Training Tuesday
This one statement actually sums up progression plans, skills development, and about any other large change you want to make in your life. Whether it is losing weight to cleaning up your dog's searching, there are many 'small' behaviors you can work on that will have a large impact.
Start with those.
All of the behaviors we ask our dogs to do are part of a chain. In order to tell us the location of odor/scent they must first hunt for it. Then once they have found the odor/scent, they must source out the strongest concentration, then they must tell us about it.
Think about ALL of the behaviors and skills involved in hunting/searching.

Then all the skills needed to locate the strongest concentration of that odor/scent.
Then the behavior that should be fluently offered once the strongest concentration is found.
There are a million 'small things' incorporated in the the 'big thing' of detection. Our K9 partners are so incredibly talented and forgiving when it comes to training, that we often do not realize when a small thing is skipped.
Strengthening your detection chain requires you to be able to identify and parse those behaviors or skill sets out of the larger chain. Then identify what you want to do or train better, the create a training plan, contingency plan, and get creative about how you are going to generalize all of it!
What 'small thing' are you working on and how does it fit into the 'big thing'?
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