Nose work for dogs

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Imprinting Odor

Imprinting Target Odor in hand

  • have a lightly scented tin in one hand

  • treats in the other, after showing the odor tin

  • immediately reward with the other hand

  • keep alternating scent/feed/scent/feed so they pair the two together

  • read below more details about how to properly scent your tin.

Imprinting target odors using a colander

  • toss a treat for your dog to go find

  • set down a metal colander with a scent tin under it

  • wait for your dog to stick their nose in the colander

  • as soon as their nose goes in the colander start dropping treats in one after another for as long as they hold their nose in the colander, stop if they come out

  • deliver treats at a quick enough pace they stay in the bowl, but one at a time so they are sniffing to find the treat

Training your indications

Here’s the thing about Scent work and Nose Work for dogs, they already know how to do it. So our training is primarily about creating a system where we can more easily read their signals that tell us they have identified a specific odor. The truth is, in competitions most failures have to do with a trainer not seeing when a dog’s natural indications say they found it and/or not trusting it when they do. Since we have no way of knowing what they smell and we can’t smell it, well under stress of competition it can make for a whole lot of second guessing. So we seek to create a way for our dogs to clearly say they found it, and this is where the training comes in.

In an ideal world we totally understand how our dog’s bodies look and how their breathing sounds as they work scent so that by the time they give the trained indication we are confident in what we see, and that’s how I like to work scent work training. One of the reasons I focus so much on deep foundations is my background is in working Search and Rescue dogs, where it’s not a game, people’s lives could be on the line. The teams I coach have to work with law enforcement and if their dog gives a trained alert, that means a forensic team gets called in, that’s not something you want to do because of a hunch.

So before you start working on scent work if you have the goal of competing or pursing any sort of higher level of scent work training decide what you want your dog’s alert system to be. Do you want the dog making nose contact and holding it? Great for sports when they can reach the target area, but what if the source is higher than they can reach? Not good for SAR work, drug detection, arson detection or most any professional level scent work where you don’t want the dog making contact with an actual scent source. Do you want the dog to bark? Great for dogs you want to keep a distance, but what if your dog barks at other times? Like when they are frustrated or distracted? Want your dog to sit or lay down? Again, what if they do these things in other contexts? Put a paw on it? Head rest? Great for sport dogs, not great for professional dogs. What if pawing is their natural frustration behavior? So when we look at building indications we want to look at those individual dogs and what your goals with scent work are. If you are using this to learn and want to someday do SAR work then we want to look at “passive” alerts that take place at a short distance from the source. If this is for scent work competitions nose touches or noses frozen pointed in the direction, chin rests on hot boxes in container searches are nicely clear, a sit/down at the source can be nice.

These trained indications are going to be something our dog uses to tell us they think they found it. But while working we need to learn all the ways their behavior and body language does this so we know we are training the right thing. I have had to fix SO MANY SAR dogs who’s owners had inadvertently trained the dogs to watch the handlers when searching for human remains, because trainers jumped the gun and cued alerts before the dog was in scent, so the dogs were moving about waiting for the handler to tell them when to alert. So you need to know the dog actually is scenting the source when you start building in that trained indication behavior. On the flip side I have also helped many teams where the dog’s natural signals were ignored causing frustration because their trained alert behavior was more complicated than they had the capacity to perform in the situation at that point in training. My favorite part of scent work is that to be good at it, you need to really know what your dog’s body and behavior says while they work to very fine details. But don’t worry, you will learn it as you go!

Ok, so we have picked our indications and now we want to start introducing our dog to the scent we want to work on. But before that we have to make sure they can do the desired behavior on its own.

So let’s look at training a nose touch indication.

Can your dog do a nose touch on a target?

Can your dog hold some duration at the target instead of just bonking it?

If your dog doesn’t yet know how to touch a target you can visit the clicker training page for more help. But here is a quick demonstration of teaching a nose touch target:

  • hold a plastic lid between your finger and thumb

  • hold a small tasty smelly treat between your fingers like a cigarette behind the target

  • present the target a few inches from your dog’s nose

  • when they investigate looking for the treat mark as soon as their nose makes contact with the lid

  • after you mark, flip the target over so they can reach the treat between your fingers

After a few reps of that, eliminate the treat behind the target and deliver the reward to the target from the other hand after they touch it.

Ok, so your dog can touch a target & can do so with a bit of duration,

let’s move onto introducing target scent odors.

We are going to repeat the target training exercise using a scented tin, make sure the scent tin is lightly scented- like a piece of qtip that was in a jar with scent, rather than a fully drenched swab. If the scent is too strong you might put the dog off of searching if they find the odor too overwhelming. More is not always better with scent work!!! Be sure whatever sport you compete in you read the rules to find out what strength of scent your dog will be expected to search. Sometimes strong scents are more challenging because it pools all over and the dog has to be good at working it to the source. I’ve watched so many dogs indicate a container that was downwind of the actual source so the dog started giving indication assuming that was the source, you don’t see as much of that with more faint odors they need to be closer to in order to pick up on.

  • ok, so we have our lightly scented cotton swab in a tin in one hand

  • sitting in a chair

  • treats in the other hand

  • present the scented tin

  • when the dog sniffs the tin mark

  • reward from the other hand

  • repeat 4-6 times

  • Once they get the idea work yourself closer to the ground

  • get that tin as close to the ground as you can

Can you hear his sniffing? If you can hear sniffing, mark and reward that.

Building Indication Stickiness

  • We want our dogs to not only give an indication, but hold it!

  • Once we start working often dog’s learn all the goodies come from the handler and they then struggle to stay at the scent source once they find it, because they look to us for the rewards. This is great if you can guess by what they did right up until that moment as to where it was before they looked at you. But to be a consistent team it helps to build in a fix for that, and I do that right away.

  • I place out the reward where they can see it, and wait for them to indicate before releasing to the reward

using a toy for an indirect reward.

letting him see the ball in my hand, getting the indication. I want him to sort out, I get the ball/treat by sticking my nose to the source until I hear the marker

Adding additional target odors

I will always go back to the imprinting stage once I begin adding new odors. For sports check the venue you use to see what scents they use. Commonly used essential oils in competitions: Anise, Birch, Clove. You will see in these videos I am now wearing gloves handling the scent tins. Once I am working multiple scents and handling different odors I need to be concerned about cross contamination and getting the other scents on the outside of the tins so I am always ultra careful about handling the tins once I am working with more scent.