Alerts & re-finds in Nosework

With our nose work sessions we shifted our focus this week to beginning to set up an alert system for our dogs to tell us they have found something rather than just relying on us knowing where the hidden goods are and seeing subtle body language indicators. The way we start is by adding in a cue whilst giving the reward. So if you want your dog to give a passive alert like a sit or down, we simply have the dog sit as we go to reward after marking their find. We can also teach more active alerts like - touching it with their paw, holding their nose on it, barking, or any other behaviors that you want to. But I have always found it is easiest to work with something natural the dog might most easily offer.

We will also be building in a secondary indicator called a refund “show me” which is a pin pointing where once the dog has alerted we ask them to show the spot since most alerts can involve the dog pulling away from the source (this is essential for things like search and rescue or forensic type search where you would not want the dog interacting with the source.)

You can see in our weekend class, working on starting container searches and the beginning stages of adding in alerts by asking for the positions during feeding and me asking for the re-find.

With Leo and our foundation work this week I have been working on taking our pedestal work to full rotations and having him start to follow me around the pedestal. I’ve also introduced shaping fetching games. I have the whole series on video that I need to upload so stay tuned for that. But for now see if you can get those pedestal steps going!