How to Scent-Train Your Dog

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ty Brown, with dogbehavioronline.com. I'm here in Riverton, Utah today, teaching you how to train a dog. The topic of today's discussion is teaching you how to scent train a dog. In order to scent train a dog all you need is a dog that likes food. If you have a dog that likes food you can scent train a dog. Now what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to get some hot dogs or some other tasty morsel like that, cut them up into very small pieces. And what you're going to want to do is stamp on the ground in a small area, and make what's called a scent pad, and this is where you're putting a lot of your own scent. Now, once your scent pad is made, you're going to drop little pieces of hot dog, or whatever it is all around that scent pad. Bring your dog up to the scent pad and tell him to search. Once he's searching he's going to start finding food and praise him, praise him heavily. Once he gets the idea of the scent pad, then you can start teaching him how to footstep track and actually track that person. And so start off with your scent pad again, but this time take one step away. Get your dog to the scent pad, encourage him to search, and when he starts searching, praise him. And then, if he doesn't find the other piece that's in your other footstep where you left it encourage the dog to continue moving forward, and then he'll find the piece of hot dog that was left in your step. Once he's does that, then you can continue moving on, and teaching him to search further and further distances. So make your scent pad, drop the food, make a step, drop the food, make another step, drop another piece of food, and then continue on in a line. Once he understands that you can start making turns, you can start going over different surfaces. Once the dog really understands the concept then you can start slowly weaning him off the use of the food, and teaching him to train, or to to track, because at the end of the track he's always going to get a reward. Now, that reward might be food, it might be a lot of praise from his owner. Whatever it might be, you're going to want to wean him off of the food so that he just tracks the scent of the person. With a lot of repetition the dog is soon going to associate the smell of the food and the smell of the person, and he's going to realize if I continue following the smell of that person, eventually it's going to lead me to food. And that's how you scent train a dog."