05/06/2026
Some Notes on GAK9 WI Detection Training
First, there is no such thing as “SAR HRD detection training”, or “police narcotics training”, or “explosives training” or “sport nosework training”, at least in the fundamentals. Naturally, there are differences in the applications, whether it be sweeping a public venue for explosives, searching a vehicle for narcotics, searching for a body in the wilderness, etc. There are even bigger differences in the competency required by K9 teams in the desired specialty. The consequence of an explosives dog missing a find is lost human life. The consequence of a narcotics dog making a false alert is taking away someone’s Fourth Amendment rights. The consequence of a nosework dog missing or falsing is a lost ribbon. However, in all cases, the following initial steps need to be taken:
1. Imprinting – the K9 needs to be taught what its target odor is. (Or, better said, what its target odors are, from a handful for the narcotics K9 to a whole bunch for the explosives K9.) I prefer to do this with either tubes (great for doing the imprinting indoors in the cold upper Midwest winters) or the towel soak method (as taught by Don Blair, extremely fast for any K9 that likes to retrieve).
2. Point-to-point and quartering exercises – teach the K9 to drive to, and measure how the distance at which the K9 can detect a given odor under given conditions. These are done outdoors using the wind. They serve to build drive to odor and turn the K9 into an active searcher instead of a passive local meter. Moreover, quartering exercises are essentially the way in which a wilderness HRD K9 will be deployed.
3. Scent discrimination and proofing – we need to ensure that the K9 is neither alerting to anything used in training (i.e., blank cotton towels, TADD’s, gloves), nor things found on real searches (dead animals, ci******es, food).
The trained final response can be either backchained (trained at the imprinting stage) or frontchained (trained after the K9 is searching for odor). For a K9 that has already had behaviors trained through shaping and actively tries behavior to get reinforcement, backchaining might present less headaches, especially if the dog already understands searching because they are already trailing. For a lower-drive dog, backchaining might induce some boredom when drive for the search needs to be built.
After the fundamentals are built, it is time to train for deployment scenarios. For the SAR HRD K9, there are numerous conferences and seminars that do a great job at this, such as those at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center. In most cases other than nosework, reputable certification is highly desirable and normally a requirement.
