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Tracking a Deaf Dog???

cptrbrown's picture
Posted April 12th, 2008 by cptrbrown
in

I am currently working with one of my dogs on Tracking/Trailing for Search and Rescue. She is deaf and I am having a hard time communicating to her through the line. If she wanders off the course or dilly-dallies I have a hard time getting her to refocus.

Does anyone have any experience working with deaf dogs and this type of work? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

THANKS!!!

Comments

re: Tracking a Deaf Dog???

Aidan's picture
On April 23rd, 2008 Aidan says:

Dogs find tracking so easy that we tend to get well ahead of ourselves. That was my mistake when I was tracking.

Keep good records and make decisions based on facts, not appearances. A dog is biologically capable of following a scent for miles, over days even! Yet a review of records might show that the same dog regularly dawdles or wanders off in the first, say, 20m of a track. This means that the dog is not yet fluent in 20m tracks. He might have completed 400m tracks with only a single reinforcer, but the records show that the behavior sometimes breaks down as early as 20m, but never as early as, say, 15m.

Take note of the distinction between CAPABILITY and FLUENCY. Does that make sense?

To take advantage of the dog's tracking capability, the dog needs to be trained to fluency in all the steps along the way, one by one without missing too many.

Set the environment up (location, surface, wind, track layer, age of track, time of day, equipment, distractions, rate of reinforcement) so that your dog succeeds at the actual criteria he is capable of, then start increasing the criteria systematically, aiming for at least 80% success at each criterion before further increasing.

Notice that I haven't really left any room for communicating down the leash, or made any mention of your dog's deafness. I believe that deafness is an advantage in tracking - less distractions, and that communication is really just a crutch to help the handler lump. The scent and the reinforcer is really the only information the dog needs. I'm not suggesting that these won't be issues in real-life SAR, but at least as far as tracking goes they don't matter so much.

I'm far from an expert in tracking, but hopefully I've been able to shed some light on the situation from a behaviorism perspective.

Sorry, I don't know how I missed your post until today! Must have forgotten to hit refresh or something.

Regards,
Aidan
http://www.positivepetzine.com

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