Grading a Schutzhund

Video Transcript

"My name is Phil Hoelcher and this morning and we are going to be talking a little bit about the sport of Schutzhund. We are going to try to show you a little bit about all three phases; the tracking, obedience and protection and give you an idea today a little bit of what the sport is all about. In this type of tracking, it is a unique tracking to a lot of other things like for example, search and rescue or even police work. The accuracy on the track is not what is important; it is just finding whatever you are hunting at the end. So the dogs are allowed to go very quickly. They are allowed to do whatever they want to do to find it. This is graded on accuracy; how well this dog goes down and never leaves the actual track, stays right on it, stays very intense on it, they call it with the deep nose, and will follow the track until the track is finished. Now this would be again the first level Schutzhund 1 dog. The track, a real track in a trial would be just a little longer than this, not much. The track will normally make two lefts, two rights. Today we made a left and a right on turns, and again when this dog would get a Schutzhund 2, the track will be bigger, it will be aged longer after the track layer lays it, they age it for 20 minutes schutzhund 1, 30 minutes for the Schutzhund 2 track which is bigger and in Schutzhund 3 the track will be 500, 600, 700, 800 paces long. It will have anywhere from 3 to 4 turns in it. It will be again an hour or old and just a much more difficult track. If you would like to talk further about Schutzhund or like to know anything else you can e-mail me at philhoelcher@aol.com."