NW/SW Progress

Scent Work

I’ll admit it: We slacked on Piper’s nosework/scentwork training while we focused on dock diving this summer. I could offer excuses about the scorching weather here in the summer making training difficult for a black dog, but I won’t. Well, I suppose I kind of did right there. Oops!

Anyway, once the dock diving season wrapped up in October, we started focusing on nosework again. The fall semester and holiday season is a busy time for us, so we crammed for two trials (one in Pleasanton in October, one in Lodi in January) and we did pretty well overall. Here’s how they turned out:

Redwood Belgian Tervuren Fanciers AKC Scentwork Trial on Oct 19th, 2018 (Del Valle)

  • Novice A Exteriors – Q (qualifying score)
  • Novice A Containters – NQ (no qualifying score)

She was nice and methodical on exteriors and had a clear alert. So proud of her! She false alerted on the box next to the correct one in containers. Not bad for limited training 🙂

Northern California Golden Retriever Club AKC Scentwork Trial on Jan 5, 2019

  • Novice A Handler Discrimination – NQ
  • Novice A Containers – Q
  • Novice A Buried – Q and 2nd place
  • Novice A Interiors – Q

She started the trial by false alerting on the box next to the HD box. Very reminiscent of containers at Del Valle. Because of this, I changed my strategy for the next three events. Even when she alerted, I asked her to check the other locations just to be sure. The strategy worked for qualifying because we got the other three correct. Yay! However, it increased our time. On both buried and interiors, her first alerts were correct, so we could have won first place if I called those immediately. However, her first alert was not correct on containers, so we would have NQd if I called that one. Overall, I’m proud of the strategy but hopefully won’t need it with more consistent training. Unfortunately, she also developed a box destruction habit – yikes! The judge strongly recommended that I work on that with her. Wilco.

We signed up for a few more trails in January and February, but we’ve got some health stuff going on with our other dog and my sister, so we’ve put training on hold again and pulled her from those trials. Hopefully we can get back in the swing of things in March.