Nosework (3/10)

Last night we had nosework class and Gimme did well, as always. The first search was outdoors on vehicles and while Gimme found the first Anise hide quickly enough, the second one was more challenging for her.  She kept searching around and around the vehicle next to it, probably drifting odor.  She's usually very good at following drifting odor to source, so I don't know why she found this so hard.  She finally found source and pawed at it.  Her pawing indicator is really nice since she resorts to that when she is sure and thinks I'm being kinda obtuse.

The second search was indoors (thank God, it was really cold I was under-dressed for standing around outside).  Joyce is setting harder hides for us and inaccessible ones.  Gimme gets frustrated and walks away, but always comes back - this is one time that I'm truly thankful for her persistence.

For the first hide, Joyce put the odor in a drawer and told me to watch carefully where she was sniffing and especially when I thought she was alerting.  There were four small drawers, in a stack.  Gimme was sniffing all around the edge of the third one down, which was sticking out a tiny bit - so I assumed that's where the odor was.  She never really persisted in one spot though, so I just waited.  She moved away twice to sniff around the room and each time came back.  She finally alerted, pawing on the left side of the second drawer down, which was fully closed.  Joyce said that was the correct drawer and the odor was in that side of the drawer.  This girl's nose KNOWS!

Joyce also set two more easy hides for her to find in that room.  She said that as I am increasing difficulty, to keep it 20 to 1, easy to hard.  I need to start practicing some inaccessible hides and will have to do a lot more practicing than I have been doing so I can stay within that ratio.

For the last search we did a simple on leash room search.  The odor and a treat was dropped in the top of a medium size cone.  Our job was to make sure we kept moving no matter what the dog did and not let our body movement give clues to whether the dog was right or wrong where they were searching at that moment.  Our other job was to delay in rewarding a bit to see if the dog would offer a stronger indication.

Gimme found the odor in the cone pretty.  She went round and round it, pushing it a bit on the floor, nosing it aside and then looked up to me as if to say, "Not one of your brightest days, eh..."  Then very deliberately pawed at it, saying "Hellooooooo...."  Sometimes the looks she gives me are really funny - she is very expressive.

At the end of class Joyce demonstrated with one of her dogs how to move around the dog.  She recommends that you do your moving more in an arc that keeps you behind the dog most of the time, because the tendency as you move across in front of the dog is to move in closer, which means you might be moving toward the odor and giving them clues.  If you do move around in front, you need to be sure to keep out at the same distance from the dog.

Today I got to have a short training session with Nova handling her two GSDs one at a time.  I do a lot of work with Gimme's reactivity concerns, but I usually have to rely on using the opportunities as they arise.  Since I don't know the people or their dogs, I can't really push the envelope.  It was great having Nova, who could take direction and who's dogs were a known entity.

We started with Kubi, who is very calm and had very little interest in Gimme until we got much closer.  We started at 30 feet doing "whazzat", did some walking behind them and finally were able to walk with them, with Gimme on my left and Kubi on Nova's right and about 6 feet between us two.  Gimme is more likely to trigger if the other dog pays any attention to her and by the end of this walk she was ignoring Kubi or calmly watching him while he was looking at her from about 8 feet away.  That was nice and substantial progress.

She didn't do as well with Freea (the one I handled at the ORT).  Freea is much higher energy and all black.  Plus we had two other dogs move in and out of the area where we were working and which likely contributed.  By the end of our shorter session, Gimme was comfortable with about 15 feet distance.  By comfortable, I mean that she was more interested in working me for food than she was concerned by the dogs.  Then I ran out of treats and it was getting very cold, so the session was over.

Nova and I will be doing this after nosework class on Thursday mornings (I'm changing classes), so that will be helpful.  After doing this, its clear that I really have to find some other people to train with to make more headway.