Imprinting Dog on Bait

First let's go over what Imprinting is in animal behavior.

Imprinting a dog or animal means to have the animal become accustom to and react to a scent, voice or feeling.

For instance, imprinting a newborn horse or puppy to the human touch gets the newborn use to being handled or touched. Talking to a new dog imprints our voice in that dog’s memory. Using scented bait does the same to the animal’s sense of smell.

In Cadaver Dog training, the training bait (aka source ) is used to imprint the dog on the odor of cadavers and small bits of human remains of different stages of decomposing.

The dog has to know what to look for, we cannot show them a picture like a child and say "see"? But, we can give a dog a scent and say "smell".

In other types of scent work or nose work dogs are imprinted on a variety of odors, such as different drugs,explosives or contraband. Nose work at dog shows use cloves and spices for the dog to find an object.

There are different ways to imprint a dog too, depending on what the scent or goal of the training is.

Here we are sticking with Cadaver odor.

We have to have Bait for the dog to learn and practice on after they have been imprinted because we cannot easily go out and find a cadaver to use. Cadavers (bodies) do follow under certain laws. Similar to obtaining illegal drugs, we cannot process illegal drugs to train a drug dog without permission of a supervising law enforcement agency. The chemicals for cadaver also must be approved by an agency that is allowed to obtain the scent.

Although I have noticed a few websites that sell cadaver bait for dog training, I would not recommend trying any training scents or aid/bait from an unknown reliable source because how do we know what is actually in what we buy? That said, back to training.

In the following lectures you will learn all about making training bait, how to Imprint the dog and get started doing searches.