Cutting with your K9 | SOURCE Short Set

Hey everyone, this week's short set, we're working on tracking. I'm in a tracking course now in Kansas, Fort Leavenworth to be exact. Obviously, I'm going to give you some things to work on. And one thing that people often forget to work on is cutting. And that's where we cut the dog into the track, but we dictate the time. So today's drill with all of our teams is we're scaling up the cut times before we expose the dog to the track. And that simply is this: we lay a track that's known, and we cut a clean area that contains no track for a set amount of time before we expose the dog to the track and they find the odor. Now, this is important to ensure that we keep the dog honest, and what that means is, is that they are only looking for odor and only begin to pull when they get into odor. So for the first 2 minutes, This handler is going to cut in each track today. We're running 4 tracks, and each track they're going to scale up the cut time. So the first track, they're going to cut for 2 minutes before exposing the track to the dog, and each subsequent, they're going to add 2 more minutes to that. So by the end of it, we're going to be up to 8 minutes of cut time before the dog ever gets on the track. So this week I challenge you to extend your cut times before you expose your tracking dog to the track. Ensure that they locate the odor, commit to the odor, and follow it. So guys, let's think outside the box a little bit. If you learn one thing during these short sets, I'm happy. So let's continue to train and progress, and I'll see you back next week with another short set.