Sniffing Around Scent Work

This morning I woke up and realized that I needed to work the dogs before I headed off to the day job. Yeti had been restless and pestering me the evening before, and Astra was pent up from being on crate rest all week for a minor injury. Sniffing is what they needed, it works to calm them down better than anything else.

I decided to work some HD cotton balls, because I hadn’t done them in a while. I set up a target cotton ball and a distraction cotton ball in the kitchen. Astra worked beautifully, finding “my” cotton ball and dutifully ignoring the distraction cotton ball, even after I told her to “find again,” and lingered in the area. Such a good girlie! We need one more leg in Masters HD to finish her title, I really need to find a trial to enter.

Yeti, to my surprise, did not do as well. He ignored both cotton balls, even after detailing the area twice, and after I tried to remind him what he was looking for by showing him a cotton ball.

Oh well. I released him from the area, just saying “good try, buddy.” He seemed not at all upset, and went happily off the living room to find a toy.

 I was puzzled. Yeti has historically outperformed Astra in HD, a fact I attributed to him having a more sensitive nose, and being much younger when I introduced him to that element. But clearly he had forgotten it…why?

Admittedly, it had been probably six weeks since I last practiced this element, but in the past, a training gap had never bothered him. Was it a case of adolescent brain? Possibly. He has gotten past much of his adolescent nonsense, but probably not all of it, he is not yet two years old.

However, thinking back over the past few weeks, I realized that we had been practicing blank areas more often, in anticipation of entering some Master level classes in AKC. Particularly in interiors, where blank areas are a very real possibility. Apparently that was uppermost in Yeti’s brain.

Happily, it is easily fixed. I went back to basics, to refresh his memory.  I got out my ceramic HD mugs (mugs are what I use for introducing the cotton ball. For more on this see my original post on Training the HD Element), and put out two distraction cotton balls and one target cotton ball. I worked the shell game for three or four repetitions, and then started seeing him give his indication on the correct container, so I reset the search in the kitchen, and ran him there. Success! Problem solved!

Yeti working cotton balls in mugs

Yeti searching for cotton ball in kitchen

I may have to review with the mugs a few more times before he is completely solid on this again. He is, after all, still an adolescent boy dog.

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