Thursday, April 23, 2015

Scent work with both girls

Can you find a tea bag?


I just read an article of different nose work things from Canis magazine. I have done some track work with all of my dogs but the idea of scent search in a room or car sounded just fantastic. So I took two tea bags, glass jar and clicker. I teach the dogs to smell from the glass jar to get a scent what they needed to find. First hiding places were really easy so that the dog almost founded immediately. As soon as the dog sniffed the target tea bag, I clicked and rewarded. After few tries Freya got the idea. Pixie and Louise had a problem of offering different tricks at first. It took few tries before they really started to search the scent.




After my dogs got the idea, I started to hide the tea bag to harder and harder places. I used sofa cushions as hiding place. I put the tea bag between them in different places and also under sofa pillows. These were pretty easy places. On our second day I started to use closed hiding places like cupboards and pen sharpener. In these cases dogs needed show me that they had found the target. I used laying down as a marker position. For this I gave a cue to the dog as she sniffed the target smell. Here are some videos of our work as girls have done this few times:






Nose Work and scent discrimination


This work also made me interested in a dog sport called Nose Work. This sport has been invented in the US and its coming to Finland. In Nose Work dog needs find certain scents from four different scenarios - car, box search, room search and open area. Dog needs to show it has found to scent and there can be more than one hide. This sport sounds super interesting so I have started our work in scent discrimination. At this point I have used tea smell and spices as scents. I just want to sold the idea to my dogs. On our first training I used two different scents and one scent as distraction. I built our set up from glass jars and holders. Here is video from our first training:



As we trained we used our new samples of freeze tried food from Orijen. Girls just loved it!! It very easy to use and hands were clean the whole time. Next we will try in training as energy food Orijen Adult Freeze dried food that you can solve in water. Here are girls with their super treats:



That's for now.. Our Nose Work scent are ordered so that work will start soon!! 

MLPF



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