SH201: IPO Tracking - Skillbuilding
Purchase all the video presentations in our Pet Dog Training Online Program! Click links for more information on individual presentations.
Course Details
In Introduction to IPO Tracking, we taught the dogs how to follow the precise footsteps. Now, on to the fun part, following those footsteps to the articles! This course covers introducing articles to the track, by far the most important part of tracking for the dog. We also discuss in detail how to start skipping and taking away the food rewards in the track itself. This course is driven more by the gold spots as we work each team through a problem area each week. Terrain differences, weather, age, and common scent challenges are all covered in detail. Towards the end of the course, we also look at simple problem solving. Laying bait and articles intelligently on the track can help train your dog to solve those problems and emerge a more confident and independent tracker.
Participating teams should come out of this second IPO tracking course with enough knowledge and information to successfully earn up to an IPO 2 track. More “dirt time” will be needed than the 6 week course, though!
Here's a video to see some of our class skills:
Syllabus
week 1: Articles/Fading Food/Straight Track with Articles and Food
week 2: Article indication (step 3)/Adding Baited Turns and Serpentines to Straights
week 3: Baiting/not baiting/Aging
week 4: Turns-variety/Not confirming Turns/Articles (again!)
week 5: Different terrain/proofing
week 6: articles/tracks from other people/problem solving
Prerequisites & Supplies
Prerequisites: To get the most from this class students need to have taken Intro to Tracking (SH101).
Sample Lecture
This week’s homework:
If you have the kinks worked out of the skills in the third video, then you can start this first homework assignment. First, consider that “article track” with the flag, no food and articles your “real track”. We are now going to add baited footsteps back into this track. It’s harder than it seems for your dog! The dog has to think about searching, eating, lying down, etc… so quite the multi-tasking sequence for your dog. This would be a sample of a straight track: Flag with article at start pad, 10 steps with no food, 3 baited footsteps, 7 steps, article, 12 steps, baited footstep, 3 steps, 2 baited steps, 10 steps, article, and so on like that. I want no food steps anywhere near the article. We are asking the dog to concentrate on two things, tracking and eating food, and tracking and indicating the articles. For most dogs this is not easy. This is the beauty of tracking! So many dogs can indicate articles, so many dogs can track like rockstars. It is the putting it together that separates out the great ones (and the efficient training!).
Here is One’s first time adding in food to the article track. As you can see he has a bit of a hard time and I get to do quite a bit of management at the articles. Evidently tracking outweighs articles by A LOT! (I actually love to see this. I’ve had two really good tracking dogs and both of them had a hard time at the articles at first. It was like they couldn’t see the point of stopping tracking…)
Instructor
Shade Whitesel
Faculty
Shade Whitesel (she/her) has been training and competing in dog sports since she was a kid. Always interested in how dogs learn, she has successfully competed in IPO/schutzhund, AKC obedience and French Ring. Her retired dog, Reiki vom Aegis, IPO 3, FH 1, French Ring 1, CDX, was 5th at the...