Scent Work

Remember my post a couple days ago where I mentioned the first thing I saw Kylie doing when we met was sniffing away happily at the ground? If I only knew how good she was, or how much fun she has doing it, I would have started working with her a lot earlier. After surfing the internet about training and keeping your dog’s mind at work, I came across a scent training course here.

I said to my Amy (my wife), I think Kylie would do great in this class and it would really be fun for her. So we signed her up. Check out Kylie at her scent work class below:

In the beginning of the first section of classes, unique scented oil, birch in our case, is placed on a Q-tip and paired with your dog’s favorite treats. For Ky, it’s anything under the sun, doesn’t matter if it were nuclear waste, she would give it a try! I usually used hot dogs or leftover chicken or turkey. I used a treat that was highly valued to her so that she would work harder to get the reward.

The Q-tip and treat are placed inside one box, about the size of a shoe box. In the beginning, each dog would go down a row of identical boxes and see if they could find the box that contained the scent paired with the food. It was great fun to see all the dogs in the class go bananas trying to uncover the box and get the treat! After the dogs figured out that picking the box with that strange scent would get them food, they picked it up very quickly.

In the second section we moved on to hiding just the scented Q-tip underneath boxes, inside bags, on tables, basically hiding it anywhere in a large room. I know what you’re thinking, how could they find a scent on a Q-tip in a large room but they do and they do it very quickly and efficiently when trained well.

What's also great about this class is it makes you pay attention to your dog’s body language – we all know how important that is!! By the end of the two classes Kylie and I participated in, I was still lacking in this department; typical right? I also entered her into a mock trial competition where she excelled, but I failed to notice her body language telling me where the scent was. I can just imagine her screaming at me, “it’s right here DAD!!!!”

What do you guys do for fun with your pup?