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!!!

Nosework

SUMMARY: Report from last weekend.

Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving, the Merle Girls and I attended our first-ever nosework training. I'd spent some time reading about it, so I had a vague idea of what's going on. Quite a few people I know are starting to compete in it or even teach it. Sounded like a fun thing to do.

The basic idea is that someone hides a specific scent somewhere in the search area and the dog finds it.

Rather than using scents like drugs or explosives (as a police or army dog would be trained for), the nosework competitions use specific scents that are not too likely to be encountered randomly. Dogs start with birch.

Our instructor was Andrew Ramsey. I had met him once before at another dog shindig and a friend waxed raphsodic about his skills at training dogs. He's a nice guy with a very good idea about what he's doing and how we can do it, too. Main thing to know is that he came by dog training primarily through his work with military dogs. As a civilian, he pursued jobs at the military's huge training facility and over the years trained thousands of puppies, dogs, and people in protection and detection work--the detection work being the key thing here. You can read a bit more on his web site.

Andrew gives us background info. We were a deliberately small group so that all 10 dogs could get enough working time.

He happened upon "pet" nosework by chance and fell in love with the idea.

OK, next thing you need to know is that there is, so far, only one official nosework organization, the National Association of Canine Scent Work, and they've trademarked the phrase "K9 Nose Work". It's sort of like the early days of dog agility when there was only the USDAA in the U.S. and they service marked "agility dog".

The NACSW defines the rules under which nosework competitions take place, same way that USDAA, CPE, NADAC, AKC, etc. define their own rules under which agility competition takes place. They also certify nosework trainers, and they seem to be pressing hard to have students sign up only with their certified trainers. This makes sense for them because they charge quite a bit for the certification program.

I don't think there was ever anything like *that* in agility-- "certified agility trainer". (Sometimes I think it might have been a good idea, but at other times I think that not having rigid controls on what and how to teach has enabled the sport to advance more quickly and creatively.)

OK, NEXT thing to know is that Andrew is not certified by them. He said that he considered it until he thought about the fact that he'd be trained by people who had only an iota of the experience that he already had in detection work, and decided to pass.

Meanwhile, the UKC wanted to start its own nosework program and they contacted Andrew--so they're developing their own set of competition rules. And the AKC contacted him as well, although I think that they then went off on their own to come up with their own rules since he had already worked with UKC. So--he's held in pretty high esteem by Those Who Know.

LAST thing to know is that his dogs run into the search area, lope around the perimeter, quickly identify the vicinity of the scent, zero in on it in amazingly short time, and freeze with their nose on the location of the scent (e.g., the lip of a drawer in which it's hidden). This is what we'd like our dogs to do.

Soooo (this was supposed to be a short post), now on to the training.

His method emphasized the dog having a methodical approach to searching for the scent, for example, working clockwise around a room.This is why he starts with a set of drawers as shown in the photo above.

[Disclaimer: I am simplifying all of this quite a bit and leaving out detailed descriptions of exactly how the various steps are done, so I doubt that these notes will give anyone really enough info to do it themselves.] 

The result that you want is demonstrated (by the end of day 2) by classmate Kathleen and Tika's compatriot veteran dog Annie (they're very close in age, started competing about the same time, as Kathleen's previous dog and my Jake were finishing up their careers in Performance):

The dog freezes, nose pressed against the scent location, handler using the leash (during training) to exert just enough pressure to get the dog to stop pushing forward when it's clear that the dog has found it, and after a fraction of a second, the dog's favorite toy is thrown right where their nose is, so the dog associates being in that position at the scent with getting their favorite reward (rather than looking to you for their reward).

Obviously, we have to build up to that. The ideal way is to have two very close to identical toys that the dog loves, if the dog is toy-driven. And, yes indeed, Boost is extremely toy driven. I handed over Boost's two purple riot tugs (you can see one in Andrew's pocket) and Boost was quite happy to play a rousing game of tug with Andrew.

Because Boost is so toy driven and usually food plays second fiddle to toys, that's how I wanted to start her.

OK, for the very first step, andrew gets the dog excited about the toy, handler holds the dog back, andrew drops the toy into the first drawer, and you release the dog, who races forward, plunges her head into the drawer, and pulls out the toy, then you play tug and repeat the whole thing a couple of times.

Then Andrew hides the 2nd toy in the second drawer (bottom drawers are all open at this point), pretends to drop the 1st toy into the first drawer, and when the dog races forward, they're so certain that the toy is there that they keep looking and inevitably get around to noticing it in the second drawer.

Well.

Andrew got Boost all excited about the toy, I held her back, he dropped the toy into the first drawer--and she stood there looking at the drawer and then at him. I finally urged her verbally to get it, and she went forward cautiously, reached in gently and lifted the toy out.

We wasted our whole first session trying to get her to understand about getting the toy, but apparently it was the wrong kind of toy (for her) for this--maybe because the riot tugs are usually interactive toys for us, not thrown toys? dunno-- Anyhoo, for her second session, we switched to food and she figured it out VERY quickly and within probably 5 minutes was methodically checking all the bottom drawers left to right to find the hidden item.

Here, Boost is working with food--she has just found it in the third drawer and I'm holding the leash taut for a moment to get her to freeze there, while Andrew prepares food for her next find.

(Photos from this one on down are by Tonya Jensen--I was so busy listening and watching that I forgot to take any more photos!)

After doing the 2nd drawer, then you hide it in the first drawer again, then again pretend to hide it there but put it in the 2nd drawer again, then in the 3rd drawer, then the dog very quickly figures out to keep going forward sniffing for it, and most dogs progressed pretty quickly to moving on around the corner.

The next step is to close the drawers and again hide the toy (or food) but now alongside a little jar with the birch scent in it (a tiny drop of essential oil on a q-tip). So they do 6 or 10 finds like that, which basically gets them associating the birch scent with the thing that they want. Then you repeat with just the scent. This is why having a toy to throw is the best option; if you're working from food, you don't really want to throw the food and contaminate the ground.  A tug-n-treat might work. I forgot to take one the 2nd day. Something to work on.

PRESS that nose against that find!

With Tika, there was never ANY doubt in anyone's mind that she is a food-driven dog.

She figured out very quickly that she needed to keep looking to find her food, but she was too smart-alecky for her own good--realized that the food was appearing farther around hte circle, so started skipping the earlier drawers and had to go back through. That was easily fixed by mixing it up more, sometimes in an earlier drawer, sometimes in a later one, sometimes in the same one twice in a row, etc.

She was harder for me to catch with the tension to freeze her--she wanted to get her paw in there. Here I'm applying the tension, not realizing that she already has a paw on the drawer and I've frozen her like that. Finally got that message and pulled her back away so that she could approach it again and I could stop her in the correct position, with just the nose, not the paw.

Within our group, some dogs were toy-driven enough for the toy to work well, some were food-driven enough for the food to work well, and for one--well, we all encountered our first-ever pine-cone-driven dog.

By the end of the two days, virtually all of the dogs were searching by scent alone, some even onto the 2nd tier of drawers and one dog with even more challenges beyond the drawers. (The drawers are just a good way to get them started because the drawers retain more of the scent, but you want to get away from using them exclusively pretty quickly.) Each dog had 5 sessions of maybe 10-15 minutes each, which was a pretty aggressive schedule, but we all wanted to get as much done as possible in our two full days.

And all of the dogs' successes were achieved with no instruction, assistance, or prompting from any humans except telling them to start looking, putting the tension on the leash after the dog had already found the scent, and then rewarding the dog. It was amazing to watch! 

I think I'd like to do more of this, but I'm sold on Andrew's method of training, and he's out in Sacramento, so not sure how/when I'm going to get more practice.

Meanwhile, I've revised the find-it game that I've played with the dogs for years at home (hide food in another room and then release the dog to go find it). I restarted along the lines of the seminar training, first showing where the food was at the far left side of the room, then gradually moving it further along and then also back again, etc., trying to reinforce the idea of methodically searching starting from one side of the room and going clockwise.

They have always liked this game and still do. [grin]