Last week in nosework first we did a single hide search on a vehicle, then a search game called Running Bunny, followed by another single hide search. That is where you have a vehicle with 2 hides on each side/end (making it 8 total). Before you approach the vehicle the hides are all paired. Walk the dog to the nearest point on the vehicle and let them start searching. They can go in either direction and you just keep following them, rewarding each hide they find. Joyce walked behind me by about two hides, moving some and reloading all the hides. It teaches the dogs to really focus on the vehicle.
Here I have a composite video of Gimme playing Running Bunny. You'll note that to start with she missed a hide here and there because she was going so fast. The first time around, when she goes to the back end of the silver car - we had a hide there in the prior search. As the game progresses (lasted about 4 minutes) she becomes more focused, really keeping her nose on the vehicle. My camera-person accidentally clicked the camera off and on recording - signified by the frames that say "hiccup".
Tonight we met at a longarm quilting service shop, where one of the students works. It was three rooms, an alcove and a bathroom. You could walk from one to the next to the next, all the way back to the beginning in a circle around a central support wall. Each transition from one room to the next had a doorway, plus the doorway into the shop. So Joyce set up a series of five threshold hides and then at the end we turned them loose to find the first hide again.
It was quite interesting. Gimme just came in season on Sunday and was clearly not very focused the first time around. On the other hand, none of the dogs did very well in this setting. For one thing, the shop owner and workers bring their dogs in to work, so there were a lot of those distracting smells to work through. Plus, based on watching the dogs, the configuration of these rooms made for some pretty dead air. The dogs had to be really close to the hides to find them, since the air wasn't moving the odor around.
Then we did another search off leash with a hide in each of the three biggest rooms. Gimme was more focused and enthusiastic, but still had trouble finding them. She was clearly searching (i.e. not goofing off), but having trouble homing in on where the odor was. All the dogs were having the same problem, though it was a little easier for the two slowest dogs.
Jeff Schettler explained in his book that often times when a dog is searching, their nose can pass right right over odor and its like they don't "see" it... and they may move several feet and then snap back to it. So, what the nose smells isn't necessarily processed instantly and the dog may have moved well past it. Sometimes they'll snap right back to it; other times they've gone too far and have to go by it again.
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