Does anyone on here do any shed hunting with their dogs?
I’ve just gotten into it over the last couple months. I’ve got a training antler (fake) and some of the Dokken Rack Wax. My dog (6yo Aussie x Bernese) has been having a blast. We’ve got 4 acres, one acre of lawn and 3 acres of brush/swamp. I can hide it anywhere and she’ll find it in a matter of minutes. It’s a lot of fun to watch, her tail never stops wagging, and when she winds it her eyes light up.
I think our next step will be to introduce a real antler, and then we’ll do some off property searches with the training antlers.
We won’t be able to actually go out looking for real sheds until Mar/April, unless we have a year with very little snow.
I’ve never heard of shed hunting, it sounds like fun. Thanks for posting this, I am routinely amazed at all the different activities people can do with their dogs.
I am sure it is fun; although I am curious how interested the dogs would be to find sheds versus other wildlife once they get in the woods?
My brother hunts for sheds on his own; he’s an avid deer hunter who owns about 150 acres. He keeps tab on the deer population with game cams and likes to look for the sheds and match them back to the videos. It’s amazing how many he finds. I’ve never found any…but I suppose he knows where to look.
I’ve known about it for quite awhile, but never got around to picking anything up for training. I was also hesitant as we’ve got a couple skulls with antlers attached on display in the house, as well as a couple sheds sitting in the garden as decoration. She’s shown interest in them, but knew they weren’t for her. I didn’t want to confuse her, but so far she seems fine. She knows now that when we’re looking for a shed in a training run that we aren’t looking for the one sitting on the rock by the garage door :lol:
My dog has enough of a prey drive that she’ll chase a squirrel up a tree, or chase a rabbit for 25’, etc. We’ve come across deer in the bush before and she leaves them alone.
So far it seems to be far more exciting for her than regular scent work. There’s a prize at the end. She isn’t smelling out the shed to please me, she’s doing it because she wants that antler. I’ve trained her to retrieve them and she trades it for a treat, or I throw her ball (which she’s obsessively in love with).
We’ve done one training run off property. I let her run around for a few minutes to burn off the excitement of being somewhere new, and then I had her come to me and sit, and I said “Where’s the antler?”. She switched to business mode, and quickly found the antler.
My SO and my dad are both avid hunters. SO is actually away moose hunting right now (I’d love to find a couple of those antlers). They’ve both got trail cams set up 24/7 365, so we have a pretty good idea of where the deer winter. It’s difficult to find sheds, your eyes start playing tricks on you. A dog’s nose would be super helpful!
I’ve always wondered how hard it would be to teach a dog to find horseshoes (a shed of a different color?). Do you think there’s any parallel here? (I can see that the dog would not particularly “want” that shoe as it would an antler, but . . . )
I’m sure it’s been done. I suspect many dogs wouldn’t want to pick up a metal shoe. But it could probably be done like regular scent work where the dog signals when they’ve found something.
I found this kind of curious. I do scentwork with my dogs and there is a payment on alert and a party when we’re done :applause: The ‘prize’ in scentwork, depending on what type you are doing, can be as big as you want it to be as long as the search area is not contaminated or disturbed.
I stopped barn hunt because you can’t pay in the ring. I do AKC and NACSW and both allow rewards in the search area as long as you don’t drop anything
Your dogs don’t find the rat to be a payoff? I mean, I know they can’t eat it, but my dogs went nuts in barn hunt. Our issue was that they got DQd because they wanted to pee on the hay. (That’s a tough rule for males, in my opinion. I wish they allowed belly bands).
No belly bands in AKC or NACSW either. Many believe that if the dog is really working, peeing shouldn’t be on their agenda.
Of my two BTs, one, I am sure, cataloged all the rats (ie finding them just not bothering to tell me about them) and then went visiting the judge and rat wrangler. The other was so overwhelmed by all the people hanging over the enclosure railing that there was no searching (I wasn’t gonna do that to him).
I’ve done off-leash with my social butterfly and he’s all about finding source and getting paid and yes, there is at least a judge in the search area (if off-leash is allowed). No social butterfly behavior as he knows he’s getting paid.
Some people feel that BH isn’t the same as a real ‘hunt’ as the prey is safe in a tube and can’t/doesn’t run away or really move. The rats are amazingly chill (if you haven’t watched BH before). They get cycled out every few dogs and are total fine with the tube being picked up and mauled. So a different dynamic than, say, looking for vermin in a barn or field.
Both my BTs are ‘catalogers’ and fairly detail oriented but they’re happy to search and source to odor.
FWIW, both of mine are pretty interested in whatever vermin are in my back yard. Early this year one of them (neither fessed up to it) scored a rat (eww, at least they didn’t bring it in the house or eat it and puke it up :lol: ). One, again no confessions, either mauled or scared a mouse that I found deceased on the other side of some low fencing I use to keep the boys out of my plants. My environmentally reactive boy sure gets interested in rabbits… my social butterfly I think isn’t interested in the rabbits until they move. But both, at night, will go out and troll the yard before bedtime. Who knows what they are doing
I’ve seen other dogs that, yes, finding the rat is the score… but not mine. Getting paid appears to be more their game plan. Because sheds are similar to scentwork, ie, they don’t move, the payment/party should, I would think, transfer fairly easily.
My terrier mix did not. We got a couple easy ribbons until he figured out I wasn’t going to open the tube and let him have the rat. He would stare up at me waiting :lol:. Once he learned trials are not real life, he thought the whole thing was an exercise in futility. I did not think of his background until after he stopped indicating. In SoCal, the grounds crew would take him while I finished stall, gather all of the rat traps, and release them in the arena for my dog to dispatch. I had no idea.
So rats in tubes we do NOT open… stupid human games :lol:.
I should rephrase. I reward her when she finds the antler, just like I would with regular scent work. But she also thinks the antlers themselves are a prize. She gets to pick them up and carry them to me. Similar to a retriever retrieving a duck. There’s something tangible for her to find, pick up, and show off to anyone who she finds (aka me :D).
I suspect that if she found a random shed back behind the house on her own that she would bring it home and chew on it.
Funny you bring up barn hunt. I tried it once with this dog at a “fun day”. She wasn’t interested once she realized that she couldn’t chase or touch them.
Some dogs excel at Barn Hunt while others don’t perceive it as a ‘game’ because the target doesn’t move and, at least in my case, no payment… having the party after you get back to the car didn’t sell my social butterfly.
Scentwork, they’re both all over payment at source and extra payment and party leaving the search area. At least it is fresh in their mind what they just finished (that 3 second rule thing ).
What you could try, at least during training for SW, is when your search is done… give your girl an antler to carry out of the search area. One of the ladies I train with has a Mal that ‘loves’ her small flexible frisbee. I don’t usually get to see her compete but in class… as soon as the ‘Finish’ is given, that frisbee is tossed and her Mal carries it back out to where we’re hanging out (social distancing and all).
The challenge might be to keep that antler in a safe place until you pull it out and reward… might be worth a try if you wanted to try SW again.
Our dogs naturally hunt sheds b/c they have been chewing on an antler shed for nearly 10 years lol. They always bring them back and we reward them, they get to keep the new softer ones and if they bring in an old/dry/impressive one we give them a treat and keep it. This is totally amateur hour in our case but if they can train dogs to find bedbugs it’s pretty reasonable to teach them to find sheds. Where I live people will pay good money for them and a dog can cover a lot of territory. We taught it to our Blackmouth Cur on purpose but all the dogs will bring some in if given the chance. Ours find them year round, spring is best obviously but any time we are out in the mountains we invariably get one or two. Heck we get them out of our pastures and our lawn here.
We had a lab growing up who would bring them home all the time, she would usually try to hide them though. On two occasions she brought home an entire skull with antlers attached. They sat up on top of the fence posts along the driveway for years.
I find the training itself to be a lot of fun. Today I put the antler in a puddle, it was fully submerged and she had no problem finding it. I don’t help her at all, she’s so fast that she’s usually out of sight when she finds it.
SO is away moose hunting right now. He shot a good size bull yesterday. When they were taking it from the camp to the truck his uncle got a little too close to a tree with the atv and snapped one of the antlers off. Whoops! Oh well, now I have a moose antler for training.
Don’t underestimate the abilities of a dog nose. Cadaver dogs can find deceased people under water (rivers, creeks, lakes, etc). I believe that cadaver dogs have also found many years old remains that were buried next to a tree (believing that the odor of decomposition was carried up the vascular system of the tree from the roots to trunk, branches, leaves).
I personally think their ability to sniff odors and separate them out into discrete odors is more powerful than how we see color (they don’t see the full color range that we do).
Bedbugs, cancer, diabetes, COVID, detection of a bacteria in citrus trees that is putting the US citrus (mostly oranges) at risk. Citrus greening or HLB disease where normal diagnosis is getting tissue from a tree and testing it - dogs can be trained to detect the bacteria in the orchard.
Dogs, they’re not just for bombs and drugs anymore :lol:
As I watch my dog work, I can see him detecting odor direction… up, down, left, right… I watch his changes in behavior from when he gets into odor and follows it back to source. Fun to watch as he works out the scent puzzle.
@GoodTimes I don’t remember if I’ve read this one but I’ve read a few books on canine noses and searching.
I love watching my boys work. My older has his NW1 and AKC SWE with a few Masters Q’s but no Masters titles yet. Last year was ‘his’ year.
This year is my younger (relatively) BT’s turn (he’s actually a better worker). We have a few Novice titles, Buried and Container, so getting ready to compete in a mix of Novice and Advanced. But, the class I train with is more Excellent/Masters level searches so my boy is getting asked questions above his competition level (I figure if we don’t Q in our next trials, its gonna be ‘bad mommy’ because he knows his job. :lol: )
It’s definitely a learning process as much for me as it is for him.
Agreed. I’ve seen a photo in a book of a dog retrieving a bird on a hunt, and while on the retrieve, pointed another bird of a different species with the first still in its mouth.
It’s sort of mind boggling to think about how their sense of smell works when you see something like that.
Right now we’re working on two skills… converging odors (two different sources but the odor plumes overlap) and the concept of you get paid only the first time you find source - you can get praise if you go back to it but paid only if you’ve found something else in the meantime (builds on the ‘find another’ which scentwork dogs do as they move up the levels but most other scenting ‘activities’ such as cadavers, drugs, bombs, birds get rewarded really once and then the search is over. In scentwork competition, you may find something but you gotta keep looking as search areas will have more than one source (and at the higher levels, no source).
Interesting skills as they are more conceptual at times.
Mine worked cypress on Tuesday and I’ve never intentionally trialed him on cypress… found it without skipping a beat
).