Talking Dogs Scentwork: The Manual by Pam Mackinnon

Author:Pam Mackinnon [Mackinnon, Pam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Talking Dogs Publishing
Published: 2013-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Food searches

The introduction to searching using food as the scent article is started a little differently. First you need to choose your food. Obviously it has to be something that you dog likes. My strong recommendation is to use cheese, just a value brand mild cheddar or similar. Cheese has some surprising properties. The main one is that it sticks to almost anything! This makes it fabulous for scentwork as you are less limited to where you can hide it than you are with a toy. You can stick cheese to walls, fences, furniture, boxes, cars (for vehicle searches), plastic, wood, the list goes on. In fact cheese will stick almost everything except cold metal. Your dog won’t be eating huge quantities of cheese when searching so it shouldn’t affect his weight or wellbeing. You can of course use other food, preferably something soft and smelly. Biscuits are not great for this stage of scentwork as they have a much smaller scent picture than cheese or other soft foods. Cheese can also be warmed in your hand and molded like plasticine. This further increases the scent picture and makes it easier for your dog to find.

If you are working indoors or are outdoors and your dog is safe to be loose, then do the following three exercises off lead. If you are in a class situation or in an area where your dog might be very distracted, work on lead.

Start by playing the ‘Find it!’ game.

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