Nosework (5/11)

We missed the 4th class of this session and will get a makeup at some point.  The class I'm going to describe was on August 4th.

This was done as a container search with thirteen boxes.  Because many of them were against the wall, it was a little bit like a basic container element search.  There was just the one hide in a box and Gimme found it so fast, it was almost like not searching.  She was disappointed to only find the one hide.

From there we went to searches in the front half of the training room, which was set up to be an interior search area.  There were some random chairs and a small table, the red wheeled cart, a clothing rack, a mop bucket, a pile of boxes, a fan near the bucket, two trash cans and some expens leaning against the wall.  The lower door triangle was our entry and the other door leads to the bathroom (it was shut).  The lighter grey rectangles along the wall are shelving with a lot of stuff on them and the dark grey square is a filing cabinet.

For the first search each team had a different hide, so we all could watch, but our hides were blind.  Gimme's first search was on the wall between the two trash cans.  She caught odor right away and was in the area in seconds, but scent was coming out through the edge of the shelving, so she had to search to find source.

Our second search was two hides on nearby chairs, so the dogs had a converging odor challenge.  Gimme is the most experienced dog in class, so she solved this problem very quickly.  I find she enjoys the puzzle of converging odor hides.  Other dogs are still getting so much "help" from their owners, so the owners were close by and moving through the layers of the converging odor puzzle, actually making it harder for their dogs.

The last search also had two hides set up for converging odor, with one of them a threshold hide (on the lower edge of the filing cabinet).  Gimme blasted past the threshold as she normally does and I kind of hung out near the threshold as I usually do in trials.  I've found this gets her to come back and check the threshold without frustrating her by holding her near the threshold.  As I've noticed before, it worked well and she found the threshold hide pretty quickly. 

From there she had a little difficulty finding the other hide.  I think this was because there was a fan in the back half of the room blowing toward the open garage doors (the lower edge shown on the diagram), so the scent was getting pushed out the door.  When Gimme didn't find it on her own, I did my perimeter walk - a largish walk around the room, kinda close to the edges.  I do this in trial searches after I shadow her movements for most of the search.  When I move like this, she shadows my movements, so I can then be make sure she has searched the whole room.  So when I got toward the garage door area, this got her into the plume of the scent on the mop bucket and she went right to it.

I know Gimme enjoyed going to class and having something to do.  She's been bored lately.  I've been working on my annual filing update, so between it and the downtime between the 3-day tracking seminars - she thinks her need for attention and mental stimulation have been severely neglected. Just sayin'...