Talking, well, mostly listening, to Dan, the guy who is the main SAR kennel in the area. He covers parts of five states and was also sent to New Orleans and Mississippi after Katrina and to the bombing site in Oklahoma.
He was sitting at the EMS station I walk past with Kharma every night, on call to go search in case the dude they were trying to talk down off of a bluff went ahead and jumped.
He has 27 Bloodhounds and GSDs and one Lab (retired) that he works with and has trained himself. He's quite smitten with Kharma - we'd met briefly once before and he'd read up on Filas after meeting her - and she liked him well enough to climb up on his lap and slip him the tongue, lol.
Interesting field . . . training wise, we talked some about what his dogs are trained to do and how he does it. I was impressed by the fact that he doesn't expect each dog to be a carbon copy of the other. They are all different, have different strengths, and he's been flexible enough to adjust how he trains according to the dog! That's something I don't often hear trainers do. Most of the time I hear, essentially, my way is the ONLY way and every dog will learn from my way. Period.
When I have a litter from Kharma, I'm hoping to keep a pair of pups for myself, and we talked a little about doing some training work in tracking with them
I'd love, though, to do some with Kharma, and I'm thinking maybe I can cajole him into working with us some, even though he doesn't train other people's dogs anymore.
He was sitting at the EMS station I walk past with Kharma every night, on call to go search in case the dude they were trying to talk down off of a bluff went ahead and jumped.
He has 27 Bloodhounds and GSDs and one Lab (retired) that he works with and has trained himself. He's quite smitten with Kharma - we'd met briefly once before and he'd read up on Filas after meeting her - and she liked him well enough to climb up on his lap and slip him the tongue, lol.
Interesting field . . . training wise, we talked some about what his dogs are trained to do and how he does it. I was impressed by the fact that he doesn't expect each dog to be a carbon copy of the other. They are all different, have different strengths, and he's been flexible enough to adjust how he trains according to the dog! That's something I don't often hear trainers do. Most of the time I hear, essentially, my way is the ONLY way and every dog will learn from my way. Period.
When I have a litter from Kharma, I'm hoping to keep a pair of pups for myself, and we talked a little about doing some training work in tracking with them
I'd love, though, to do some with Kharma, and I'm thinking maybe I can cajole him into working with us some, even though he doesn't train other people's dogs anymore.
