Nosework (3/9)

Nosework class on Tuesday was uneventful.  Gimme is well into a false pregnancy, but she did very well.  The wind direction is as shown and really strong, though the direction and speed changed a lot. The two red dots were the first search and the lime green dot was the second search. Gimme did fabulous on both searches regardless of what the wind is doing.  She was pretty direct, even though her route wasn't the same as the other dogs.   

After vehicles we went inside for container searches.  The colored rectangles are small brick shaped colored boxes and black "bugs" are odor locations.  The green circles are four low stools, which were there to show us how it looks when odor is bouncing off them from the low boxes.  The most obvious bouncing odor was from the stool closest to the hide in the purple box.  Gimme was pretty darn fast.  She went by the red box at first, but when she got to the end of the line of red boxes without finding odor, she turned herself around to go back and indicate it.  From there she went to the blue hide and then the purple.

For the second container search, they placed odor boxes on top of the stools.  This is a common difficulty in trials.  We did miss a container on a chair in our first L1C Element trial (my fault), but when we saw it again at the next trial, I'd learned my lesson so Gimme aced it.  She really aced it in class as well.  She went directly to the purple one, then the blue, then hit the red one on the way out.  Had it not been for the time it takes to reward with peanut butter, she would have had all three of them in under a minute.  Interestingly, all her paw indications were pretty mild, even though we haven't really trained them lately.




Since Gimme gets so emotional during false pregnancies and has difficulty concentrating, I'm always a little surprised she's never had any trouble doing nosework.  Partly I think it may be because she gets to go in and search and then back to the car.  Even though she's using her nose in barn hunt, there is the prolonged waits which is challenging.  Even if Gimme is first in her blind, between a long walk and the time in the blind, it can easily be thirty minutes (or more) before she gets to search.  If she is later in the blind, it can be a lot longer. Likewise being in the building for RallyFrEe for an hour can be hard.

We were talking this morning about engaging the "seeking circuit" and how its such a primary thing in dogs, so I think this is another reason why she does so well at nosework regardless of whatever might be going on in respect to false pregnancies.  I'd like to see how she'd do in barn hunt if there were no waiting.

BTW I'd been saying how much better Gimme was doing with this false pregnancy and I still think this is true overall.  However, we ran out of Sepia (a homeopathic remedy) and I couldn’t find another local source.  While waiting for the store to get it in, Gimme didn’t get it for three days. I noticed last night she was acting a bit more emotional and today it was much more obvious.  Sepia can be used for the following regarding the mind and emotions: tearfulness, impaired thinking, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, uncertainty, nervousness, confusion, and over-sensitivity.  Sure sounds like someone I know.

Anyway, the store got it in, so I was able to give it to her right away when I got home.  Within an hour she was back to what I was seeing before we ran out.  She’s sound asleep beside me as I speak. I usually keep an extra tube - I'm now keeping 2 spares to prevent this – basically a back-up to my back-up.  Just sayin’…