Mounted search and rescue

[SARCRNA@aol.com]

I'd like to jump in and add to Terry's account of his horses.  When I heard about Terry I attempted some clicker training with my horse and targeted the scent source with many repetitions before increasing distance away from it.  Each horse we taught to do this would go to the source and touch with his nose.  We've only attempted this with 2 horses and not much training time as we are a K9 team with many dogs to train.  In our minimal experience we found it was something that horses may accomplish.  We too lost a source which the dogs were too tired to locate in thick heavy brush and trees and the source was hanging which made the scent pool even larger.  The horse (stallion) we used located the source in the tree for us while the dogs were still searching.  The postion of the horse's nose was an advantage to locating the source.  The dogs used were very good at indicating on source yet they had difficulty due to the location. 

 

Target training is demonstrated on our website (ghsd.org) with horses.  There is a video of my horse going to a target stick and touching it, then coming back to me.  Go to ghsd.org, click on pictures and go to the list of Heide/Breley/Jessi which are pics of my dogs.  If you go to the 2'nd page it has the video of my horse--just click on the video and it should play.

 

Susan Martinez

Greater Houston Search Dogs