Bird Dog Training with Scents

With thee aid of microscopes and telescopes, we can see better than the natural vision of any animal on the planet. With sound amplification equipment, we can hear things that no other animals can hear. But we cannot even begin to approach the experience of the what a dog smells when it sniffs the air or ground. The sheer olfactory power of dogs is awesome. Dogs live in a world of smells, and it is a world that we cannot yet imagine.

So while we train using verbal commands to dogs that are not verbal, and hand signals for dogs whose vision is, overall, not quite as keen as ours. But the sense of smell, the dog's strongest sense, is rarely used to train. Almost.

This time of the year we use Lion Country Dog Training Scents quite a bit.With the wild birds are nesting and brooding, we do not bother them.But we do almost bring the experience of grouse to our training dogs.We use up several bottles of LCS Better Grouse scents every summer.
Of course, there are other scents available too, but because we train on grouse, and because we do not have any grouse in the Johnny house, grouse scent is the scent that makes sense to use.

We pour it the pigeon socks, and use it on remote traps. On bad scenting days, we can compensate some by using more of this scent and get good training. The scents can better cover the human scent on some of these gadgets and I truly believe that, while certainly not completely realistic to the dog, the familiarity of these scents does carry over to wild game later, and make the transition easier. No double-blind studies have been done to test this for sure, but from our observation, scents do help.

Ryan Frame,

LCS Elite Staff