Juliette Mylius | 21 August 2023
We’re back for session 7 & 8! In these sessions we can see how much we’ve progressed since the start of our scent work journey. After troubleshooting recently in session 5, we are well back on track and are now into some great scent work training on the ground!
Session 7
Session 7 was basically about making sure Duke was confident with doing his ‘search’ on the ground, and if so, stepping it up a bit by adding another tin in (so one hot and one cold).
We’ll start skipping the set up now as it is the same as always! And of course, the structure was starting with obedience, into scent work and ending with obedience.
Into training, I started off with our focus from session 6 which was sniffing the 1 hot tin on the ground. Duke was confident in this, sometimes even going straight back to sniff it again after being rewarded. And so, we made it a slight bit harder.
I now added in another tin so that one was hot and the other was cold. When he went to the hot tin he got rewarded and when he went to the cold tin he knew instantly (most of the time) to go to the other one.
It was great to see his progress in this and with this session going well, I think that’s all I have to say about session 7. Plus, of course, we finished with obedience!
Session 8
And this is where we made things interesting! After seeing Duke confident with his searching on the ground in sessions 5, 6 and 7, I knew it was time that I could try making it harder.
So, after starting off our scent work journey searching with 1 tin and then 2 tins in my hand, we transferred that skill to the ground (eventually). Now we tried something that we haven’t done yet: 3 tins! This means that there is now one hot tin and two cold tins – only the hot one getting him treats.
Of course, I wanted to start off well, so we did some obedience and the scent work with 2 tins to check he was still confident and happy with it, and he was! Then we moved on to 3 tins.
To do this, I got Duke (and my other dog) in a stay, then put the tins down on the ground and asked him to search. Then he went up and sniffed them till he found the right one! If he went to the hot one then he would expect treats, if he went to a cold one then he would keep sniffing them until he found a hot one!
This was so great to see! However, I did run into 2 problems. Firstly, with my other dog, Lady, joining in the scent work session (I usually train them at the same time), they would both go to the tins at the same time. Meaning that they would both be crowded around them and be sniffing them at the same and different times. This made it harder for me to focus on one dog at a time and to reward them when they sniffed the hot tin (even though this series is focused on Duke’s training, Lady is joining in too!).
To resolve this, I think I will have to find a different set up for the next training session/ find something to occupy one dog whilst I train the other. Oh, and the second problem, that’s obviously easily resolvable: I got attacked by mosquitoes!
But overall, I would say session 7 & 8 went super well! Something I would like to work on sometime would be Duke’s indication as now, I am just giving him a ‘yes’ once he has found it and then reward. I will eventually like him to give me some sort of passive indication like sitting, staring, putting his nose at it etc. However, we have only just recently started in this dog sport, so I am proud of him and happy with where we are at now!
Next session, as just mentioned, I will start working on training Duke to give a passive indication. I will also work on his scent work with 3 tins (maybe possibly 4). Eventually I might even see how he would do in a 1 tin search (where the hot tin is hidden somewhere).
This training session was also filmed so you can check out some footage of it on our YouTube @practicepaws or below:
The next post in this series will be out on Thursday (the 28th) where we dive into our final training session post that discusses sessions 9 & 10! Then on Saturday (the 30th), we finish up this scent work series with our Overall Guide to Scent Work (also to be posted on the blog).
Feel free to give us some feedback on how you’re finding this series so far on our Instagram @practice_paws we would love to hear your feedback and of course also any recommendations if you are already training in Scent Work!