I know I said in my last post that we weren't attending this class because I could not afford it due to moving next month (not to mention yesterday I started receiving bills for my student loans, gah!), but one of the people I train with offered to pay my class fee. She is a great person and I am so grateful for her kindness.

Since it was the first class we were supposed to just have a bunch of boxes on the floor and have food in one box where the dog could self-reward. However, 4 of the 6 people in the class had attended the Nosework Seminar a while back, which was taught by the same instructor as the class, and have been working with their dogs since then, so some of us are already moving ahead and being challenged.

Frodo did amazing. I honestly thought he was going to do better than he did at the seminar. Not that he did bad, but I guess I just thought he was going to rock the socks off this game from the word go! Today he was really using his nose, though he still uses his eyes more than is wanted, and was absolutely having a blast!

The first round the instructor was just putting food in the boxes and he found the first hide right away, as he was supposed to. She also put a hide against a back wall in the first round, which poses a little more of a challenge and a lot of times the dog will actually pick up the scent on a certain wall, and work that wall. He didn't do this (though I was able to see another, more experienced dog in the class do it), but he did find the hide quickly. The third hide in this round was tucked near the entrance around a little ledge.

During the second round she started him off by putting the box on it's side, facing the wall. Because of that the odor pooled in the box and did not spread like it did when the open face of the box was pointing upward or toward open air. During this second round the trainer also used my bait bag and hung it from a chair to add elevation and move from just box work to environmental hides (not something that is normally done in week one, but that she did for some of the class today to further challenge some of the dogs), and he had no trouble finding that either. The last hide of this round was on a bench, he hopped on it and found the bag without issue.

For the third round the trainer hung the bait bag higher than she had last time and hung it from a crate in the corner, where the odor would part along the walls. Frodo did great this time and you could actually see has he worked his way down the "scent cone" :

For the last hide of the day the trainer hung the bait bag from the entry gate because Frodo was so eager to work that once he entered the search area he would blow past everything until he got to the center of the room, then start working. This was definitely his longest and hardest search of the day because he just couldn't seem to realize that the hide might be by the entrance and not out on the search floor! He did eventually find it though without any assistance.

I was so proud of him! He has been zonked out since we got home, he hasn't even waken up for dinner yet!

Over the next five Saturdays I am going to post about the Nosework classes, and I realize it may be very dull and repetitive to read, but I am going to do so in order to have notes that I can look back on for ideas or to mark progress. So I am apologizing in advance if this bores anyone, though it does say right on my banner that this blog is boring, so I can only carry so much pity for you all ;)