Sniff It – Week Four

By now we have a regular Sniff It routine here – we do our homework every morning – Bear thinks this is a wonderful way to earn breakfast.

This week in our class, our first assignment was to make things more challenging happening for our dogs by adding more containers, more boxes and more containers in boxes. We are still only hiding one food filled container but the dog now has to find it! Our second assignment is to observe our dogs and see what kinds of ‘signs’ they give us when they have found the food container.

As far as the box searches go, I think things are going nicely. Bear will still occasionally pick up a container and remove it from a box but he always leaves it if it is not the correct one. As before, I remain neutral any time a container is picked up and only give him attention (and food!) when he finds the correct container.

With the container search this week, I have been waiting a little bit longer when Bear finds the right container to see what he does. He typically starts by scratching at the container with both paws and then eventually lays down. I think that having done some article indication work for tracking helped but it’s still cool to see the light bulb turn on! Now the next challenge is to get this behavior with containers hidden in boxes!