Tracking: Freedom to Hunt Style

★★★★★

From Copenhagen and Chaos to Sport, SAR, and Scent-Sation...The year was 1990. The internet had just launched, Ice Ice Baby was polluting radio waves, and an eight-year-old with more confidence than coordination was about to learn his first real tracking lesson the hard way.The morning began at 2:30 a.m.—because that’s apparently when bad ideas and mountain lions wake up. I’d been handed off to a group of uncles who looked at me, looked at the snow, and thought, “Sure, let’s give the kid a dog. What’s the worst that could happen?”Enter Dinky—a little Walker × Blue Tick hound with the personality of a jackhammer and the impulse control of a grenade. Like me, Dinky was young, unproven, and overconfident. Nobody explained (or maybe I just didn’t listen) that when a lion dog hits a fresh track, you don’t lead—you hang on and hope you don’t lose your footing.So there I was, leash wrapped around my waist like a death belt, marching proudly down the road when Dinky locked onto scent. One heartbeat later I was face-first in the snow, being towed into the timber like a human plow. That’s when it hit me—literally and figuratively: you can’t micromanage a motivated dog. You can’t command instinct, control drive, or negotiate chaos. You can only learn to let go and trust it.Fast-forward a few decades and the lesson still holds. Nowadays I spend a lot of time training Search and Rescue (SAR) dogs and their handlers. I see it all the time—handlers overhelping, overtalking, overthinking. Not out of arrogance, but out of love and habit. SAR handlers pour their hearts into their dogs and build them from puppies, but too often they don’t get access to structured, progression-based training that teaches them how to let the dog lead. And that’s exactly what makes this course different.This course is the antidote to overhelping!It demands you check your ego at the tailgate and accept a fundamental truth: the dog leads, you follow. If you’re still convinced your dog needs your constant guidance, you’re not helping the dog—you’re just soothing your own ego. And “ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity.”The brilliance of this course lies in its structure. Each module is a carefully scaffolded progression designed to build independence, motivation, and drive. You’ll see dogs come out curious, optimistic, and fully engaged—dragging handlers into the scent picture with conviction. You’ll see them fail, recalibrate, and re-engage, each time stronger, more confident, more alive.And that’s the point!In behavioral neuroscience, struggle isn’t failure—it’s a catalyst for growth. When an expected reward doesn’t appear, dopamine dips, signaling the brain to adapt. When success finally follows that adjustment, dopamine rebounds even higher—engraving persistence into memory. This “Reward Prediction Error” (Schultz, 1997) isn’t just science jargon; it’s the biological blueprint of learning. In simple terms: struggle builds capability.Wolves figured this out long before we did. They don’t lecture pups on hunting technique—they let them chase, miss, recalibrate, and chase again. Each near-miss hardwires determination because it links effort with possibility.In modern dog training, we often destroy that process with good intentions—helping too much, correcting too soon, preventing struggle. We strip the learning out of learning.This course fixes that!Every exercise is designed to set up the dog for discovery, not dependency. The less you interfere, the faster your dog evolves.By the end, you won’t just understand how to set up effective training scenarios—you’ll finally grasp why your dog works the way it does. You’ll stop asking, “How can I help?” and start asking, “How can I help them struggle and learn?” And that shift changes everything.If you’re tired of dragging your dog through training like I was dragged through that snow by Dinky, this course is for you. It’s not about perfection; it’s about progression. It’s about trust.It’s about understanding that the real art of tracking begins when you stop trying to control it.So leave your ego in the truck, trust the process, and let the dog lead. Because when you finally do—you’ll see what real tracking looks like.

brandan lyons