Huge Search Yesterday

[jocoyn]

HR - 5 dogs - Nothing final this has been out for several months with coyotes and pigs in the area and involved about 9 miles of road frontage. Did narrow down to a probable area a few hundred acres before dark................

I have never seen the dogs so tired. Mine fell asleep twice - once in the back of a truck with his head my flankers knee (after first assignment) and once on the way back on the seat of an SUV transporting us.....Another dog actually fell off the car seat onto her back and just looked at handler and went back to sleep. Rough terrain. Not a murder so no practical limits on how far a body could be moved.......

Of course the dogs sleep for 10 minutes then they are wagging tails ready again.....

[BlackthornGSD]

Lot of a negatives? How long did you go between breaks for the dogs?

[jocoyn]

We train negative areas....Cool damp conditions.....scanning not detailing my own dog went hour/hour and half between short breaks this time - if it is summer I force breaks more often.

It was not a completely negative search....all the dogs were hitting scent that led to the same area (several dogs independantly had body language focused in same direction) but we did not have the time to detail them in and we had larger areas completely negative. .... actually lining up trailing dog head pops on a recent live search was how we knew where to deploy the air scent dog that found the victim. A lot of stuff falls together when you map these things for your planning folks. (We call them in so that they can update strategy in real time)

One our last search I pulled my dog after about 3/4 of our assigned area because he shifted gears. when he is actively scanning he has a slow trot with his head down and mouth slightly open...the switch is pretty easy to read. Even when he is off, if he hits oder he will respond but I figure if he is not activelly scanning and working a pattern he is not at 100%.

I have trained mine with negative areas about 2 hours old and you can see when his body language switches from scanning to talking a walk.

[BlackthornGSD]

Originally Posted by jocoyn

I have trained mine with negative areas about 2 hours old and you can see when his body language switches from scanning to talking a walk.

Yeah, I asked because it was something we heard about in the Jonni Joyce seminar last week. She was saying that 35 min "nosetime" for most dogs between breaks, some dogs up to an hour, a very few up to 2, but that it was better/wiser/smarter to just take a 10 min break, get the dog to relax, then restart fresh. And for me, it's all theoretical so far--so good to hear how different people do it.

[jocoyn]

Rebmann says about 20 minutes -but that is for a detailed forensics search - I think there are a lot of variabes but your time spent searching negative areas should not exceed the time in which you have trained in negative areas and you still have to know how to read the dog. One thing I will say for Jonni, is that the woman knows how to read a dog and I do have to give her a lot of credit for the incredible success we have had with water searches.

Honestly I think our later search was a lot more taxing on my dog because we were near a road and in heavy briars and I had to use more constant directional control than normal.

Jonni is certainly not the only one (nor do I believe the creator) of the concept of "nose time" or "negative searching" but she did a good job of putting words around the construct. Deb Palman who has been a Maine Game Warden/K9 handler for over 30 years has another good article on the topic. I know she also has some trainig articles on USPCA site.

Something she said in the article -- early in my dog's training he would alert on animal bones if they were in a human scent pool. We did a lot of training making him go to source by putting distractors close to source (not too close though because THEY can soak up scent) to get over that. So when he was working a ravine very actively and clearly showing scent behaviors and we encountered an entire deer skeleton (complete except for legs, lower jaw about 10 feet away, and stuff still hanging off the bones) he jumped over it and kept working.

Also you have to work negative areas to learn how your dog behaves when he encounters OTHER scents. I once pegged on and said "did a dog pee here" because he always has to lick female dog pee and wants to pee on male and female dog pee. One of my earliest problems was overdetailing my dog when he hit any scent and prompting a false alert.

Negative Searching