The Dog Charmer by Tom Shelby

Teaching Your Dog to ‘Go Find’

I was at a dinner the other night and one of the guests evidently heard that I’m a dog trainer and did K-9 SAR (search and rescue) for many years. She has a French bulldog—which, by the way, has recently replaced the Labrador retriever as the most popular dog in the U.S.—and she wanted to know how to teach a dog to “go find.”

I told her that as we were sitting at the dinner table we were dropping 40,000 dead skin cells a minute and the average mid-sized mutt probably has more than 200 million olfactory cells in his nose, while we two-leggeds have about 5 million. I also told her that the part of a dog’s brain that discerns what the smells are is about 40 times larger than a human’s, relatively speaking. It was Mark Twain who said, “If dogs could talk, no one would own them.” So when you come home and your dog smells your pants, he knows where you were, who you touched and what you ate.

So, how to get started? Very simply, have someone hold your dog back, or, if he’s obedient, have him sit and stay while you let him smell your hand with a small piece of hot dog or dog treat in it. Then back up while happily telling him he’s going to “go find” the treat and let him see you place it out of his sight behind a shoe or chair leg or whatever. Then release him with the words, “Go find!”

After a couple of those, let him see you look like you’re bending down and placing three or four treats in different spots, but only place one, in one of the spots. That’s the point at which he’s really going to start using his nose to find the treat. The key is to have success build on success as you make the “find” more and more difficult. 

It’s my poodle, Paula Jean’s, favorite game. I tell her to “lie down” and “stay” in the kitchen while I go upstairs and hide a treat in one of the three bedrooms or two bathrooms. Then I yell, “Okay” (a release from stay) and “Go find the treat.” She charges up the stairs and usually finds it in a few minutes. She also taught me that I can’t just walk into one room and place the treat, because she’ll track me to the one spot and find it immediately. I have to walk in all the rooms several times, making sure I’m not in the room with the placed treat last.

In terms of searching, I also informed the guest that she has a brachycephalic dog, the type of breed with the pushed-in nose, like bulldogs, and they’re not quite as good at searching as the non-brachycephalic breeds. 

Readers, FYI, my Doberman, Michelle, found two people alive and several bodies. My Doberman Michael tracked a woman 11 miles. More to come.

Tom’s book, “Dog Training Diaries,” was judged as one of the three best training books by Dog Writer’s Association of America. Tom Shelby, “The Dog Charmer” Cooperstown author, answers pet owners’ questions on training their dogs. E-mail your questions to dogsrshelby@msn.com