Most people would not have the interest to do obedience with a bloodhound but I see it as a challenge. When you get the bloodhound to do something for you it is worth a lot more than when working with some of the more traditional obedience breeds. Bloodhounds do not particularly posses the will to please their owners, they are very independent. This is why one needs to find the right way to motivate the bloodhound to do tasks.

For me the miracle method has been clicker training. I started training Peppi with a clicker in 1996. First thing was to get her to pay attention to me, after the attention connection was established, I proceeded with training her the correct show behavior (how to halt and pose - this is called auto-stack - and how to trot nicely around the ring with her head and tail up). She adopted this so well that she became a Finnish champion in the next three shows I entered her into and I got commented how beautifully she shows. Before training this our shows were more or less disasterous - the only thing she wanted to do in the ring was to leave it. It is easy to see the difference between a dog that is confident and loves what s/he is doing and a dog that would rather be somewhere else doing something else.

Then we started training obedience, first it was just a fun game but then I decided that we could try competing as well. Well, much to my dissatisfaction she did not do that well in the trials (we competed twice with Novice 3 result). This was because we had always trained alone and never in a group. With just the two of us she did everything beautifully and would have easily scored Novice 1, but when a lot of distraction was added (new environment, strange dogs, people) the nature of a bloodhound won, she got more interested in all what was happening around instead of concentrating on the performance.

Martta has been conditioned to the clicker (= she is familiar with the click & treat connection) from the early age and she also knows the touching stick. She will be trained in a group to avoid the same problem as I had with Peppi. Both her parents have CD titles on them and the trait to be more-than-average-trainable-bloodhound seems to run in the family. Martta shows great attention and is always ready to play with her human. Watch for us in the obedience rings in the future!

Clicker training

• Clicker training
• Conditioning
• Keeping contact
• First training session
• Principles of shaping
• Touch stick
• The word "wrong"
• Can you improve show behavior?
• Eliminating fears

Obedience

• Obedience