Many behaviour problems in dogs come down to boredom, and a lack of exercise and stimulation – basically, their needs are not met. They spend much of their days indoors or outside in a yard. Not every dog is walked every day and not many get sufficient stimulation. When they’re outside, they are not always allowed to sniff, dig, run and jump to their heart’s content. Introducing your dog to scent work can make his life better. The best part? You don’t even have to go outside.
Using their noses
Scent work is basically teaching a dog how to search for a particular scent. Dogs are used for their amazing scenting abilities in all walks of life – to search for missing people, to find narcotics and explosives, to detect cancer, and even to detect when someone is about to have an epileptic fit. All this through just using their noses!
You can make scent work as easy as searching for bits of food or finding a toy, to more advanced by teaching your dog to search for an article with a particular scent.
Benefits
Scent work has numerous benefits for dogs, including:
- Scent work can be soothing for dogs. Blood flow to certain areas of the brain increases when dogs are concentrating really hard on sniffing, and this can help calm them down.
- Nose work teaches your dog how to problem-solve.Many dogs never get much of a chance to ‘figure it out’. Nose work allows your dog to use his nose to solve problems to find food. This is how most canids spend hours every day!
- Nose work helps your dog gain confidence and independence. I use scent work a lot with many fear issues in dogs. Sniffing out new spaces can really help a dog to get comfortable in their surroundings.
- Scent work is tiring. Rather than constantly trying to physically tire out your dog with playing fetch (which can actually have the opposite effect), do some nose work instead. The dogs who come to our scent work classes are exhausted afterwards – including the hyperactive, energetic breeds!
- It’s suitable for all breeds and ages. Even if your dog is blind, deaf, three-legged, or all three, he can do scent work. This is great for dogs with hip issues, older dogs or shy dogs. Aggressive dogs can also get great exercise without putting others at risk!
How to start
Put your dog away in another room. Place about five cardboard boxes in a line. You can use shoeboxes or parcel boxes – just don’t use boxes that have already contained food. You want the boxes to be big enough so it will be easy for your dog to reach in and get the food. Put a small piece of cheese or cooked meat into each of the boxes. Try not to use treats that will crumble. Now, let your dog into the room and allow him to explore the boxes, finding the treats as he goes. Every time he finds a treat, give him a second one right where the first one was. This helps teach your dog to wait for you when he finds something, because he’ll get paid double if he does!
Repeat until your dog comes running into the room and goes straight to investigate the boxes. Once your dog gets the idea of what to do, you can start to use a cue to tell him to begin searching. I use the words ‘find it’. Then, after a few repetitions, start to put treats into only three quarters of the containers, then half, then a quarter. Your goal is to have about one to four hidden treats per search round. Hear all that sniffing? That’s your dog’s nose working! Remember that each sniff is helping your dog to relax, learn and problem-solve. How cool is that?
Don’t show your dog where the food is – let him use his nose to figure it out himself. It doesn’t matter if he misses a bit – just leave it out for the next round.
Make it interesting
Now that your dog is confidently searching for treats in boxes placed in a line, start mixing things up. It gets harder for the dog when the search area gets bigger, and when there are more boxes. Keep the ratio of about one to four hidden treats per search.
Working in the same room or area as before, make things a bit more challenging for your dog by:
- putting the boxes in a circle.
- setting up the boxes in rows.
- putting the boxes along walls.
- tucking the boxes along the wall near the front door.
- putting boxes in corners.
For now, keep all the boxes on the ground. You can then start to use other items to hide the food in, such as plastic tubs, small pieces of luggage and backpacks.
Read the follow up article here.
