Thread: Training scents

Exactly...

Dangerous Dan. A little courtesy will go a long way to having this explained in a way you can understand because at the moment you don't. Making slights about cell phones, out of ignorance won't endear you to the people trying to help you. For the record I'm a professional trainer. i am trying to make you understand that simply recognising a scent from training will do nothing to shut down the scent of other animals. Prey drive in the field will over ride that. The cell phone dog I mentioned is regarded by many as among the best springers in this country on birds so obviously that early training was not detrimental to hunting. but it sounds like you believe that by "focusing" on one scent in training you are hoping the dog will ignore other scents in work. Simply, that's ridiculous. The dog will learn through experience what scent is and how to work it, if you want it to ignore some game in the early training a simple "leave it" command lets the dog know when unwanted game has been located. Young dogs get this very quickly. Unfortunately the majority of handlers are in the field with a dog too early before such preventative training has been done and the "leave it" command or a hiding for finding a possum serves only to confuse the dog, further erode the relationship with the handler and rarely if ever stops the dog seeking the game it was reprimanded for.

If you are talking about breaking the dog on possums then the above method using the "Leave it" command will always produce a result. If your training is not solid enough to have the dog respect that when it hears and you are looking for a magic solution to shortcut that then the answer is there isn;t one... and using scent in training will not make an ounce of difference to the field behavior.

At then end of the day I have a kennel full of dogs at the moment of which two are mine. they don;t hunt possums, they are very highly regarded and well known for their ability. None of them were of have been trained using scents. So bear in mind when trying to be a smert alec that None of the dogs in my kennel have your problem, but yours or the one you hunt with does.... Good luck.