Nosework Practice

I'd forgotten to put my odor kit back in the car, so I didn't get the hides set in the morning.  Instead I went over well before we planned to meet, set them, then took Gimme for a 3 mile walk on a nearby trail.  That gave us a cook time of roughly 2 hours.

As you watch this, note that Gimme only goes into one shed that didn't have odor in it, quickly ruled it out and left.  Odor was in the 3rd, 7th and 9th sheds (relative to the startline).   She does "catalog" the first two and then goes on to find the others before coming back to indicate them.  I let her go behind the 9th shed, because the wind was blowing away from us and I wanted her to have a chance to detect the inaccessible odor from a vent 5 feet off the ground.

The 9th shed has that one in a vent at 5 feet up and then q-tips in the door right above the hinge  which you see in passing at 1:37 and 2:04.  At 2:57 she pulls the odor out from under the support of the 7th shed.  At 3:29 she finds the last hide (3rd shed), which Tucker had pulled down and we neglected to reset, so it was in the middle of the floor.  Gimme found all four in 3:22.4... a very respectable time for 4 hides in one search area - which she'll never see in a trial.

Gimme, even with her cataloging, is fast and accurate.  Our training buddy took over 9 minutes to find all four - with a little help from us.  He's not nearly as driven as Gimme.  Sometimes he is faster than she is, because she blasts by hides.  However, when they are hard, she's always faster.

When Susan was picking up the tins after the indoor searches, she noted that the odor was very faint.  Certainly enough for the dogs to detect, but the lack of air movement other than shoppers going by, would make it a tough search.  I don't remember when I last refreshed the q-tips in those tins.  I'll be setting these same hides on Wednesday for class - using all fresh q-tips and with 7 hour cook time.  So it will be interesting to see how that affects Gimme and Tucker in their searches.  The q-tips for the shed searches were all fresh, having only been used once.

You can see that she localizes one of the hides at 27 seconds...  she doesn't get up to it, but knows generally where it is.  The odor is up above the second shelf, in line with the support between shelving sections, so it could easily be pooling where she puts her nose under the lower shelf, still she didn't indicate there.  She brackets the second hide at 52 seconds.  It takes her 4:38 seconds to find the first hide.  She does get a bit frustrated 6 minutes into the search and throws a false alert at me...  given how quickly she leaves it, I'm certain she knew odor really wasn't there.  At 6:42 seconds I try to "make a corner" with my body to help her find the second hide, but it didn't seem to help.  If you watch carefully at 6:55, her tail wag speeds up (fast enough to strobe on the video) as she finally gets a real bead on the second hide - interestingly well above it.  She found both hides in 7:09.  That's a very long search - Tucker was just a little longer and would have quit if Susan and I hadn't helped him.

Gimme got sooooo close at 1:22, but didn't persist.  While this search was very long, Gimme never needed help or encouragement.  I'm sure she smelled it just enough to make her keep looking.  She never lacks for persistence.  She makes me think if the little boy optimist in an old joke, where he's placed in a room full of horse manure and when they come back hours later he's still happily digging away, just convinced that with all that manure, there has to be a pony in there somewhere.

That's Gimme's approach.  All she needs is success in the end - it doesn't matter to her how hard the challenge was, so long as she wins - she thrives on challenge.  

Another note... I did notice my handling sucked in this video.  I got stuck standing still frequently - especially when I knew she was pretty close to the hide.  Of course it doesn't help that the aisle was narrow and cluttered.  Fortunately I handle well enough most of the time that Gimme doesn't pay any attention - never having learned that I might cue her where it is by getting stuck myself.

We did another search, but ran out of space on my camera's disk.

Gimme had a bodywork treatment after class on Saturday.  I had noticed Gimme was willing to sit, though responding a bit slow, but she didn't want to stay seated unless the rate of reinforcement was high.  She was doing pop-up toaster sits.  Sure enough Tonya found both hips were out of whack, but her right hip was really locked up.  It was so bad she had to do the energy work first, so it would relax enough for her to do bodywork - otherwise it would have been very a forceful and painful adjustment.  So Gimme got energy work twice - once to release the hip and again at the end, as usual.  I did some TTouch and energy work later where Tonya said would need it.  I could really feel the heat from the inflammation when I started, but it would be almost normal by the time I was done.  Gimme is doing much better now.  I'm going to get her treated again this Saturday.