Decided to get into deer recovery/blood tracking (new pup) 2/14 update (End of Season)

Beagles are incredible dogs.

That's a nice shade of blue on your toe nails.

Just curious, where did you get the pup?

There's a few good facebook groups with guys who love to help new trackers train their pups. Louisiana blood trailing network is one. N2G (nose to ground) is another group in Mississippi.

You will enjoy it. I have a bloodhound that is a natural tracker...once he is motivated. He is very strong willed and won’t do anything he doesn’t want to do. My wife has a beagle and she is the exact opposite. She is wide open. She will run a rabbit till she can’t breathe. She has had zero training.
Here is my bloodhound in all his glory.

Long post incoming. This is how I trained my 2 Lacy's, and both are surpassing UBT-2 certification standards at 6 and 8 months old.

I started with short liver drags. Like 10 paces short. Let the line age for a an hour so that the scent isn’t overwhelming, or else the pup will be all over the place. Aging this long won't hurt the puppy. It's nose is probably already fully developed for scenting by now. It's the brain that you're trying to develop with mock tracks.

These short liver drags are meant to just get it excited about tracking. Once it shows enthusiasm, switch to a piece of deer hide. I used the Bone Dog Hunter hides until I was able to get a deer and freeze the hide from it.

Continue with the straight line drags. Drop some blood in the hide and then on the ground every step 

Once your puppy is consistently finding the prize at the end of the line (I use a high value treat like a hotdog wiener or something and TONS of praise), make it longer or the line older. Once you know your pup can handle a straight line, regardless of length and age of scent line, switch to deer hooves and add a turn. I zip-tie mine to the end of a broom handle. 

Your focus is now on the turn. You don’t need to walk a mile and then turn. You can go 20-30 strides, dropping blood along the way, then make a soft turn left or right, walk a few more paces and then drop the treat. 

Make the turns sharper as the pup gets better. 

Once it has that down, you can add a second turn. 

Eventually you’ll want to cross back over the main track, like an “X” shape, add water, and train on some lines where the deer would literally just turn around and walk the same way it came, but that’s way later in training. 

This is called “Modular Training”, where you focus on a single goal (straight line, turn, crossing water, etc) until you’re confident the dog can work through that module in the field. 

I only change one variable each track (length of time the track is aged, distance, amount of blood, number of turns, after a rain, etc.) 

I only do mock tracks maybe once a week, and sometimes every other week depending on my schedule and the weather. I've noticed that if the weather is super hot and humid, my dogs will just lay down without really even trying. I started waking up at 4am to lay my tracks, and run them before it gets hot outside. That fixed the laying down and not trying part.

I never ever ever correct my dogs if they go in the wrong direction. I just let them work it out, and they always find the treat in the end. I always put the same collar on my dogs, always use the same permatack lead, and always use the same tracking vest. When those come out, they go from hyper as hell to straight business. 

My goal is to get them to work through a complete mock track with all modules and no blood, because if there was a good blood trail after the shot, a tracking dog would not be necessary unless the deer just needed to be bayed and finished off. 

Buy the book "Tracking Dogs for Finding Wounded Deer" by John Jeanneney

You can go to a butcher shop and buy beef blood. It doesn't have to be deer blood. Blend it to keep it from clotting, put it water bottles and freeze.

Collect deer legs from deer that you know ran after the shot. The interdigital gland between the hooves puts off a distinct scent when the deer is stressed. This is how the dogs find wounded deer where there is no blood trail to follow.

Oh and use some flagging tape on tree branches or ground stakes so that you remember where the scent line is.

Follow Louisiana Blood Trailing Network, Mississippi Blood Trailing Network, and Arkansas Blood Trailing Network on Facebook. Tons of good info there.

Moar updates pls.