BB’s first exposure to the Randy Hare method
Laura bought some Randy Hare boxes and we pulled BB out to see what he’s think of this method of training. BB is already a trained and certified cadaver dog. It was neat to see that Laura could introduce a distraction into the game almost immediately. We didn’t have any tennis balls on a string handy, so we used a rubber ball on a whip. The whip part was torn off fairly quickly. But that made the ball on a string rather perfect for this purpose.
Tracking nose time and distance
One of the easiest things you can do is track your dog’s nose time and distance. I use a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS mounted permanently on the dog’s trailing harness. Not only does it give a great picture of what the dog has done, but by using the start/stop and lap buttons on the GPS you get useful stats for your logbook. You can read them directly off the GPS or download your tracks and import the data into a spreadsheet or use a GPS sports logging application such as Ascent for the Macintosh or TopoFusion for the PC.
Since Google Earth lets you import GPX files by drag-and-drop, you can also quickly scan your track visually to see your stats:
Start the clock when you harness the dog and stop when the dog finds the subject. Press the lap button between training problems. I find it’s easiest to save all tracks for the same day in the same file. But you could save your your tracks weekly or even monthly, if you so desired.