NOSE WORK – CLASS 5 OF 5 – 12.12.2010

Sadly, tonight was our last night of nose work class.  Dee bought some birch scent to start teaching the dogs how to search for a specific scent.  She also bought 15 new boxes so that it would not be confusing for the dogs to work with a new scent.  There are 3 of us in class, so each of us got 5 boxes.  We started by marking one box with a star and that was always the target box used to find the birch scent.  Dee put drops of the birch only in this one box and the other 4 remained unmarked.  We were instructed to bait that box over and over again so that the dog would start to associate the scent of birch with food and thus a reward.  By our 2nd or 3rd time, we decided to make it more difficult for Orso by no longer including food in the box.  In other words, Orso had to identify the scent of birch alone.  He was great at it!  He loved it!  We progressed the level of difficulty by moving the boxes around, arranging them differently, spreading them out, bunching them up, etc and he still would always immediately locate the birch box!  Near the end of class, we brought back all the boxes into one area and only left one birch box – so now it was 12 unmarked boxes and only 1 birch box – to really challenge the dogs.  Again, Orso always sniffed out and alerted us to the correct box.  Just like with the smaller group of boxes, we would progress the level of difficulty by changing the configuration of the boxes.  Such a shame tonight was the last class…  Below is a video compilation that runs just under 6 minutes with lots of small clips from the class!  Enjoy!