He is reliable so that's what I thought I would do to see how he gets on We've hidden in boxes, bags and wellies all 100% found and delivered with great enthusiasm so time to up the anti, how exciting Thank you. I keep my plastic box on the window ledge in the utility room so it's not contaminating anything at all so I think that should be fine
I eventually got round to doing this with Willow today! It's getting so hot that it's a perfect activity for us to do that doesn't involve lots of running around in the full sun. Well, she absolutely loved it. I kept it very short, and just did the first three exercises, because she can get stressed by doing too much new stuff in a session, but her little face was a picture
Another couple of sessions done, and she continues to love it. Still keeping it easy for her, but have introduced boxes for her to search now. She can't wait to be sent to search, and this is for a toy reward, no food involved. I wasn't sure if it would work with her, because she's so much more food than toy oriented, but she finds the searching so much fun anyway, and finding the toy seems to be reward enough - certainly for now. She's also happily bringing it to me to have a game, where she normally liked holding on to objects. I'm so glad we are doing this. It's so good for her fragile confidence and she's having a blast Oh, and you'll be pleased to hear, @JulieT, that she's whooping Shadow at it! He also loves it, but rushes too much to use his nose effectively. He'll get there, and this really is just for fun, so as long as that tail keeps wagging, I'm not too fussed about getting it 100%.
HeeHee - it's good to do something just because your dog loves it! Well, you know, until catnip is a big smuggling thing, then we'll be right there, offering help to our nations, with our fully trained catnip search dogs!
We will all be grateful for your efforts when (and it's surely imminent) the world turns its attention to crushing the damaging and illegal international trade in catnip. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that we have trained noses at the ready
It was my birthday last week, and the present that Pongo has given me is a Scentwork workshop in October! Very excited, what a clever boy he is to figure out that I was interested. I'm just a little worried about the phrase "dogs must be under control at all times" and having to leave him in the car for periods while others are working... oo-errr.
Pongo is amazing at buying presents!!!!! I've got a noisy dog in the car. Try and park him out of sight of the other dogs and leave him with a Kong if you use them
Happy Birthday! Charlie is hopeless at settling. I took his covered travel crate, and worked on him settling on a mat for a bit, then popped him away in his crate for a bit with a kong, then we worked a bit on staying calm while other dogs worked, and then settling....and so on. You've just got to bite the bullet and train in those environments, otherwise you never get any better.
Just a little update on Charlie's scent work Charlie continues to absolutely love this game, he is finding a treat the size of, excuse me , a rat dropping in large areas. I also took his toy out of the tripe box for a couple of weeks so it hardly had any scent on it to see if he could still find it, I hid it in drawers in a bag, under gravel, in hidden big bags etc. He is sent for it and looks to me for direction if he needs it and finds it everytime even opening the drawer I love watching him with his nose to the ground and hearing his nose in action, the loud intake of scent which is very loud I am just wondering how I can move this on a bit from the house, yard and garden or to make it more difficult. We do have a playhouse in the garden that the children used to use I could use that but it would be limited, or my car? Great fun!
We started some sort of scentwork with Indie a few months ago. We followed a Fenzi trial lesson for 'nosework' I found on the internet - for that one, you use Birch scent in a little metal tin with holes in. I just got a little bottle of the essential oil from ebay (£1) and two really cheap tobacco tins. One you keep the scent in, and one is identical but with no scent. We started off by just getting indie to target the scent tin with her nose for a treat. Once she could do that, we worked with the scent tin and the lure tin and she was only click/treated when she put her nose onto the scented tin. We quickly got to the stage where the birch smell was a Good Thing. Then we just started gradually building up difficulty. I sometimes hide both tins under lots of upturned flowerpots in the garden, and Indie has to find the right one. She developed her 'alert' by herself - once I started hiding the tins under things that she couldnt get at, she automatically went to paw at the thing covering the tin. This has turned into a cute little paw tap when she thinks she has found it. She goes wrong sometimes - I hid it in a closed cupboard in the kitchen which was too hard for her, and she kept alerting to the washing machine which was next to that cupboard. I had to open it for her before she believed that it wasnt there! Having the lure tin is good - it shows that she is not just looking with her eyes. When she finds the lure tin, she gives it a disparaging sniff and hurries off without alerting. In fact, she doesn't use her eyes to such an extent that she can often see me hiding the tin in the garden, and then proceed to search the whole living room before deciding that it might be outside. I am not sure if that is her being rather dim, or just evidence that this is very much a scent game for her and the visual information is irrelevant... anyway, there seems to be many ways to teach scentwork, but whatever you do I think it is great fun and very stimulating for the dog and it seems to build a bit of trust too. Sometimes she thinks she can't find it and comes back to me and snorts at me - I tell her 'go find' again and she looks slightly disbelieving at me before hurrying off and seems doubly pleased when she finally finds the tin.
Sorry got muddled as to which post I was replying to there! I guess lures that look similar to what he is looking for but don't smell similar can add another level of difficulty. I think the American nosework training uses vehicle search as a more advanced level, and that's why tins are good sometimes as you attach a magnet to it and can stick it under a car etc. And they also use a different scent (pine in addition to birch, in the American case) and begin to ask the dog to search for one in the presence of the other, so asking them to do selective search. So perhaps you could train search with two toys separately, then begin to teach him to go find one and not the other? They also use food as distractions, to require the dog to search for the thing they are told to (a non-food related item, that then gets a food reward when found) rather than searching for the thing they want at the time. Also could you vary the height too - see if he can find something that's been hidden up a tree for example? That adds a whole extra dimension of space that he can learn to search. He sounds like he's got an amazing nose, and would be way up for the challenge!
