What is Scent Work?
What is scent work?
The game of scent work allows pet dogs of all ages and types and their handlers access to skills and learning previously reserved for specialised police and military working dogs. Scent work (also referred to as Noseworks or scent detection) involves training your dog to search for food, a toy or a specific odour in several set-up scenarios, referred to as ‘elements’.
Some people play the games of scent work purely for therapeutic and enrichment purposes and use only food or toys in their searches forever.
For those interested in competition trailing or simply wanting to learn in more detail about the sport, the dogs are transitioned onto searching for odour. The four competition odours are Birch, Clove, Anise and Cypress (Cypress is used in ANKC trials only).
Why teach your dog scent work?
Scent work is a game that uses the real-world environment so can be played almost anywhere, requires very little equipment and no prior training to get started. It is a ‘no obedience’ game that anyone can play.
Scent work taps into our dog’s natural desire to hunt and seek, giving them a safe and biologically fulfilling way to easily burn lots of mental & physical energy. It assists our shy or fearful dogs to build confidence and our overactive dogs to put their excess energy to good use with fun searches, building resilience and teaching independent problem-solving skills.
In our classes, dogs work one at a time and rest between searches safely in the car, allowing reactive dogs or dogs that have been excluded from other activities to also come along and enjoy the activity of scent work.
Scent work builds a bond between the dog and handler as handlers learn to observe, understand, and support their dogs, playing the game together as a team.
It’s FUN!!!!!
How do we teach scent work?
Our emphasis is on creating good learning experiences for our dogs and supporting them in independent problem solving, rather than commanding them to perform searching tasks in a predetermined manner. Our dogs already know how to search and hunt – this is our opportunity to learn from them!
We start by teaching the concepts of the scent work game to our dogs by hiding their favourite food or toy in carboard boxes and slowly introduce a variety of search environments, gradually increasing the challenges and adding new skills as the dogs’ progress.
When our dogs locate the hidden toy or food reward, they play with it or eat it, self-rewarding and reinforcing their successful searching behaviour.
Searching is an obedience-free zone, without handler interruption or unintended correction.
The four different ‘elements’: containers, interiors, exteriors, and vehicles are introduced to the dog while still searching for food, allowing them to continue building their hunt drive and learn the foundational skills of scent work.
It often takes several months of food or toy only searches to really allow for our dogs to build their desire to hunt, a stamina for searching, and skills needed for searching in many environments before we begin to transition to odour. This also gives the handler time to learn good handling skills and observe their dog and how they search.
When the team is ready, we introduce Birch as our first odour, pairing that with the food or toy that our dogs have already learned to search for. Over a period of time, we reduce the ‘pairing’ until the dog is searching for the odour alone.
The sky is the limit and dog and handler teams can train to go onto competition trailing, which includes searching for blind hides (location of the hide is unknown to handler), searching for multiple hides in a single search area, and, at the higher levels of competition, searching for an unknown number of hides in a larger search area.