 minutes. At
that time he couldn’t find the right direction of the trail so I had to show
him the right direction. The rest of the trail went pretty well and this time
Boris coped with the bloodless section very quickly. As always Boris was
thrilled and extremely happy to find the rabbit at the end of trail. On the
whole we had a nice time together!
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