Jerry,
I want to first thank you for your time for putting on the NTPDA seminar through our department. I want to start out by saying, unlike others who may have attended the seminar, I didn’t already know everything you were teaching. I enjoy learning different training techniques that way I can implement them into our training and hopefully improve the quality of our dogs. One of the best things I learned from the seminar and looking back on it now seems common sense when you think about it, was the way we as trainers need to be setting up training scenarios for the scent dogs, especially the EOD dogs. Ever since attending the seminar, I have begun implementing the way you said EOD scenarios need to be conducted. I have increased in size and in frequency the amount of blank areas that are being searched by the explosive dogs prior to actually finding a hide. I can speak from personal experience, I have seen a change in the way my K9 partner Ryker works after just a few sessions of increasing the blanks. This will help out tremendously when we have to do stadiums or large venues. The one thing that I think could be improved on when we host the next seminar is the work stations that were set up. I loved the way we had numerous stations throughout the building and the fields but I think with a class the size of the one we had, we need to start teams in different stations at the same time and have them rotate instead of having every team start at station one. This would cut down on some of the idle time and keep the K9 teams more active. I think we as a hosting department, can help this process out better next by having stations labeled and assigning teams to different stations. All in all, the seminar was great and I had a wonderful time. Thanks for allowing me to apprentice as a NTPDA evaluator which I wasn’t expecting, I truly appreciate it.

Thanks,
P/O Charles Farley
Baltimore City K9 Unit