Answering this question is a little like the old dilemma of three blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and trying to describe what the animal looks like.

“Tracking” in an historical sense is not a technical term. In our mind, the greatest dog trainer of all time, Konrad Most, took on the subject in the early 20^th Century and simply described it as following a living being through the scent left behind. For some time and continuing today, there were great questions about what the dog was following. Was it human scent, disturbed ground, scent from the clothing worn by humans or, as brought up today, is there some human biochemical character to scent. So the word, “tracking”, doesn't have a specific enough meaning to really help distinguish all the methods that different people and sports organizations use under the umbrella named, “tracking”. Yet we know that Most was after a very practical problem: what is the best method for law enforcement or military trainers to teach a dog how to follow a human being.

Schutzhund was never intended to be a part of this quest; rather, it related to an entirely different concern to dog trainers and breeders. Schutzhund was designed, initially, as a temperament test, one where only dogs that passed could be used for the future breeding of working dogs. The fact that, for the past eighty years, it has also evolved into a sport shouldn't detract from its fundamental purpose. Schutzhund was, and is, interested in testing the nerve, intelligence and physical skills of the working dog. The protection phase tests the courage and hardness of the dog. Obedience defines the fundamental social attitude of a dog as well as its physical coordination. Tracking, while seeming to test only the natural scenting skill of the dog, also tests its nerve in a way that is only apparent to a knowledgeable breeder or trainer.

As Schutzhund became more popular as a sport, the tracking rules became more demanding, so that today we see high scoring dogs working a track from footstep to footstep, following the ground, not the air, scent. To the casual observer, this seems artificially structured and, in fact, many detractors describe this as a style of tracking, “Schutzhund style”, presumably in contrast to “AKC style” or trailing. K-9 trainers might raise this point and say that it really isn't necessary to require such trial like precision. Besides, these dogs are only working the ground scent, which is nondiscriminatory, and the police and military want a dog that can find a specific person, so they need a type of training that teaches the dog to discriminate one scent from another. Good Point! But it doesn't get to the heart of things.

Keep in mind that most dogs have good noses. Certainly some are much better than others, but most tracking work should seem fairly simple for a dog. In Schutzhund, the reason that such precision is required is to see if the dog's nerve can hold up as the tension and pressure mount while the dog is running a track. We have seen any number of well trained, but less than perfectly temperamented, dogs run a perfect track for several hundred feet and then start to become stressed and distracted to the point that they struggled to finish. This is what Schutzhund is trying to find out about a dog, among other things. Can it control its drive? Does it have good nerve? Does it have a good nose? Can it concentrate on one thing, to the exclusion of all else, for ten to fifteen minutes?

A good Schutzhund trainer will start with a young dog and make it nosey. Then with the use of bait, teach it good tracking skills such as moving forward with deliberation. Over time, concentration is developed and the dog is taught it can conquer any problem such as weather conditions, terrain, change of surfaces and passage of time. So at the end of all this training, we should have a perfect tracking dog. Sorry—not so.

We have been told by our German friends that about one-half of the dogs in police work in Germany are Schutzhund trained. But these K-9 trainers understand that they are not ready for street work. This is where the concept of trailing enters the picture. A more modern term than tracking, trailing is generally defined as a dog following the distinctive scent of a single individual. Many will describe it as air scenting and, it is true, a good trailing dog will often carry a high nose and cast away from the ground scent, following the airborne scent left by a human. But, in watching K-9 training and actual street work, a good K-9 will use all of the tools that it understands. So a street dog may cast and work an area several yards from where the “track” is, but then return to search the ground to reestablish the scent. It is not one technique, but a combination of techniques that a working police dog uses to carry out its job.

So if Schutzhund is high school, K-9, search and rescue and specialized law enforcement and military programs for dogs are advanced skills. In short, they take a dog that may already understand Schutzhund tracking and teach it additional techniques that meet the requirements of the professional or service dog trainer. To flip the coin over, we have seen many street dogs that could enter Schutzhund tracking events and finish with high scores. There is no conflict between police and Schutzhund tracking training, only a recognition that they are two different levels of training with very different goals and they can complement each other.

AKC tracking, on the other hand, is a very different breed of cat and we are not totally confident about the answer. The best picture we can make that contrasts AKC tracking with other tracking is our observation of AKC tracking training and trials. We have seen experienced AKC tracking trainers use a stop watch on the track with the idea that the dog that finishes the track first is the best tracking dog. Now if the Schutzhund tracking trainer would use a stop watch, the measure would be the dog that takes the longest time to finish the track being the best dog.

The answer to the question about differences in AKC tracking can be found in watching most AKC tracking dogs. They are more like trailing dogs than tracking dogs, at least within the definitions we use here. Common traits are high energy, high noses and a great deal of casting while running the track. There may be several reasons why this happens.

• AKC has a long history, back into the 1940's. At that time, in Europe, the concepts of trailing were still dominant and consistent with what had gone on in the early years of dog training where dogs were encouraged to work much like a modern police dog with casting, air scenting and a high nose. When watching a modern AKC tracking event, we cannot help but compare the picture to one of early tracking dogs of the 1930's and 1940's. Said simply, AKC tracking used the concepts of tracking as were then known and never evolved. Why would this happen?

• The philosophy of AKC is that tracking is non-competitive. For that reason it is pass-fail with no score assigned. Without the motivation to best each other and work for high scores, dog trainers simply continued to do what was always done.

The real problem may be that many AKC and K-9 trainers are starting with a form of trailing training that skips over the fundamentals that should first be taught to a young, starting dog. If a dog is simply started at this more advanced level, ignoring the development of behavior that is necessary for any good tracking dog, then the trainer is guilty of incomplete training.

To try and answer the question, we think the best starting program for a young dog is to teach it ground scenting first. This promotes fundamental scenting skills and starts to teach the dog to contain its drive. This doesn't mean working many months to develop a good intermediate tracking dog, but, rather, teaching it to follow the primary ground scent with some accuracy and not allowing its drive to externalize, or “leak” as we like to call it. After only a month or two, the trainer should have a dog that understands primary scent, follows it calmly and stays concentrated. At this point, the trainer can then move on to more traditional and advanced work that K-9 or search and rescue requires. It isn't about ground scenting versus air scenting. It is about molding the dog's behavior when doing scent work and ground scent work gives the trainer much more control over this early stage of learning. A complete program of beginning tracking and theory is set forth in Tracking: From the Beginning by Gary Patterson.