Sniffing Around Scent Work

I am not really a gadgets person. I don’t run out and buy the latest kitchen cookery thing…air fryers, food processors, insta-pots….I don’t collect dog self-feeders or enrichment toys. But, show me a good scent work gadget and now you have my attention. Not necessarily the scent vessels (of which you can find a huge variety, now that there are 3D printers everywhere). But the gadgets that help you with air flow? Yeah, I am on board.

My latest discovery is a battery powered air blower which has the potential for getting rid of lingering odor—at least some of it.

 In situations where you have set a hide and then removed it, you will usually have odor particles lingering in the area for some period of time. No one knows for sure, but these seems to be a combination of scent particles in the air, and clinging to surfaces.

Dogs will often show interest in lingering odor, and sometimes, if it strong enough, or they are less experienced, they will false alert on it.

This is a problem if you are an instructor, running multiple classes on the same day. Sometimes you want to set up different scenarios for different classes, so you move the hides and that lingering odor gets in the way—dogs can work through it but it eats up valuable class time and sometimes gets in the way of the lesson you were trying to teach.

Lots of people believe that cleaning the surfaces where you have put the hide will help clear out the lingering—and that is probably true. But what about the odor particles lingering in the air? It’s clear that these disperse if you wait long enough, but in the short term, maybe the air blaster is an answer.

This little air blower is designed to blow a blast of air to clean out all of the crumbs in your keyboard. It was invented to replace those expensive air cannisters—it is more powerful and it is rechargable and reusable. And that air blast should blow away odor particles as well!

Now, I am not one hundred percent convinced that it works. Because scent particles are not  predictable and will cling perniciously, against all logic.  (I have seen this happen with metal objects in particular.) However, I have been experimenting with this little blaster in classes, and it seems to help some.

Sometimes after removing a hide and using the air blaster, I see the dogs searching in that area linger less. They might hesitate, or give the area a quick sniff, but move on quickly.

Other times, however, I do see the dogs show interest and investigate the areas where there were hides, even when I have air blasted the area thoroughly.

There are undoubtedly other variables at play here. Last night, for example, I had three hides on chairs. After running one class, I removed the hides from the chairs and relocated them to another area in the same room. I used the air blaster on those chairs. On two of the chairs, the dogs did show a lot of interest. On the third chair there was no interest. Was it just that they were chairs (which dogs OFTEN find hides on) and there was also a lot of odor in the area? I am sure that odor from the hides in that room were hitting the chairs.

I will have to keep experimenting and see if I can find any answers. Probably the next step is to remove hides and run that area without any hides at all…will there still be interest? What about if I remove hides, clean the surfaces AND use the air blaster?

If anyone else out there has any experience with this, I would be interested in hearing about it.

NOTE: I am not getting any money to publicize this gadget. I don’t even know the brand of the one I bought. If you want to get one, I suggest you google “air blaster for cleaning keyboard,” I am sure that there are lots of good options out there.

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