Tracking the Negative

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Police Canine Training Podcast.

I want to pay a couple bills here before we get to the show. So Ray Allen Canine has been a great sponsor of the show. They have probably the biggest selection of all the canine gear you need. It's a one-stop shop, so check out rayallencanine.com. Ray Allen Canine has literally everything you're going to need for a dog.

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So John Johnson owns Ace K9, outstanding product. It's the only heat alarm that I recommend. So check out acek9.com for all your heat alarm needs. They absolutely will help you. And then the The Colorado Canine Conference is coming up in about two months. And the Colorado Canine Conference, we've got plenty of room left. So if you're thinking of coming but you're worried about maybe we're selling out because you're waiting for budget or approval, go ahead and send over your registration.

I understand some agencies can't pay until July 1st because of budgets. But go ahead and register and you'll get your name on the list and then we'll work out the payment after July 1st. But lots of people coming already, lots of great instructors. And the lead sponsor of the Colorado Canine Conference is the Next Level Canine. So Tim Adams is from Next Level Canine, and they're the lead sponsor of the conference.

One of the great things about this conference is you're going to have the ability to come here, and if you need a dog for your unit, you can buy a dog right on site. Tim's going to bring up quite a few single and dual-purpose green dog candidates that you could test, take it different places, test, even have some of the experts that are here to teach classes maybe look at the dog and see what you think. So check out the nextlevelcanine.com or give Tim a call at 801-358-0120. Music.

This is the Police Canine Training Podcast with Jeff Meyer. Join us for each episode to get real-world advice from canine professionals who have experience on the street. Each episode will focus on up-to-date information that you can use on the street. Spend about 30 minutes with us each week as part of your training day. Our goal at Police Canine Training is to make every canine team be the best they can be.

Welcome to the Police Canine Training Podcast. I am your host, Jeff Meyer. Today, it's going to be a fun podcast. I've got three tracking experts with me, and we haven't done a lot on this podcast on tracking. And anybody who knows me knows that tracking is just not my forte. In the department that I worked for, we just didn't need to track. We had a lot of cops and a big grid in our city, so we could set up a perimeter and just go yard to yard.

So I did very little tracking. I've trained some tracking, but it's far out of my wheelhouse. So when I have questions on tracking, I go to people who do a lot of tracking. And one of them is a friend of mine that is right up in Loveland, and he's close to us where I live now. And Steve Colburn is with me. So I've got Steve Colburn, Royce, Ilse. I think I might have to fix that again. I just talked about it.

And Jay Crafter. But I've got three guys who do a lot of tracking, varied backgrounds from different parts of the country. And they were actually just up in here in Colorado doing a week-long class. Sometimes they're up here for two weeks at a time doing really intensive classes. And everybody I've talked to that's been to the classes raves about what a good class it is and how hard they work and all the stuff that they get to do in the class.

So I wanted to bring them on here and just talk about what they see when they're traveling. They all do stuff together and separately. So there's a lot of experience here on this podcast all dealing with tracking. So with that, I'll just start with Steve, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. How are you doing, Jeff? I'm getting in there. So how about maybe tell everybody a little bit about your background, and then we'll talk about your tracking background also.

Okay. Yeah, I've been working for the Loan Police Department for 19 years, or I'm sorry, actually 23 years, and been in K9 for 19 years of that. And obviously our agency does a lot of tracking. And so we do everything from urban tracking to rural tracking, but we have a mix of disciplines within our unit. And I currently handle a bomb dog and I run two dogs. So I have a bomb dog and search and rescue dog. And then my second dog is a gun detection dog and then a patrol dog.

In the past, I've handled dogs on the SWAT team, narcotics dogs, and patrol dogs. So I'm on my fifth dog during that 19-year career. And I think, you know, it's important to note right here that your tracking dog, your primary tracking dog now is your bomb dog. Am I correct? That's correct. And I think that's a little bit different. So we'll touch base on that. I think a lot of people think patrol dogs only for tracking.

So we'll talk about that, but I'm sorry, go ahead with what else are you going to finish up with on your career? Yeah, no, we have six dogs in our program and then I supervise and am the trainer for our dogs. Excellent. And has tracking been a passion of yours or did you kind of get more into that over, over time or where, where did, uh, where did that come in, in your canine career? Uh, you know, it kind of started off as a necessity because we did it so much in our agency.

I, if I'm being really honest, when my first year, I really didn't know it, I didn't understand it and I was frustrated by it. So I got really into it and then it became a passion of mine. And then I started working with a lot of other people that they really liked tracking as well. And when we started finding people and having a lot of success on the street,

that's when I really got into it. So would it be fair to say that maybe early on when you were doing your initial training, you know, you're doing patrol dog stuff. And when you talked about tracking, it was lower down on the food chain for what your training days were. And like, like I see a lot of agencies that kind of more what it was then. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, way back in the day, our tracking was more of that parade field, you know, a big tent pad, heavy stuff.

And we would, we would train that way. We did everything from dragging things to that bottle to, to all of that. And we had to certify it and stuff, but we, we didn't have a whole lot of success. And still we started adding in the discrimination and, and adding in different things within our tracking programs. And then once, once we did that, we started finding a lot more people. Yeah. And I bring that up because I still see even this day, I don't know if you guys do too.

I still see some agencies that their primary way to find people I think would be more successful by tracking because they just don't they don't have the luxury of setting a tight perimeter but when I watch their training it is on a golf course or something and it's you know.

Footstep to footstep and not not really what what is going to find a suspect running through you know an alley and jumping fences and stuff so it's suffice to say, Your training has changed quite a bit over from what you first did to what you're doing now. Absolutely. And even the way that we set it up in training, you know, before it was, we would go through, we would do our odor training or patrol training. We do our building searches and our bike work and everything.

And then that last half an hour of the training day, we'd look at each other and say, hey, you want to get a track in real quick? And it just wasn't a priority for us. And so once we flipped that, and now we start the majority of our training days with tracking first. And that really being a foundation for us, that's when we started finding people. That's when we started having success. And then, of course, it became contagious within the unit, too.

I think everybody within our unit really enjoys tracking. And like you say, where you live, if you want to catch somebody, I mean, really, I'm sure there's times where you get area searches, but I'm sure the far majority of the suspects that your agency finds is probably on a track.

Yeah, I mean, we're right against the foothills. So we have everything from urban environments and shopping malls to neighborhoods with backyards and alleyways with the hard surface tracking all the way up into the mountains where we can go rural and all of that too. So we have a nice variety of tracking environments that we have to cover and train for.

Let's switch over to Jay. Jay, you want to introduce yourself and talk about your background a little bit? Yeah, Jeff, thanks. My background started off in the British Army. Obviously, with the accents, you can tell I'm not a local boy. I am a US citizen now, so everybody can high-five me. British Army, I was in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps and working dogs there. Basically, my foundational work came from that. Then with everything that was going on in the Middle East and everything.

I got offered a job to come and work for the DOD when I left the army.

And so obviously came over and I was down at Lackland and spent five years down there. Ended up in North Carolina doing some work up here. When I became a US citizen, I set up my own company. It's kind of like a dream of mine to do that. And yeah, I set up Invictus K9. And yeah, like literally my first gig was into South Africa to go and actually watch an elephant program.

Then with that, I got a trip back home and I ended up getting into the conservation world with anti-poaching and helping the law enforcement departments. So to date, I think I've put 60-odd dogs into Africa to eight different countries. And about a year and a half ago, I took a pause with Invector's Canine.

I was offered a great opportunity to work with an organization, working box conservation and 501c3 and i just you know have a greater impact on the work that i do in africa so i get to go over there and yeah basically hunt poachers and it's you know the the difference between all of my military work i mean like for example i was doing the usrb combat tracker program and our certification standard there was this was a mile long track like in Arizona.

So, you know, obviously pretty similar to the Middle East. And so it was one mile long, one hour old with two turns. And obviously at the time, I thought, oh my God, this is so difficult. But now, you know, the stuff that I'm doing in Africa that I can't quantify, you know, if we're doing 20 plus kilometer tracks, so big distance tracks, I call it endurance tracking.

And yeah, I've been very fortunate to kind of get into it. I never thought it would kind of grow to the way it has and the impact that we've kind of made with these dogs. And all the handlers are local nationals in the different countries I'm working in. And then outside of that, I'm, you know, doing these courses around the country. Yeah. And very passionate about the work that I'm doing in Africa. And I was born and raised in Zimbabwe.

And my grandfather was working in national parks. I was always linked to it. And yeah, I've just been very lucky to be able to carry on with it. And there was no plan to do it. There was no plan to get involved with it. But I'm not teaching anything. I'm just sharing stuff that I've learned over the years. And if I'm honest, I've plagiarized everything I know. and it's great people that have taught me great things and I've got an opportunity to share that with other people now.

And staying on the topic of tracking, I think most people now, you know, it's become a little more common, but I don't know, eight, nine, ten years ago, the first time I talked to, you know, a U.S.

Canine officer that started doing something in Africa about poaching, I didn't really wrap my head around it, but these are dangerous people that you guys are looking for. I mean, can you kind of speak to kind of what the crime is there and what the encounters are often like? Well, it varies, to be honest with you. So, you know, you've got your subsistence poachers. They're going to come in and, you know, they're just bushmeat poachers.

And they're looking for just, you know, antelope, whatever they can say, hunt for an arrow. And then you've obviously got your, you know, more higher-end poachers. I mean, the program I was working in, the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, we had a team of poachers come in from South Sudan. There were 55 men armed with AKs and PKs and a couple of RPGs. I mean, they all have grenades. They're all tooled up. Yeah. And they're militias. They're militias and basically elephant.

They sell the ivory and they fund their civil war. So they're very organized soldiers who you get up against. The similarities between them all is the amount of distances. We don't have helicopters. We don't have aircraft. We've got one or two vehicles. We've got four guys, four handlers, and four dogs in one vehicle. And there's no air con. So we're out in the middle of a desert environment. And, you know, we'll come across a carcass, you know, vultures or hyena GPS

or something like that. And then from that point, we'll start the follow-up. And those guys, you know, everybody's armed. I mean, we had an incident in maybe June last year. We approached these guys. The dog gave a proximity alert. And we were about 400 yards out from the guys. And they were in an ambush role. And, you know, we managed to make that up for infants. So it was very successful because of the dog, obviously.

You know, without the dog, the visual trackers would have walked in headfirst to a, uh, you know, an ambulance. Yeah. Yeah. Like I say, it's a, I know it's a, it's a military operation a lot of times for what you're going against, but the, the, the tracking and the terrain and stuff, you can, if you can track there, it very much translates over into coming to like the U S and teaching police officers how to track different environments and surfaces.

Totally. Like a lot of the, you know, for example, when someone's trying to hunt a rhino, they're going to try and shoot the rhino as close to the boundary of the park as they can so that they can remove the horn. And it only takes about five to 10 seconds to remove the horn. And then they'll, they'll exit the park and they'll go into the community. And, you know, the community could be, you know, like a small town, like a farming town, but I mean, it's concrete, asphalt, you name it.

And then at the same time, it could be just a rural village. Like a dense village there. And you're talking, the sense of discrimination, it's insane because you've got, I mean, thousands of people walking around because nobody has a car. Everybody's walking around and you've got goats and chickens and donkeys and cattle and everything else in the area. And we've got to go track through all of that. You know, the phrase I use is track resilience.

That's outstanding. Royce, let's talk about your background and your little bit different background. And again, say your last name correctly because I don't want to butcher it again, but if you can just talk about your background and kind of how you ended up doing what you're doing. Yeah, no, you got it right there, Hilsie. Hilsie. Yeah, so I've been working for Texas Parks and Wildlife as a game warden since 2009. My department decided to stand up a canine program in 2013.

We went to start it off in Utah Post. They're kind of tracking methods that they were using at the time, which have evolved also, and started there, came home. Doing just, you know, footstep to footstep, more competition style tracking, kind of like Steve talked about, learning that.

We had a lot to learn from every single person we met after that and started getting into more sin-discriminate tracking when I met Steve back at Utah Post a couple years later and really started working with different folks. I live down south of Corpus Christi, Texas, and work a lot alongside Border Patrol and all the border activities that we've had.

And so lots of bailout style tracking rural area rural into urban and then some some distant stuff also a few years ago things as most people know got a little busy down here yeah and i was just happened to be starting a new dog and so that was the perfect time to get lots of tracks to the point we were going on multiple tracks a day and so it provided a lot of opportunity for real-time practice and so then learned from a uh met a buddy that had worked in the texas prison system and he and

i started working together and it worked together we've run pack dogs together like the prison if you've ever seen the prison pack dogs running multiple dogs after human subjects on horseback and then we'd use a leash dog we'd use my dog when it was leash dog time and then We'd do pack dogs whenever it was pack dog time. Yeah. Made a pretty, pretty good tag team there and caught a lot of folks, uh, there for a long time. What kind of dog are you working?

I'm in a lab. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. Matter of fact, our whole team is labs now. We've had some, a shepherd. We've had a Malinois. We've had even had a Yag Terrier, but we're all doing non-patrol dog tracking for search and rescue and for criminal apprehensions. Okay. That was kind of a topic of contention at first. How are y'all going to track bad guys with floppy ear dogs?

And our department was a little nervous about that with a brand new program and us running floppy ear dogs for the first time. So what we did was we got together with our rural tactical group and put together a cover team course. It's a two-day course. It includes shooting, classroom, and then reality-based tracks where we set up and show guys that wanted to come work with us on a day-to-day basis on calls how to cover for the team and how to do formations.

So the end goal was to have guys all over the state that could be our tl and run a team of kind of your rough job throw together officers that both tracks turn out to be and that worked out really good and it proved to be successful on a lot of tracks and so we've been real lucky to kind of get over that hurdle and that's how we started running that so was that a was that a decision that you wanted to do or you was kind of forced on you to stay with labs or

i'm just curious where did that come with the site to uh to use labs over you know a traditional patrol dog when you were starting so our our initial the initial idea you know of course we're we're parks and wildlife we're a we're a game agency and we got 13 non-law enforcement divisions within our apartment and so the idea was hey we want floppier dogs because we don't want to have the image of a scary point of year dogs and so that's how the initial idea got started so we started with labs and

then we just progressed to stay with labs we've tried different options we've certainly considered the point of year route but with us being primary mission search and rescue yeah it works best for us to have that flexibility and they're they're really so reliable in tracking and we kind of got that part figured out that it makes the most sense for us to stay with what we have.

We could go to pointy. We've talked about doing pointy dogs and going the patrol route, but we would lose so many opportunities on the search and rescue side. And quite honestly, all our border work would be very hard to do with patrol dogs the way we do it now. And put you on the spot. You've got a lot of experience between your teams and stuff. Have there been some times where it would have been very, very advantageous to have a patrol-type dog at the end of a track?

Or are you guys, your tactics are such that it hasn't really been an issue? Like you're getting the proximity alert and then you're handling it without having to have the dog go in for an apprehension?

You know you know that out of all our tracks out of the whole team i could maybe think of, maybe three or four times we could have even deployed a patrol dog had we had one okay that's just considered in the situations we've been in and we've tracked you know we've tracked some pretty it's a pretty sturdy criminals over the years yeah but but just has it hasn't been an issue and i bring that up because that's one of those things that makes a lot of people's heads explode because, you know,

they think it's got to be a patrol dog because they got to bite the, you know, at least have the ability to bite the guy at the end. And I know there's quite a few different agencies now that have started to go to labs and, or those types of dogs tracking. And, and there is a very safe tactical way to do it. It's just different, different than doing it with a patrol dog. So it hasn't been a big issue with you. You were your agency, it sounds like.

No, it hasn't. I mean, I get it. If, if I was in a, maybe I was in a certain place and that was, a different kind of, you know, terrain, criminal, whatever. I mean, I'm not against them by any means, but for us, it works very well. I've never felt a situation where all, man, we can't do this because we don't have a patrol dog. We might not do it right now because we don't have the right team, but we can wait and get the right people there and then move forward.

And it definitely would change your tactics. So you're going there knowing that this dog's not going to make an apprehension. So we're going to stay back and use him as a proximity alert and I assume order the suspect out.

So, I mean, those are tactics that I would encourage, you know, for people who are listening, if you have a patrol dog and you're tracking, it wouldn't hurt to learn these same tactics just to be able to employ maybe some of that thought process as opposed to, I think sometimes we're guilty of chasing the bite with a patrol dog and maybe instead of slowing it down and ordering the suspect out, people go straight in for an apprehension, which since it's not an option for

you, it doesn't happen that way. So, but I just think it's an interesting topic because I think some, some people get real, real defensive. I'm sure you've, you've seen it, that when you tell them you're tracking dangerous people with a lab. I have. Yeah, we lived it. We lived it with our own department. People, you know, freaking out about, oh, no, I don't think y'all can do that.

And then we, and then we know we went through a period of time where, you know, we'd get on a track and our department, you know, somebody in our department would call and say, hey, no, no, no, y'all can't do that. And so, you know, we could have argued, we could have fought, but instead of doing that, we went through and like I said, set up scenarios in our course specifically for that. So when those people showed up and saw it happen, saw the proximity alerts,

saw us make practical takedowns in reality-based scenarios, it's sold it. Yeah. Yeah. And so they started to trust us and that program has been amazing for our department.

So moving on a little bit, I know that you guys, everybody was just in Loveland last week doing a class and you do it every year. Steve, can you just talk about what that class is? And I know you do it annually and how that kind of came about and what you guys do during the class. Yeah. I mean, this was our fifth year teaching with Jay and then Royce out here. We normally host a two-week class here in Loveland for all the Northern Colorado teams or teams really from across the country.

We've had military teams come to it, teams from Texas, as far away as Maine. They made the drive as long as that is all the way out here to the course. And they come out, it's normally structured where the first week is rural, where we're up in the national park. And so we use the YMCA of the Rockies is nice enough to let us use their facilities and grounds. And so we use hundreds of acres of theirs to be able to track over.

And really the thought process behind that first week is to increase distance and track in some of those rural areas that we may be able to with a little bit of scent discrimination. So you have some other people up there that are running around the property and hiking and everything else. And then, of course, animals and other distractions for the dogs to work through. But nothing like you see down in the city.

And we also track up in the national park. So we partnered with the park service up there and they let us go into different areas of the national park, which is very unique because no dogs are allowed in the national park at all. So they allow us to go up there and kind of the same goals, increase distance and track in some of those environments. And you don't even have to throw a great distance when you're going up and down a mountain. That is taxing enough. Yeah. The dog teams and the dogs.

Yeah. And everything else. So by the time we get done with that first week, everybody is very, very grateful to get out of the mountains. And then the second week is structured where we come down into the city and we start tracking in alleyways and business environments. We show them inside tracking where we're tracking through businesses, into businesses.

And we're going through those different environments with tons and tons of scent discrimination and we go during normal business hours right in the middle of the day and we start working the dogs through those and teaching people how to read the negative. How to add scent discrimination into their current programs and then how they can continue to increase their tracking profiles within their teams. And by no means do we say that you're going to come out finished and done in two weeks.

I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges for most people. They think they can get this done in two weeks, and we try to tell them right up front, and we make it really clear it's a long process. Our initial tracking program, just for our teams internally, it's a full eight weeks within their academy, and then a two-week prior to that eight-week separate training with nothing but tracking.

So we're talking 10 weeks of tracking there, and then coming out of that, we're really running that program for an entire year, phasing from footstep tracking to trailing principles to scent discrimination and you know all kinds of things in between and i assume you know what what your goal this the school is is kind of give them the tools to go home and and keep working on on the stuff and show them you know how to continue

so yeah i know that you know again i know tracking is far from my forte but i assume that most people show up and their dogs can do a footstep to footstep track, But when we start talking about scent discrimination. I think that's where things, you know, is that where I'll ask you, Jay, is that where things start to fall off the rails a lot of times with doing true scent discrimination? And you're talking about environments that you've worked in where, you know, it's on the extreme end.

So when you're up in the national park, it's probably not as hard, but is that, is that like the first hurdle that you have to go over to get for people to take the next level of tracking? Yeah.

Yeah, I think you're kind of spot on there with the, a lot of the teams that we see are going to come in and they've got like, I don't know, it's like the training is coming from a sporting background, you know, tracking to flags, like, you know, in a kind of soccer field type situation and a lot of treats and scuffing a lot and that kind of thing. And really, it's just operationally, it's not going to get really weird.

And so the first, I mean, again, of course, So then again, I go to the first day, nobody's going to talk to each other, everybody's best friends. And, you know, so, you know, literally just, you know, a couple of assessments and then we get into it. And I think like, I mean, for me personally, I don't want to speak to everybody. The biggest thing that is, is getting handlers to understand how to work the dog in the different environments.

Sure. You know, like handling really is obviously going to be different to handling in an urban environment. And never mind the threats, I'm just talking about a nice, safe, happy training track and, you know, getting them to understand that and, you know, there's, you really, what tracking comes down to it is you've got to go and, you know, employ the dog and train the dog and get the reps and, well, I suppose, just like anything else.

But for me, tracking is a 3D environment versus lock detection, which is more of a 2D environment or patrol work, which is a 2D environment And yeah, the, the, the same discrimination is, it's just, it really kind of like changes everything.

And, but at the same time, I mean, a hundred percent used to be the guy that was terrified of doing urban tracks and I avoided it as much as I could because I just, I just didn't have the comfort that I could go and do a trap through that kind of environment.

You know my my kind of tracking background is in northern ireland with the british army and you know we're going after the ira there and you know i just it was awful i yeah you know i knew deep down that i couldn't track you know if it was a green grassy field you know the rolling hills of northern ireland break and as soon as i had to go into a village it was like yeah but i just didn't have the confidence to do it and so that was like my foundation and you

know now like i i It doesn't even bother me when I think about the urban stuff. I think it just comes down to just approaching the training appropriately and you can get the dog through it. If the dog wants to track and the handler wants to track and they want to put the effort in, you'll get through it. Like this course that Steve was describing, I mean, you're blown away at day one. Some dogs that really are just basic average tracker dogs at the end of the two weeks.

And I don't want to say this is like every single dog, but there are some dogs at the end of that two weeks that could not track at the beginning that are tracking hard surface extremely well, nose down. And they're going for a good half mile through, you know, really urban environment and crushing it. And the hand, it's a, it's a double blind and it's just, it's really appealing to see that. And, you know, but obviously it's a, you know, not every dog can do that. And some dogs struggle.

And yeah, I appreciate what you said. In that that you didn't have that confidence because I know that there's people who are listening to this that you know have good dogs are driving around listening to this podcast and they've got a good dog in the back of their car and they're happy with the patrol side and maybe happy with the detection side but if they're being honest they probably feel exactly how you did it's like yeah we do a little bit of tracking here and there but you know

I'm not sure if he could really track through you know an urban environment or track you know down the middle of an alley or something like that so i think i appreciate you know you kind of saying that's not you know you felt that way and i think a lot of people feel that way and that there is you know there's training that can be done for most of the dogs you know to get them up to that that speed uh royce i assume you kind of deal with you know the same the same kind of scent discrimination if

we go back to that is there stuff that you do to start the dog off with to start keeping them on one track as opposed to going off on any different tracks? Yeah, no. You know, we started doing traditional split tracks with our dogs. And with my first dog, I was much more religious with it and took more step-by-step process. You know, honestly, I learned from Steve when we met up in Utah a lot of those basic scent discrimination concepts.

And then down here, we ended up tracking a lot of groups. So what we found was that tracking the groups sorry my wife's trying to feed my dog that's right yeah. Tracking groups, we found that the dogs will pick out a single person out of the group and stick with that person. So we might, you know, if there's a group of eight, we may track past two or three or four that the guide is trying to leave behind to kind of slow us down.

And for some reason, she picks them out. And that wasn't trained by us. It's just how it naturally works out. And so then we, you know, so that they do it on their own.

And then they'll stick through that, through contamination. you know say let's say a through a perimeter they just kind of stick on the person that they're tracking and go with it and then we just reinforce it as they do if they do it we know it or we do it in training as we practice it so that's really the way we trained it the other thing we had to do is come back and go back to those basic principles when it when that stuff slows down and

we want that one guy you know running from you know a house in town and super urban got to go back to those same split track principles and go through them all over again and teach them okay this is the one we want you to find, not just take one yourself. Yeah. And when you're, again, like going back to, you know, people are showing up for a class that you're teaching, is that the stumbling block that you're seeing also of just dogs not being able to follow the track you want them to track?

I won't speak for all of us, but I think we'd all agree that most of the dogs pick up the discrimination pretty quick once you show them the principles and reward them for the right decision they pick up that concept very quickly when it's trained correct when it's trained right but is that a weak link of the the key there is the training and doing it correctly is that and i'm just taking a stab at it because like i said it's not my forte

but i see i just see that that's something i've seen people kind of struggle with staying on the you know turns and and the correct track and cross tracks i i think just a lot of people aren't confident in how to you know how to implement it yeah so they just don't they just do the tracking that they know how to do which is exactly where where we all were at some point in our life i mean there was a point in my time when i was told by.

Extremely experienced people that i respect that you couldn't do some discrimination tracking you'd never you'd never do it yeah and you know then i found people that were actually putting it in practice. And I went, Oh, I, uh, I don't know what I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So Steve, you, you mentioned a phrase, a track in the negative. Can you kind of explain what you, what you mean by that? Yeah. I mean, we used to, like you talked about, what's the biggest stumbling

box and hurdle. I think so much of that is the handler. Like everything else in canine, you know, where the weak link and just training the handler to see the negative. And when I first started, we were taught to look for the tracking behavior and that the dog had to be within six inches of the track at all times. In fact, we would correct them back onto the track.

And so we brought those same parade field practices from that to urban tracking and it just doesn't look the same like the odor goes all over the place and it blows in other areas and it can be way more than six inches it can be you know across the parking lot it can be wherever the odor is going to blow and collect and really learning about the skin cells and and you know the other things that the dogs are following they're not just the ground

disturbance so in that we changed the mindset for the handler to stop looking about when the dog's tracking and just their tracking behavior and really look for the negative, especially. And when you say, just to be clear, when you say negative, that's when the dog's not on the track. Correct. So they're going to show up behavior saying I'm getting out of the track or I passed the turn, right? I missed the track there or I'm running out of odor. And that's what we describe as the negative.

Yeah. And it can be everything from their head going up to a change in pace to start looking in the other direction, wanting to pull in other ways. And so we teach and emphasize the negative behavior and even praise the negative at points to show a more pronounced negative, or we call them negative drills, where we show the dog to show pronounced negative behavior. And then you'll see them cut back or we help them cut back initially onto the track faster.

And especially in urban environments, you're going to blow out of that track at some point, either at an intersection where there's heavy contamination or a 90 degree turn or they jump a fence. Like you may continue forward for a little ways before the dog shows you they're out of odor and that's what we're describing as the negative.

And then when they're, so when they're tracking though in this theory, you're just kind of leaving them alone and letting them, because they're naturally doing what they do, and then you're just watching for them to tell you, okay, I don't have any odor here. And then at that point, that's when you kind of start casting them into different areas to try to reacquire the track.

Yep. And so a lot of urban, we changed the terminology because if you look at a lot of the manuals and books, the casting techniques are in circles and everything else. And so we coined the phrase closing the door.

And if you think of an intersection, like a four-way intersection, if you come up and, you know, it's the right side of the intersection and the dog shows you negative, we close the door on that section, we move to the next section of the intersection and we start looking to reacquire the track, which really at that point is just restarting the track. And all tracks start at either 90 degrees, 45 degrees, or flat directly onto the track. So if they can restart the track, they can reacquire it.

Or even go and show you that there's negative, that there are no tracks out there. You know, I had one right after we got our search and rescue dog. It was in the middle of COVID where they said a lady had left the facility. She had dementia. And so I got called out and they said, we're pretty sure she went out this door, but the camera's not working.

And so I started going around the building and my dog Jojo kept saying there's no track there so she would go negatives all the way around so I tried cutting it again going the other direction negatives all the way around and then I did it one more time just for you know good luck or not and again it was negative and ultimately we we did a interior track and locate and found her inside the building and the amount of resources that we were calling

out I mean we're calling out drones and additional cops and search teams and just be being able to say, Hey, there's not a track here is just as important as being able to say that the track goes this way or, or vice versa. And then I guess the successful part of that story is that she'd be exposed to it. So tracking on carpet inside a building, you know, it was just a different environment. She didn't eat grass. So she successfully tracked inside the building once you went back.

She did. Yeah. She, you know, when I first heard it, I'm like, dogs can track inside. Are you kidding me? But then I look back at my dope career and my explosive career and the dogs had been tracking us long before I ever wanted to admit it. I mean, if you think that, you know, you've done hides before and you've seen those dogs that you got to walk the whole building because they'll start tracking you and figure out where the height is right away.

If you only go into one room, they run to that pretty quick. And so when we first heard it, I don't know that I was a huge believer. I had to see it. we had to train it and everything else. And this was our first operational one that we found. And I was a huge believer after that. But the lady was staying on the third floor. It was where her room normally was at. And the facility, of course, said they had checked all the rooms and everything, but it was right during the height of COVID.

And so they wouldn't go into any of the COVID rooms. And they didn't tell any of the police officers that, of course. So once I figured out there wasn't a track outside, I started working the elevator from her room and running my dog on each floor. Well, we went down the next floor and got a track and we hooked in, went to basically what would have been her same room, just a floor down. And it happened to be one of those COVID rooms. And she was inside that person's

room, just laying on the floor. Yeah. And I think that's a great story. And it shows so many different things about, you know, the scent discrimination, the different surfaces. And, and like you say, I, when I first heard about some of this, I was a little skeptical too, but then just like you said, I thought at different times doing, especially doing detection, you know, we weren't doing any patrol stuff and dogs, our dogs, it didn't even, we didn't even train them to track.

I'd watch them track down the carpet of the elementary school we were training in because, and they look for which room we walked into. So definitely it's a very viable option that I don't think it's used quite enough. And I know in the class that you guys do, you end up like at big department stores and you mentioned businesses and stuff.

When you get to that type of stuff, Jay, you know, what's your goal, you know, when you're going through a big department store, is it just to expose the dog to more different sense and different, I assume different surfaces and just teach the dog you can work through that hard environment no i think for me personally it's going to be you know getting that confidence from the handler as early as possible so they can see that the dog can do it i mean that's you know 20 years ago that was me you

know i didn't believe they could do it and somebody showed me and i was thrown away and you know here we are today but i think you know that handler confidence and the belief is a big part of the success i think the dogs are going to do it you know we'd like totally underestimate what they can do and a lot of the deficiencies that we come across in the training we've created ourselves you know indirectly but no i think for me.

You know, leading the hand to see that the dog can actually do it in a very basic format, you know, whether it's lining out along the side of a building or the side of a curb, you know, with a turn, the dog shows a negative, then takes a turn and then, you know, is rewarded for doing it. The hand is where you see, oh, wow, they can do it. And there's people walking around and whatnot.

And, you know, obviously not every dog is, you know, super advanced and ready to go and, you know, do a certification track to the city.

So the less experienced handlers and less experienced dogs we want to show them what that looks like but once that confidence comes in that handler really they're hungry for it then they start enjoying it it's not this massive hurdle for them to cross within the Monday we're doing maybe 20-30 yard tracks but by Wednesday we're doing intersections and crossing roads and going through buildings and you know and it's the same dog and the guys are blown away by how sophisticated the tracking

is you know that i'm not saying they're ready for certification or anything a lot of those tracks you know kind of like known steve's got a great expression and playing that he uses it's 50 50 for the 50 50 track you know obviously uh 50 percent known 50 percent unknown and you know they'll go through and do those and I totally steal that and I do give Steve credit for it because he deserves it and.

No, it does. Honestly, that's one of the best drills you can do with a handler is give them those 50-50 drills. You get a good start. They know where the first turn is. They get comfortable into it and they can work through it. And then the blind comes in and they don't know. Then they've got to handle it. And then the muscle memory is there and the confidence is there because they've had a good start. They can see the dog's on track and then they finish strong.

And that's what they retain, the handler and the dog. And it's powerful. And I don't want to devalue urban tracking, but I genuinely feel that a tracker dog is a tracker dog. And the environment that you're tracking in, as long as the dog has been trained and the foundational work is solid, that dog will track in whatever environment it needs to.

And you've just got to expose it to those different environments so that it can have the confidence to do it, which obviously in turn feeds confidence into the handler. And one of the expressions that I'm not a big fan of is, trust your dog. And I can see Stephen Royce right now probably cringing at me. You go to the conferences and everybody's saying, trust your dog, your dog's nose knows, and trust the nose and all this stuff. And everybody's got the cool expression.

I don't trust the dog. And I trust the training. And I think if you trust your training, your dog will be successful. And what I can say about Steve and Royce is both of them do high quality training and that's why their dogs perform and their unit dogs perform to such a high standard. It's because they do the training. And I think, you know, the hand of confidence is pretty much the most important part of it. Yeah.

Royce, on that note, Royce, I know your primary job obviously is training the tracking part of it, but from doing another training and, you know, being well-versed in this, if somebody who's listening to this works a dual-purpose dog or a single-purpose dog or a bomb dog, whatever, what do you think how much time, say once the dog is through a class and he's up there for the maintenance training, how much time per week would you say on average, would you have to devote to

keeping the dog up and running really tightly on tracking? That's a tough question. Sure. Like all tracking, it's such a variable. But I mean, I would say as much as you possibly can that the dog still enjoys it. And you can get away with it. And I don't know how else to put it.

I mean, if you're doing at least a couple tracks a week, and definitely quality over quality, if if you do one long reality based track a month but you do all foundational stuff like, real solid foundational work three weeks out of the month you're probably going to be a lot better off than the worst thing i see is every time you know we train one day a week and that one day a week we throw like the whole book at

the dog yeah yeah and then they show up to class and they're I'm like, man, this is, this is a struggle for whatever reason. They, they tried to throw the book at him every time the dog either doesn't want to track anymore because it's so frustrated or the handler is so frustrated or the handler hasn't been honest about their training. That's one thing about that.

I try to push a lot when we talk about sin discrimination and urban tracking, like all the store, you know, the big store tracking, interior tracking, you have to be, you have to be real with, real with yourself and honest about your training. You know, we, all three of us, I know I just saw, I didn't have a dog with him, but Steve had his dog with him and, and we ran a track that. It just wasn't adding up. The dog just wasn't doing it for that track at that

time. And it was based on age and a ton of contamination. And he was like, this just isn't working. This isn't tracking. And so to have that humility about him to say, this isn't working. So we just stopped and reset up the scenario in a way that is right for the dog at the time. And that kind of training, if you can do that once or twice a week, that's way better than every eight. Yeah, yeah. Do the quality. It's all about quality over quantity. Like everything, you know, in K9.

For sure. I always talk about that for detection stuff. If you put out one hide with a purpose and you're working on something real specific, I'll take one hide over that. Than six that you walk down in elementary school and throw them in the teacher's desk drawer in every other room and say, I've done all my dope searching that day.

So I'm sure it's the same principle. So Steve, I know that you're helping put the Colorado Canine Conference together and the three of you are all going to be doing like one day tracking intensive classes at the seminar. So if you come to the Colorado Canine Conference, you'll have the opportunity to work with all three of these guys together go spend the day from about 10 a.m. till about 9 p.m. with your dog.

In that kind of environment, Steve, obviously you're going to be kind of drinking from a fire hose, but what are you guys hoping to do on those days? Yeah, I mean, so we were talking about this when we were just out here in the class, not knowing exactly who's going to show up to class and what their skill level and everything else is. But we obviously called the class tracking the negative.

So we wanted to be able to show people if they're ready for it, what the negative looks like, where you can go from there. At least go over the basic overviews of scent discrimination and how they can add it into their tracking profile. And if they're not tracking at all, if they're brand new, how do I start? Where do I start? All of those things. So we got some phenomenal locations coming up for the conference. We have the entire property of UNC campus, Ames Community Campus.

Both very very large campuses in our area so everything from graphs and soccer fields literally there to sidewalks and urban areas if the teams can handle it so between the three of us we're kind of planning to be able to split up a little bit yeah and and give each team what they need and then still keeping the group sizes small enough so that we can do it one day is a big feat we know that so give them as much information as we can without overwhelming them too yeah Yeah,

and it'll kind of follow along with what we're doing here at the conference is, you know, working on critical skills and trying to put more tools in the toolbox. Yeah, and then also, you know, part of it is just that, you know, getting other resources and people I can talk to and, you know, come to the class and go, who can I call if I have this question or where do I progress from here? You know, I've done the two-person split track, what's next?

Or I'm looking to track with Labradors and non-bite dogs, what does that look like in my program? I want to track with bite dogs, what does that look like? And just having resources that they can also call to help them with some of those questions, I think is another thing they're going to get out of it. Okay, so wrapping things up, I think we've kind of hit on all the different notes and stuff. So Jay, is there anything you want to kind of wrap up with before we end this?

No, I mean, if there's anyone who's listening that's coming to the conference. Obviously super keen to work with them and help them out. And just like any kind of training course, just come with an open mind. And we're looking forward to anybody who wants to come and learn about tracking. And I think one of the things that we've agreed on tonight is that humility.

I certainly don't think that I know everything about tracking and I don't know, Stephen Orschfield, the same way, we're constantly trying to learn. And anybody who comes to the course, we can help you out and we should get something and just give us a chance is what I'm asking.

Because I feel like the three of us, you know we do some good work with tracker dogs and the proof is in the pudding and we can practice what we preach looking forward to the conference a lot and uh people hear me say it a lot of times at the conference but steve you've been a tremendous help when i told you i wanted to bring it up here to loveland you have so many contacts it's been you you made a phone call and we got three different large schools

all within a block of each other and you've got a college campus and your contacts and your, your, you know, your reputation with the community is going to really make this a great event. We guys aren't going to have to drive all over, all over the place to go to different stations and get a lot of work in. So it's, I'm really looking forward to it.

About a couple of months, you guys will all be back here in Colorado. So I appreciate everybody jumping on today and, you know, talking a little bit about tracking and I'm really looking forward to doing some of the hands-on stuff with you guys. So thanks guys us for taking the time today and be safe as our bay kind of spreads back out across the country. Awesome. Thanks, Jeff. We appreciate you. Yeah, Jeff, thanks very much. See you in July.

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So check out catsplatinum.com for your record-keeping needs. And then finally, I want to talk about canineservices.com. So k-9services.com. Kevin Sheldahl is down in New Mexico in the Albuquerque area. He sells dogs. He also has courses available. So if you need to do a canine course, either for patrol or detection, he runs several of those every year down the Albuquerque area. So you can go there, get a dog, and run through the entire course all on one-stop

shopping. He also will come to you and do a seminar or even an audit of your agency or unit. He also has an online course. So he's got an online detection course. So check out canineservices.com or give Kevin a call at 505-250-4576. Thanks, everybody. Be safe. Music.