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.
