Canberra resident Jeremy Wikner is a “dog whisperer” of sorts, training dogs to be expert trackers and his natural teaching method – the only one like it in Australia – is sought after in South Africa, New Caledonia and New Zealand.

What looks like just a stroll with a pooch on a leash is actually complex, with Jeremy watching the dog’s body language, posture and speed, right down to its tail wag (even noting wind direction, temperature and humidity).

Jeremy can harness a dog’s innate scent tracking skill and in turn, help dogs to catch poachers in South Africa, find missing persons and offenders for New Caledonian police, and conduct search and rescue in Australia.

He recently finished a workshop in Canberra, where his furry students included a Kelpie, Dutch Shepherd, Golden Retriever, Belgian Malinois, Springer Spaniel, and a Bloodhound.

“The natural training method [GAK9] uses a dog’s innate scent-tracking skills,” Jeremy said.

“Every dog uses their nose from the moment they are born and do so initially to find their mother’s teat for milk. These are skills that are ingrained in dogs at birth and cannot be reproduced by humans.

“Our philosophy is that we cannot train a dog to track because they already have this ability from the moment they crawl. On the contrary, human interpretation of this ability is often biased and contradictory to the tracking instinct of canines.”

So, Jeremy gives the dog its nose, or as he says, “teaches without teaching”.

Canberra’s nature reserves are perfect for laying trails for dogs to track. Jeremy simply walks a trail, placing a “scent article” (like a bottle) at the start point, which tells the dog who they are tracking.

Then he waits. Jeremy has waited at the end of a track for anywhere from 10 minutes to more than four hours.

“Our job as a dog handler is to teach the dog to track in a variety of environments [urban and field] and stay focused on one target at a time; olfactory discrimination,” he said.

“These training styles enable the dog to learn through self-discovery.”

A recent graduate of Jeremy’s school is Hans the Belgian Malinois, who’s been deployed to South Africa to search for poachers hunting rhinoceros. So far, Hans has had great success and Jeremy receives regular updates.

If you book in for one of Jeremy’s workshops, he delivers tracking skills in days, not months. He prepares dogs for the real world through “evasion tracking” (when a person being pursued tries to throw a dog off their trail) and “double blind testing” (where no-one present with the dog has a clue about where the track is).

Other former students of Jeremy’s (all Belgian Malinois) include Errol, sold to a wildlife conservation organisation in Victoria; Dirk, sold to the Australian Army (military police in Darwin) and Frank, sold to state police.

When Jeremy’s not training dogs, he’s, well, training dogs. He works for the Federal Department of Defence in Canberra.

This year, Jeremy’s off to South Africa and New Zealand for more GAK9 tracking training, making him one of only 60 qualified trainers in the world (and the only one in Australia).

Despite Jeremy’s proven expertise, not all dogs graduate, and his own pet dog Charlie is a failed working dog. He’s an 11-year-old Belgian Malinois from the Netherlands (he speaks Dutch) and he was discharged from a government agency because he was nervous around gunfire (who wouldn’t be).

Charlie’s now the family pet, who doesn’t do much tracking, but Jeremy’s two-year-old toddler loves him.

Jeremy Wikner runs Ascencion Canine Training ascensioncaninetraining.com and is on Facebook.