My baby is growing up!

On Saturday June 2nd, Ben and I loaded up Piper and headed to an ORT in Davis, CA. An ORT is an odor recognition test that dogs competing in nose work through the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) have to pass before competing in a trial.

Yikes, that last paragraph is still pretty technical; let me break is down.  K9 nose work (also called scent work) is a dog sport where dogs use their nose to find particular scents.  It’s a fun activity that uses a dog’s natural ability (sniffing) in a methodical way. It’s based on the type of training that narcotics- and bomb-sniffing dogs go through. However, instead of sniffing for drugs or explosives, scent work dogs search for essential oils.

You heard that right: essential oils.  The stuff you make homemade cleaners out of.  The stuff that you diffuse into the air to make your home smell good.  The stuff you rub on your chest to reduce congestion during a cold.  Good ol’ essential oils!  So, basically I’m teaching my dog to find a tiny Q-tip of essential oil (in birch, anise, or clove scent) hidden in a large area inside, outside, on a vehicle, underground, or in a closed container.  In competition, I won’t know where the scent is hidden so I have to trust Piper’s nose to lead us to it and tell me exactly where it is.

But we’re not ready for a trial yet, so let me get back to the ORT.  In this test, a Q-tip of the selected scent is hidden in one of twelve identical closed boxes and the dog has to tell it’s handler which box it’s in.  The handler then calls an alert (literally just says the word “alert”) to the judge in the room to indicate the correct box.  Was the handler right and within the 3 minute timeframe?  Great!  You passed the ORT for that scent.  Wrong?  Too bad, so sad, try again on another day.

Soooooooo…how did Piper do?  She did fan-friggin-tastic!  She found birch immediately, which was the scent she needed to find to begin competing at the novice level.  Yaaaaaaaay!  I was so proud of my girl.  Here’s a video of her birch test (side note: I definitely need to work on my handling posture):

Then, just for the hell of it, we signed her up to test for anise and clove too.  Even though she doesn’t need to recognize those until she’s ready for more advanced competition, we figured we were making the drive so we might as well try.  She did not find anise, which was a teeny tiny bummer. She looked pretty sleepy and unmotivated, and she false alerted on the box next to the correct one. Here’s the video of her anise run:

So based on our miss on anise (love that they call it a “miss” rather than a “fail”), I tried a few different things for clove.  Piper was still pretty sleepy, so I worked on jazzing her up.  There’s a Bloodhound in our nose work/scent work training class named Wanda who is super low energy, so her owner/handler Lisa has to talk in a high voice, jog with her, and generally convey a sense of excitement to get Wanda to want to work.  So, I imagined I was handling Wanda and turned the clove test into a paaaaaaaar-tay!  I also waited to call an alert until the second time Pips indicated the same box.  I know this is a controversial tactic (it indicates I don’t trust her), but honestly, I didn’t trust her after that anise run.  And…she did it!  We got clove, which you can see in this video:

So, all-in-all, this ORT was a great experience.  We met some nice people, Piper got used to a dog-event environment, and we accomplished our most important goal: passing birch.  I count that as a pretty successful day!

Pic: The Good Dog Dog Training contingent at the Davis ORT.  Donna wasn’t physically there, but we all heard her voice echoing advice and reminders in our heads 🙂