September/October 2007

Trainin’ Dogs With Rick Smith
Stopping On Scent
by Rick Smith & Sharon Potter

cent is one of the truly fascinating things about dogs: Their whole world revolves around their noses. If there were some way we could put ourselves in a dog’s body long enough to discover what it’s like to receive so much information from one little sniff, what an incredible experience that would be! The very best tracking dogs have the capability to track human scent from something as miniscule as skin cells flowing through a car’s ventilation as it speeds down the highway. The power of the canine nose is beyond amazing.

What’s really amazing, however, is that knowing what we do about a dog’s scenting ability, many people still don’t trust it to find birds. Humans project their limits onto their dogs and want them to get in close enough to the bird that they could find it without the dog, rather than trusting the dog to use its wondrous nose and stop on scent. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a dog, doesn’t it?

A good bird dog should stop on scent, and that means first scent – not waiting until it gets stronger. The closer the dog gets to the bird, the likelier it is the bird will flush, and that costs us the shot in most cases. Bumping or spooking a bird and making it run is not conducive to shooting opportunities. Anything a dog does that costs us a shot, the dog should not have done.

Back to SO07 TOC