The purpose of the pad is to have the dog discover that there is food in the grass (dirt, etc.), and that if he uses his nose he finds it and eats, which satisfies his hunger drive. It also gives us the ability to know exactly where the scent is and watch as the puppy/young dog discovers that there is no food outside this area and learns to come back into the area if he should leave it during his search. It also gives us the opportunity to build (via opposition reflex) a strong desire on the part of the dog to resist the handler's unwitting attempts to pull him off the track -- a not uncommon event.
If you cannot determine the boundaries of your pad you may use the BBQ skewers to mark the other three corners for the time being. It is more important to know the precise boundaries than worry about extraneous cues. These will be dealt with later.
The flag always ends up in the lower left corner of the pad, as it is supposed to be in trials. That flag quickly becomes a cue to your dog that this is where the food is. This is good -- but can also have a negative impact. Dogs trained with this traditional method of learning the pad search will often become hectic at the start, pull too hard, even lunge to get to the starting flag. This habit is hard to break later on and can translate into rocket-like starts that will cost you points in trial. However, we can still make use of the scent pad exercise with the addition of one simple thing - a baited tail.
What is that?
When they know they are going tracking, many dogs will put their noses to the ground and start searching for the trail on their own. We simply take advantage of that behavior in the dogs that naturally exhibit it and build it in dogs that don't - but in a way that is useful to us for schutzhund.
Instead of just walking in and jumping to the pad area, you walk in and start baiting about 6 feet in front of the pad, walk with very close steps, bait them all and make no jump to the area where you will make the pad. Then you create your pad the same way, jump off and walk away.
What’s the difference?
Scent Pads pg 1, Scent Pads pg 3 , Scent Pads pg 4
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