Nosework & box games and pedestal

So in our Nosework Games we want to be transitioning to using our target odor and fading the food at the hide spot and marking & rewarding finds. You will see a natural drop in intensity indicating the find when we move the food away, this is normal so be ready to mark and reward immediately when you see your dog sniff the target odor. Keep the finds relatively easy for the initial hides without food.

For practicing your searches keep it short, it is surprisingly a lot of work for a dog to search intensely and we don’t want to risk them fatiguing and losing motivation for the game. I do 3-4 searches max in a session. Don’t think you need to keep making the hides harder, the idea is to make it fun and build drive for the game before you make searching hard.

You can work on nose targeting with your dog away from the searches to teach your pups to hold their noses on a find longer for you. Here is the class recording from the weekend where we worked on searches without food at the hide, you can watch me work Nick on several hides, his first searches without food at the hide.

For our foundation and puppy training this week I’ve been building my box game, you can see me working on sending to the box from different positions, as well as working on bringing his front feet out and backing back into the box. If you are on Instagram you can see on my IGTV channel another video of me working on the box game in a way that is going to build into an easy transition to teaching staying a send and a stay on a place.

I also introduce his pedestal for the first time, getting his front feet on the pedestal and getting him confident in that position. I’m working on having him get comfortable laying on his side in a down for future cooperative care. You can see me lure him to roll his hip while laying down, and then rolling onto his side.

As you can see I keep the sessions high engagement fast paced holding his focus the whole time. It’s important to have an idea what you are going to work on during your sessions so you can transition between them without losing your dog’s attention. This is how you build a relationship with training that keeps a dog engaged with learning!