Nosework (3/14)

Class was held at Diane's friends' place in the country.  They have a humongous 2 motorhome size garage. We each got three searches and Joyce paired the first two searches.  The air current was almost non-existent.  It always moved toward the door, but really slight.  There was one of their trucks parked in the building, which was not part of the search.  I think I would have asked them to move it outside, since it proved to be a significant distraction and is not a challenge we should ever be faced with at a trial.

Because Joyce paired the hides on the first two rounds... Gimme decided that indicating she'd found it wasn't all that important.  That is, until after she decided my treats were better than Joyce's.

Gimme's first search was pretty wild and flighty - since she hasn't done anything nosework since our last class.  Still she found all three in the allotted time.  For the second search she was more settled and did better indicating.

The third search was unpaired and blind - so Joyce moved odor for each person's search.  I don't know how she did it, but she picked hides that were hard enough that each dog timed out.  Gimme was the only dog with two hides since she's at that level.  She found the first one really quickly.  Then she got stuck in a corner area of the room and was just all over that space looking and looking and looking.  I even tried taking her out of the area and then going back to it.  She never did find anything and honestly we have no clue what she thought was there.

The second hide was actually high up on the back side of a water heater up on a stand (inaccessible) in the corner of the room with the room's miniscule air current moving into that corner.  Joyce had me take Gimme over there and while she searched that area, I never saw any sign that she caught the odor.  We finally just fed her near it.

I'm not especially thrilled about going into a trial weekend after ending on such a dismal note.  So tomorrow I'm going to add a nosework field trip to our day, so we can end on a more positive note.

Remember, keep all your body parts crossed for our trial on Sunday...  Its at an elementary school, so we're unlikely to have a truck sitting in the middle of the interior element, eh...