#scent detection

[kay-outside]

Yesterday we got up at 4 am to drive to a rural community center for Achillea to sniff wintergreen scented q-tips 😂 explain that one to your non dog-sport friends lol

Achillea qualified in instinct and all 3 searches for Novice, earning her CKC SDIN and SDN!! Very proud of my girl, that was a long day! Our friends Chickadee and Sadie also passed 🎉

[driven-2fetch]

First QP towards our Novice title in Scent Work. 😁

[shepherdnerd]

Tristan got a new title today! Advanced level in scent detection! He did such a good job on all his search components!! So proud of him ❤❤❤

[gar-a-ash]

Practicing public searches again! She is not as confident in public vs practicing at home, and definitely does not have as much stamina, but it's good to work her in such a large public building. Air moves differently and tracing odor (especially cold odor, I didn't let a hide sit longer than 30 seconds) is a lot harder in a building like this.

Excited to try trialing her soon! One of my regrets with Reese is that even though he was trained to Master level on searches we never actually trialed, and I don't want to do that to myself again.

[abirddogmoment]

Mav crushed it at the scent detection trial, sniffed so many things (including a rabbit in the parking lot) and had beautiful committed alerts for all of his runs. He Q'ed in Open Containers and Open Exterior, and I NQ'ed us in Interior because I got too excited - I'll be more patient at the next one!

It was a really fun Saturday with my faves 💜 cheers to @youngventure and @mongrelization and their perfect dogs.

[hashtag-xolo]

Tzapo learning to look for a new medical scent for detecting low blood sugar. We are working on imprinting and find-it games on the bed are a lot of fun, as you can see Tzapo is veeeerrry eager to be asked to find the bottle:

Tzapo was having a ton of fun with scent detection training and didn't want to stop. He took a short break to run off and get water but then came back and immediately started sniffing again in case if set up a new hide while he was gone 💙 he's a good boy.

My medicine causes my blood sugar to go low if I don't pay attention and my autistic brain is bad at making me eat but my brain struggled to give me permission to train that because ???? Brains are stupid and set up stupid rules??? But I'm finally doing it 😬 and Tzapo is clearly having a blast with it.

[mandana-the-service-pup]

We went for a freedom walk yesterday at the park I’ve been taking Mandana scootering. There is a paved pathway that goes half a mile in with several short hiking paths that loop off and rejoin along the way. It’s not really a “picnic” style park but it’s perfect for short walks and biking.

She did really great most of the time. She wasn’t as responsive to her longline cues as I would have liked, but I knew this could be an issue. We haven’t been able to do sniff walks much since she started having problems with the fertilizers/pesticides near us, so she was desperate for some decompression and out of practice.

We did have a bit of an oopsie moment but it was completely my fault for setting her up to fail. I decided to try a new hiking path and it was a lot narrower than the other trails with a lot of blind turns. We were going down a steep hill and she was out ahead of me. She saw a rabbit and took off around a corner. Because of the decline I knew I wasn’t going to be able to safely hold the line and in a second she was out of sight. She didn’t respond to her first recall so I called her by name and she came sprinting back. Even though she “failed” I gave her a jackpot reward anyways. I want her to know good things happen when she enthusiastically runs back to me.

On our way back she started to run towards something again, but this time she turned on a dime and ran back to me immediately. The failed recall was my fault without a doubt. I should have had her closer to me since we had never been on that path before and we were out of practice. Lesson learned.

TMI WARNING: ticks

I checked her over before she got in the car and I ran a flea comb all over her when we got home, but later that night I found she had a few ticks on her (they were too thin to get caught by the flea comb). She is on prevention but that only kills them after they have already latched on. Having had Lyme disease before, I am not fond of ticks but increased exposure was something I had to accept when taking on a service dog. There are sprays available like Cedarcide & permethrin but I’m limited in what products I can use because although Mandana’s super sniffer makes her perfect for medical alerts it also makes her very sensitive to strong smells.

Out of curiosity, I decided to experiment a little with teaching Mandana to alert to ticks (bed-bug detection dogs are a thing after all). I used a combination of her vocabulary and scent-training skills and we had some surprising success. I showed her a tick and let her sniff it, called it a “bad bug” and told her to “show me”. Out of the five ticks I found on her, she was the one who found three of them. She pointed to her upper back two separate times and handed me her front leg. That’s pretty good for a first session. If I wasn’t so tired I would have stored the ticks in the freezer so I could use them for more sessions but I’m positive we’ll have more to use soon. Hopefully, we’ll get to a point where she can find them on herself as well as us. Wouldn’t that be nice for hiking season!

[securityunit-ese]

Backyard noseworks!

They both found this one faster than I expected. It’s not a hiding angle I’ve done before