Training the dog

SUMMARY: TWO new classes!

source: 3/8/25 started with a response to a friend's blog post.

Zorro and his Human Mom (me) have been working on a bunch of things suddenly this month. In addition to the nosework that we started...4 weeks ago already?... last week we started Advanced pet dog training as a refresher at the local PetCo (we did all that 9 years ago or so, but don't practice enough). Including things like reactivity and paying impromptu attention to the human even when not in a specific training situation. 

Zorro can be quite reactive on leash. Or not. HM was a bit worried beforehand, especially seeing the small training area and learning that the other 2 dogs in the class are large males, which Zorro is more likely to take exception to than much smaller or female dogs. Lo and behold, everyone has behaved exceptionally! And we are mostly working outside the little fenced area, throughout the pet store, so there's space aplenty. (9 years ago, for beginning and advanced classes, Zorro was so wild a couple of times that I had to put him back into the car eventually and go inside by myself. Thank goodness he has mellowed out to the world so much!) 

 I also realized that, although we practice sits, downs, waits lots at home, we don't much practice elsewhere, or that loose leash walking let alone like a heel, or waiting before going through a gate or door (can you say "gradual relaxation of criteria"?). Our goal is to get Zorro's CDC, since almost all my other dogs have earned it.

Yesterday was our second session, and he is a champ at some things (sit and down on command, although staying there is iffy; I always intended these commands to have an implied "stay" but clearly we need to work on that--but I knew that just from working at home) (and come when called (now that he knows I have a handful of treats)) (and spontaneously looking at me) (and paying attention to me instead of to the other dogs when they walk by, which is a specific class exercise). 

Realized on my way to Nosework this week, which was outside for the first time (still just 3 rows of boxes with treats in a few of them), how bad we have become at "heel" work and at sit/wait to go through the gate. This is all probably good for both of us. We did work on these things quite a lot when he was probably 1-3 yrs old.

 Do I have photos? STILL NO!!! Doh.

nosework: it seemed inevitable

SUMMARY: everyone is doing it, either post agility or alongside agility

origin: my post and comments on Facebook, February 14, 2025 --and then I didn't actually post this here until Mar 8, but I backdated it to Feb 17 anyway.

Today, Zorro attended his first nosework class. He joined a class that had been already ongoing. He knows how to find treats for sure. He kind of whipped in, found the treats, and was ready for more. But a terrible thing happened:

I DIDN'T TAKE ANY PHOTOS !! 

But I Facebooked it anyway and here's some of the ensuing discussion. It's long and basically unedited, and it's mostly encouragement from friends and their own experiences and me filling in details about our smelling background:

michelle: How fun. I hope you end up loving nosework as much as I do.  I know Zorro will.

me:  I hide his food at mealtime quite often. I like it because it keeps him occupied longer than the three minutes it takes to eat it out of even a puzzle bowl. He likes it because it's food and it's interesting. His tail is usually wagging the whole time. So, so far it's no different than what we do here at home. Sometime soon I hope that we add the scents and fade the food for nosework purposes. 

Michelle:  So fun.  I do a cookie scatter for my dogs every night but it is not a huge challenge as it is a small area.  there is alot you can teach a dog long before you get to odor. Odor is the easy part.  Kind of like agility, we all want to teach the contacts and weaves but so much of the foundation is just ground work.

me:  last night I was trying to remember how I got to where I have a dog that I can just put in a down-stay somewhere while I wander around randomly distributing food substance. I think it started with a suggestion in an early class of some kind? I don't remember whether I ever did it with my first dog, Amber. I might have. 

And the initial suggestion was to cut a paper towel tube into 1 inch circles, lay them out in a row, put a treat in one of them, and then see if the dog can go more or less directly to that one . it turned into me hiding one treat somewhere out of the dogs' sight end releasing one of the dogs to go find it. Then they would get another treat as a reward when they did. And then I would hide another one and let another dog go find it and so on. At some point, I started hiding more than one treat at a time.

It has made a difference with only one dog in the household, also, because I no longer have to block off areas to allow each dog to do a big search for their own whole bunch of kibble or treats. I can just hide it all over the place and leave Zorro to it.

Michelle:  super fun!!  You are going to love nosework. You’ll get the competitive side of this game. Ribbons!!

Gwen: Yay!! I know it’s not as much of an adrenaline rush as agility, but from a dog-behavior-geeky standpoint, nosework is pretty fun indeed. And always a learning experience.

me: through the years I have loved watching my dogs find edibles. It never takes any of them long to get the idea. Their noses just tell them to get to work! I love seeing a dog walk briskly around a room, maybe trot a little bit, and suddenly their head jerks back to one side and they turn around and go looking for the scent that their nose caught as they went by.

I hide kibble in things, under things, behind things, on things, out of sight, in sight but in a weird place… boxes, bags, large canisters, bookshelves, under carpets or towels or toys or cushions on the floor, wrap a bunch up in their fleece or other large piece of material randomly so they have to dig around to find each. 

Inside the house, I have avoided putting things at higher elevations because I don't want the dogs to ever think about it's OK to take something off the coffee table or the side table or whatever it might be. I know I need to work on elevated things. We took three turns in class yesterday after the instructor hid treats, and in the last one, he finally came to me and stood staring at me wagging his tail ears up, wanting to know what the heck was going on because he  thought he was done. I just told him he was doing good and go find it, he was all Business, turned around and went looking and found both of the elevated hides very quickly then.

Gwen:  you two are well on your way! 

Lloyda: I agree with Gwen.  It’s fun to be doing something my dog clearly loves.

me: yes, his tail is often wagging as he goes looking. I mean, I would work to find candy or cake or cookies hidden all over the house!😄

Sara: Nosework is wonderful! Dogs love it, it’s really interesting— much more so than I expected when I got into it about 10 years ago, with Miko (who thought agility was dumb). Astra is now loving her class at San Lorenzo DTC—the same class Joyo used to be in, with some of the same people and dogs. She’s by far the least experienced dog in the class, but she does really well. She passed her ORT last month, has a Sniff’n’Go at Marin Humane on Friday, and her first trial in March.  We probably won’t do a whole lot of trials, and I don’t care if it’s NACSW or AKC. In it for the fun, and teamwork with my dog.

me: Sara McAulay I will probably look into competitions when we are ready. I don't know if they are more frequent than they were few years ago, were everyone was desperate trying to earn scores because there were so few events and filled up instantaneously. And now I'm in an area where there aren't nearly as many people or dog activities. We shall see.

Sara: Ellen Levy Finch zorro and you will both enjoy yourselves either way.

And if you buy an inexpensive little kit of scent oils, you can play in your house and yard, hardware stores (often), playgrounds, parking lots…

Julie: Congratulations for giving Zorro (and yourself) the gift of Nosework.

me:  all of my dogs have loved hunting for treats that I have hidden. So I have watched them do it for at least 30 years now. I just always preferred agility in part because it kept me very active physically and mentally and kept my dog very active physically and mentally and we were always working as a team! The communication between me and my dog in agility training and agility competition was one of the most exhilarating aspects of it.

Yes, I love watching my dogs hunt for food, but I still miss the things that agility gave me. I don't see the teamwork involved in nosework. You and others who have been doing it or teaching it for so long maybe can respond to that.

I am thinking of a one weekend nosework type seminar that I went to with Tika and boost quite a few years ago. The instructor had his dogs with him. He had someone hide a scent somewhere on the very large property (not his property), and then he sent his… I think it was a Malinois that time... to go do the search. The dog ran full speed around the whole field area and then full speed, with very brief hesitations (slowed down a bit and turned head) about halfway around again and then zoomed across to where it was hidden in a tree, one of the places he had hesitated slightly before, and put his paws up and just stared up into the tree. I do not believe that a dog doing, for example, a methodical trot around the perimeter would have found it faster...

I decided that's what I would want my dog to do if I decided to do nosework. We are nowhere near that. Zorro hurries around the room, but isn't running at all. I think I need to start hiding stuff outside even though the weather is crappy. I also need to start pairing scents, but I'm trying to be patient.

Julie: I got started in Nosework with the people who invented this activity/sport. They were all professional detection dog handlers who noticed just how much their dogs enjoyed the training and decided to see if their friends dogs would like it just as much. The rest is history. I went to my first seminar in 2011, quickly decided I wanted to learn as much as possible about it when I saw how much my dogs loved it and started the process of becoming a certified instructor. Since then I have spent probably tens of thousands of hours observing dogs searching and almost as many hours teaching classes to other people who wanted to find an activity that would be not only enriching but also fun for both them and their dogs. They also wanted something that would be very accessible and affordable. K9 Nosework is exactly that and so much more. It opens the dog's world to us and allows us to see the invisible world of scent through their behavior. It is endlessly complex, never the same for any 2 dogs and provides physical and mental enrichment to the team. It truly is a team sport and can be very physically demanding but also kind to a dog's body, especially those who might be getting older or have some injury that prevents them from doing agility or other very physical response. A 6 week Introduction to K9 Nosework© class taught by a CNWI (Certified K9 Nosework Instructor) will give you the best introduction to this extremely popular sport. Here's a link to search by geographical area for an instructor: https://education.k9nosework.com/findinstructor

Sharon: Good for you and Zorro! How on earth are there no photos; my sister with the always present cameras?

me:  I know. What a dork!

this is all there I have: the door to the training facility.

[ insert photo from 2 weeks earlier]

Susan: Good for you!!!

dishwasher points

SUMMARY:  Rules for Dishwashers

Source: My comment on someone else's post about how super efficient they are at packing the dishwasher and how many points they gain or lose by certain rules of their own, such as what if something doesn't get clean. Their point system has established that they can fit 24 items in the top rack and 24 items in the lower rack and they lose points if they don't fit that many in… Well, it's complicated. Anyway, here's my response.

I agree to a certain degree. 

my current just-washed load; because the top rack was fully loaded and I needed forks or something, I sadly could not completely fill the lower level.

I consider the dishwasher a labor saving device. Therefore, I lose points for every item that could be washed in the dishwasher that isn't, because then I would have to wash it by hand, necessitating a dish pan with dish soap and a dish cloth and rinsing and a dish drying rack and all that. 

My strategy is to keep adding things to the dishwasher until everything that could go in at that moment is in AND the dishwasher is as full as I can get it given certain restrictions – – I do not stockpile dishes on my counter for that purpose. Nor do I hand wash things that the dishwasher could handle. (Exceptions: Sharp knives, pots and pans, and certain delicate items. But I avoid using all of those as much as possible!) also, running out of some particular important clean item (say, forks) takes precedence over trying to fill every square inch of the dishwasher. 

And I have rules: for example, lightweight plastics go only on the top rack, glass drinkware goes only on the top rack. even if I am out of something important, both top and bottom rack should be as full as makes sense to my own rules of logic. 

For one person, with occasional guests, I think I run the dishwasher about once every five days. Here is a full clean load. Too bad I had to leave a little unused space in the bottom rack. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

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agility learning never stops

SUMMARY: compare 1995 to 2025

Source:  My comment on a friend's Facebook post about how agility training never ends, January 2, 2025. 

TO DO: Add photos?

Susan P said: Lots to do- always lots to do. Agility- the sport for people who never reach a finished product! lol

Never finished, right! I remember a point in my agility career, probably around the end of my first year, when I'd been competing for perhaps six months after six months of class training, and I thought, we already know how to do all the obstacles and we know the rules and we can run a course, what more do we need to learn? 

Of course Nancy and Jim (Of Power Paws agility) kept figuring out more things for us to learn. Dang it! And I continued with all that sort of thing for almost 2 decades. And by the end of that time, agility was changing faster then I could keep up with. It is very different sport.

Equipment

Some changes are to the equipment. Back then, I thought we needed an even larger variety of equipment that was already available. But since then, most if not all American utility organizations (Based on what I know about AKC, UKI, USDAA, CPE, and NADAC – – the last one has gone even farther away with obstacles) have eliminated The following (in part, for safety, and part for their difficulty as an obstacle to set up and move around):

• the crossover, 
• the chute (collapsed tunnel)
• The table except in certain circumstances
•  I think the tire is on the way out? 
• and I'm not sure about triple jumps… I think they are gone?

other changes: 

• The A-frame is now rubberized (And so are the dog walk and the teeter) instead of plain plywood or metal, And is not as high
•  I don't think anyone allows an odd number of weave poles anymore But I remember encountering 11 at least once in a competition. And the spacing between weave poles is much more generous by several inches

Handling And training

i'm not sure that I can do a summary or even a list of everything that has changed here.Back when I started, it was not completely uncommon to see people trying to always run the course with their dog on their left side, as in heel position. In my training, it was all about doing the right body language and the right obstacle name to get the dogs to go around a course. Now, everyone is learning Commands to verbally direct their dog to the backside of a  Obstacle or to skip an obstacle or to prepare to turn instantly after An obstacle. Handler's work at a much greater distance from their dogs, and that is particularly important because dogs have gotten so much faster.

Back then, pretty much everyone trained their dogs to at least stop briefly in the yellow zone at the bottom of the contacts. A few years into my experience, people were starting to work on figuring out how to train dogs to do running contacts, that is keep their complete speed but ensure that they got their feet in the yellow. More theories were evolving over that time. More people were successful with the training.Now, watching some of the national international championship runs, I think almost everyone is trying for running contacts and usually making them.

Dogs

back then, everyone began with whatever pet dog they had. Now, border collies Dominate the top two or three heights. When I first saw a fast Papillon on do a course, around 2000, I and everyone else were stunned to see the speed and that the dog's speed on the course beat even the top border collies. Papillion's became more common, now Some people are Breeding Border Paps To get the size and speed advantage of the smaller dogs and the working ethic of the border collies. As I understand it, that is still an experimental thing and the results are uneven, as to be expected when trying something new with crossing breeds.

And one no longer commonly gets a dog from Just someone that they know or at a shelter if they really want to compete at the top levels--people know so much more about which breeders are breeding for show versus breeders who are breeding for dog sports or herding...herding border collies are still a popular source. 

people have always worked on finding ways to get their dogs to do courses faster, to react to you faster, to move their legs faster, to make turns faster,but now there are so many activities and exercises to ensure their physical health and their attitude. That felt like they were just beginning when I started, if they were there at all.

In summary

everyone competing learns and relearns and relearns and relearns how to work with their dog on and off course as the standards for skill and time and performance and equipment change – – 

I would still love it if I were younger (because my joints did not age well). Sometimes I loved learning new things. Mostly I did. But towards the end, particularly as my knees and back got bad, I would look at the new "master handling" courses in USDAA and think, no way. Just no way.

But if I were younger and starting out…