How scent work can stimulate your dog’s mind and senses
Scent work is 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, to detect cancer and even to detect when someone is about to have an epileptic seizure. All this just by using their noses
You can make scent work as easy as searching for pieces of food or finding a toy to more advanced work where you teach your dog to search for an article with a particular scent.
Benefits of scent work
- 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. Sniffing out new spaces can help a dog to get comfortable in their surroundings.
- Scent work is tiring. Rathe than constantly trying to physically tire out your dog by playing fetch, try some nose work instead. The dogs who attend scent work classes are exhausted afterwards – including the hyperactive, energetic breeds!
- Scent work is 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 and shy dogs.
Give it a try!
- Put your dog 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 they 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.
- 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’ when 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 using a cue to tell him to begin searching, like ‘find it’.
- After a few repetitions, start to put treats into only three-quarters of the boxes, 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 sense working!
For more cool tricks you can teach your dog, get Dog’s Playtime here!
