Nosework (5/15)

Class last night was held at a classmate's friend's house, we searched her garage.  It was a 3-car garage and cars were taking up two bays, so we only searched one bay and the area between it and the door to the house, filled with a lot of interesting stuff.  The start line was the threshold of the garage door.

A couple of the hides were threshold hides and Gimme did a great job on them, pretty much going right toward them.

I've noticed lately on harder hides or when there is a lot of residual odor, Gimme tends to get frustrated and then throw an indication at me to see if I'll pay for it anyway.  So for the foreseeable future, I'm going to continue to search blind in class, but then have a hand signal or make eye-contact with Joyce when I'm ready to call "alert", "banana", "truck" or whatever verbal I'm using that day.  Then she can give me a thumbs up or thumbs down.  I don't really want Joyce to tell me where it is, preferring to let Gimme sort it out, but I do want Gimme to believe I always know where it is, so she'll push to source.

I wasn't seeing this before the inaccessible hides seminar, so I'm thinking its a by-product of that day - an unintended lesson that its not necessary to try to get to source.  Gimme is also tending to leave odor without indicating, which she used to do a lot and then had stopped.  Now its back.  <sigh>

On the last search there was a hide that normally Gimme would have accessed, instead she was bracketing all around and not pushing in for it.  So we left the search area and Joyce paired it.  Then Gimme really pushed in and got it.  Since we had the time, at the end I asked Joyce to leave it set and let us run it unpaired.  I wanted to see if Gimme really learned anything from the pairing.  In fact, she did search the whole area and when she caught that odor, this time she did push in.

So that tells me the pairing does in fact teach the dogs something when a hide is difficult.  I know we all believe it does, but I've never actually had the chance in class to search it again without pairing to see if it really taught them to solve that puzzle.  As a training practice, I think we probably should repeat the search without pairing, to cement the lesson. 

So all in all a good class.  Tomorrow Susan and I are going to search at Home Depot.  I'll go there before work and set some hides for us.  I've also offered to do that next Wednesday for class. 

This morning we had a walk around Capitol Lake with Frank and Tor.  There was some kind of walking event held by a local casino and many had brought their dogs.  I think we passed at least 25 dogs - overall Gimme did well.