A detection dog trainer walks through imprinting a dog to find drugs at any height. The dog learns to search elevated locations and follow scent into tight spaces, building the reliable nose work needed for real detection work.
Chapters
So we have a dog coming out and we're about to imprint odors onto this dog. These— this dog is specifically going to be trained for drug detection, so we're going to start the initial phases of detection work with them. Now with this particular dog, we've moved past the initial stages and now we're in the third or fourth step of this imprinting process. The imprinting is teaching the dog odors, specific sets of odors that the dog is going to detect as a career path for this particular dog. Oh yeah. We're teaching the dog to not only sniff on the ground but also up high. So we've placed the aids since he already knows the odor. Now at this point, we place the aids made in a location where now he has to pick his head up and go into the location to get the source. So, you know, we're also looking at, you know, will the dog go in, or environmentally will we have issues that we need to train through. As we saw in that case, he doesn't care. He'll go after the odor no matter what, and that's what we want to teach at a very early age, a very early stage in this training process, is no matter where that odor is, you go in and get it.
Ah, little boy, little boy.
Find it.
All right, so on that last dog, or on Hank, We saw that the dog was sniffing with his mouth open, especially as the session got longer and as he began to get tired. But these are all things that we're going to work on, him learning how to efficiently and effectively sniff with his mouth shut to find the odor. A couple key things that we looked for was the dog to recognize odor, which he did very well, but he'll become more conditioned to be able to work with his mouth shut and sniff out of his nose as our training continues through the process of, um, teaching this dog to learn how to detect drugs.
