Nosework (6/15)

I set the hides in the same place as I'd done for Friday, but at 10:00 a.m. for a 6:00 p.m. class.  And, of course, making sure I had fresh q-tips for the tins.  

Gimme did a great job with the sheds, getting the ground hide outside shed 7 first.  Then she got the wall/vent hide in shed 9, followed by the hide in the door crack.  She kept bypassing shed 4, actually veering a little bit away from it.  So I didn't want to guide her, but instead to act like I might in a trial.  In a trial I if I knew/thought there was more odor and was presented with this set up, I'd take her briefly into each shed, so that's what I did.  I started at shed 1 and went down the line.  When we entered shed 4, she found it almost right away.  I asked Joyce what she thought of that handling strategy and she said it was okay - but that if I took her in one and she wanted to leave, I should let her (which is what I did).  She did these four hides in 3:18... real close to what she did on Friday.

For the interior with the converging odor and fresh q-tips, she was very fast.  Again finding the high hide first and then the lower hide.  Interestingly, this time several of the dogs were catching odor for the low hide in the shelving on the same side about 15 feet away.  We think it was somehow getting sucked along the back behind the boxes and coming out there.  The dogs would get stuck in that area for a bit and then decide to work further, carefully checking everything on that side until they got to odor.  Gimme did this search in 2:48, compared to 7:09 on Friday.

Gimme spent too much time checking high when the odor was lower.  It occurs to me that we've been doing a lot of high hides with her lately.  So I'm going to make it a point to do a bunch of low hides in the coming weeks.

The last search I forgot to start my stopwatch, but I'm thinking it was about a minute, a LOT faster than Friday.  I was conscientious about making her wait at the start line and about 5 seconds into the wait, she started to pull to the right, so I let her go (which was direct to the threshold hide).  The second hide was on the back side of a front shelf support, in the middle of the shelf.  There was no bottom shelf, just some boxes on the floor.  Once Gimme had the general location, she went under the shelf, turned around and put her nose right on it.

All in all a very good class.  We had a lot of people, since it was a combined class.  We have no class next week.  At least we'll be resuming Public Dog, so Gimme won't be too bored.