Hunt 'em Up!

Basically, training almost any dog to blood trail is simple. It's so simple in fact that I can sum it up in just a few paragraphs. You don't have to own a hound to train your own tracking dog. Any breed with the nose to follow a trail can be trained. I have seen everything from labs to Jack Russell terriers to dachshunds trained to trail deer. I personally have a black lab named "Tilly," and a heeler/shepherd mix named "Diamond Cut." In short, you would start out your training by making a game of it. You could use a strip of bacon or a piece of calf liver tied to a string as your first scent marker. To make sure the dog is following the calf liver or bacon scent and not yours tie the string to the end of a long pole to drag it well away from your own scent trail. Getting your dog fully trained to blood trail takes a lot of time and patience. But knowing how to get the dog motivated to track and stay with the right line from the beginning really pays off when working with hunters to recover their harvest.