The Nose II
In our last post on nosework I shared some of the reasons I love it and showed some easy games you can do with your dog. Getting your dog to use their nose, regardless of if it is just searching for food or toys, or searching for an odour, is my favourite way of adding some mental stimulation. It can build confidence in insecure dogs to work more independently, and help calm overexcited dogs or frustrated dogs. You can read more about this in another blog post I have written on how to use The Hunt As a Model For Stimulation.
When we got our most recent addition, Tennessee, it was a given that she would get to try some nosework as well. She is a dog with very high prey drive, who loves tracking for animals in the woods. But since those activities are not allowed, it was important that I found a safer outlet for that desire. When I’ve posted videos of Fausto doing scentwork, I always get loads of questions on how we got started, how we taught the indication, and so on. So when I started Tennessee’s training, I decided to document all the steps from the start.
A little disclaimer! We are not certified Scentwork instructors. Tessie is the second dog I’ve taught this to. We don’t cover contamination at all. But if you are just a pet owner who is not necessarily aiming for high level competition, I hope these videos might give you some fun ideas on things you can do with your dog!
So! Lets get started. When I got going with Tennessee, I broke the training down into 3 main steps:
Conditioning the Odour
Building Motivation for and Endurance in Searching
Teaching an Indication
Although Tennessee liked searching for wild animals, she had no interest in searching for food or toys. Her food drive was non-existent (spitting-out-cooked-chicken-and-refusing-raw meat level low) and her toy drive was so high that she was unable to think and use her nose if she at all thought there might be one around. We worked on being able to use these effectively before I could expect any progress on searching for these as primary rewards. Her attention span was very short and she would easily popcorn back and forth between focus points. Once we had the motivation and concentration to search for food and toys, we slowly started to build up the duration that she had to search for - her endurance.
On the side of this, we built up a positive association with the scent I wanted her to search for, so that I could easily swap out the toy or food for the odour once she was ready. Then, for her to be able to tell me that she had found the odour, I taught her a way to indicate the location of the source to me.
The details of what scent we used, how we moved to searching for the food/toys to the scent, and what indication we choose are all in the videos! The way I taught Tennessee was so much easier than how I taught it to Fausto, and when some of my clients have attempted it, they have found it really straight forward to implement as well. If you give it a try, let me know how it goes! All the videos start off with an explanation and end with a few clips from our training sessions.
I never put the time and effort into really teaching the 3 foundation steps separately when I got started with Fausto, and his progress took so much longer! Once Tennessee had a good understanding of the basics, it was so easy to put the steps together and get a nice final chain of behaviours in a relatively short time frame.
While I started to have her so short searches for the odour, I continued to work on longer searches for the small Kong piece (step 2 - building motivation and endurance) and continued to proof her indication (step 3) so that she could hold it for longer and under more distraction. When she had made progress on those parts, we put more effort into generalising the full sequence of behaviours (searching for the odour for longer periods and indicating in order to obtain a reward from me). For a while, we did short (3-5min) sessions in new locations almost every second day.
Finally, we introduced a second odour while we were away on holiday in a new location, around new people and smells and across different set ups. It was pretty messy, but we filmed it so that you could see how it went!
Happy training!
