So I have been going up to the Fortress K9 facility for the last few weeks to work on tracking with Joel and figured it may help others in the program if I started logging some of my thoughts and experience here. I had listened to some of the info in different episodes of the protection dog podcast and had been doing some "tracking" with Loki that after a little I found out was more detection training then tracking. Ether way it was a lot of fun to do till I realized what I was doing had no real world application unless whoever I wanted to find had a kong, and likely the one I had been using, tied to them. When I heard Joel mention a few different times he was looking for someone to run tracks for him to work up a few of his dogs I decided to start working toward being able to do that. I made it up to the facility to some of the group classes to stress test Loki a little before committing to doing this and exposed some unknown issues I had caused/missed but with a little coaching and some focus I was able to get that turned around real quick and felt confident to start learning this new skill.
More to follow.
I have enjoyed the videos of yall doing tracks. We will be down working with Joel from June 15th to the 24th if you want to get together and do some more tracking. My cell is 615-545-5660
Well the last year has been a bit more busy then expected and I forgot about updating this post. I have learned a lot from Joel and all the other clients and trainers that have been out while I was at the facility. Now that operations are moving to Ohio I plan to start updating this thread with some of the experiences I can remember and post what I am doing to continue advancing the tracking work with Loki and now Luna.
