In the Scent Work method that I teach in this Course, your dog will not be searching for food treats. Instead, your dog will be introduced to your chosen scent or odour right from the start, and rewarded with food and/or toys for locating the source of that odour.
After completing a few preparatory steps, and ensuring your dog is suitably motivated, we will use a back chaining process – meaning that we first teach the dog what to do when it smells the odour (sit, down, freeze or other trained behaviour of your choosing), before getting the dog to search for the odour. A reward signal (a clicker, or a verbal marker such as "Yes") is used to communicate to the dog the specific behaviours that are being rewarded. This method is similar to the way in which Police and Military Dogs are trained to find Narcotics or Explosives, or Conservation Detection Dogs locate Rare or Threatened animal or plant species. The Course will show you how you can easily achieve this with your own dog at home.
This training method is fast, leads to enthusiastic searching, and can prevent or resolve problems such as excessive scratching or biting at hides (places where odour is hidden), or having difficulty "reading" when your dog has located the source of the odour.
To help in the process of training your dog, we will explore the use of a variety of food delivery procedures and utilise everyday equipment such as kitchen colanders, pvc pipe, bricks, cardboard boxes and plastic storage containers to fully develop the chosen indication (alert behaviour).
My scent training method is geared towards owners aiming to enter Scent Work or Nose Work competitions (Trials), but you can use this training method for any other scent related activities such as finding truffles on your property, or locating items you habitually lose!
This Course will take you through the entire initial Scent Work training process, and introduce you to some Novice/Starter Level searches, including Container Searches (cardboard boxes), Interior Searches, Exterior Searches and Vehicle Searches.