Extreme Nose Work!
By Jeff McMahon
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Petco can be a great place to find anything from a citronella collar to quell the incessant barking of your Shiba Inu, to a pet hamster or cockatiel for your son or daughter, but for Penny Scott-Fox and her peppy, black, Flat Coat Retriever, Turner, it’s the perfect location for a training exercise she’s calling Extreme Nose Work.
K9 Nose Work is a popular new sport where dogs learn to utilize their impressive sense of smell to search for a hidden scent (one of three essential oils on a cotton swab), find it, and alert their handlers. Most searches in class are done indoors at pet training facilities and community buildings, or outdoors in parking lots and grassy park areas; and for practice between classes most handlers use their own home or some other familiar location.
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Penny, a nationally renowned dog behavioral specialist and trainer (see www.scott-foxtraining.com) has been involved in K9 Nose Work since November 2007 with her beloved Beauceron, Harry (The Harry Award is dedicated in loving memory to this noble dog), her salmon-loving Beagle, Caliban, and most recently, Turner, who, with just nine months of experience in K9 Nose Work earned a Nose Work 1 national title, a 1st place ribbon in the vehicle search, and a 3rd place overall in the June 7th, 2009 NACSW trial and has since achieved her NW2 title. Penny is also a Certified Nose Work Instructor with classes at the La Canada Community Center.
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| Turner, NW2 |
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| Scott & Cane (also holding Gigi) |
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For Penny, success in K9 Nose Work is a combination of classroom learning, practice, and creativity. To reach the level of excellence she and Turner are at, Penny had to take the solid foundation built in class along with a traditional practice routine, and get creative. Some of the most difficult challenges a K9 Nose Work team can face are new environments and distractions.
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New environments can be frightening to timid dogs, or trigger an irresistible urge to urinate on unfamiliar smells, sometimes referred to as “marking territory” in other dogs. Distractions can range from human and animal, to food, toy, or anything that your dog may deem of a higher value than the search. A team that can overcome these hurdles is sure to find K9 Nose Work the most rewarding sport that dog and handler can do together. What better place to confront some of the most daunting challenges in K9 Nose Work than Petco. That was Penny’s thought, and now she’s put it into action with impressive results. According to Penny, Turner’s greatest potential distractions are high value food like Natural Balance turkey sausage treats, rope-ball toys, and small animals like rats and birds, all of which can be found in Petco, along with the added environmental challenges that a pet supply store provides like strange humans and dogs, new and interesting smells, and more. With the help of a fellow K9 Nose Work handler, Scott Williams, who set up “blind” hides, where neither Penny nor Turner knows the location of the odor, Turner confronted a number of challenging distractions in this new environment. What resulted surprised even Penny, in search after search, Turner led Penny to a display basket of Natural Balance treats, a rat or bird cage, a heap of rope-ball toys, and in every situation, she faced and overcame the distraction, alerting Penny to the odor, and ultimately increasing the confidence and experience of both handler and dog.
Since starting her Extreme Nose Work training sessions, Penny and Turner have returned to Petco several times and continued to see positive results. Penny plans to expand the training to include other unusual search environments with new distractions such as pet-friendly restaurants, parks with barbeques and kids playing ball games, and any other challenging location. A suggestion from one of the founders of K9 Nose Work, Amy Herot, is to always have your odor on hand when travelling with your dog, be spontaneous and look for completely new environments to run searches with your dog. Not only will this type of training strengthen your dog’s skills in K9 Nose Work, but if your dog is shy or fearful of new places, people, and dogs, or over-excited around those things, redirecting the dog’s focus to the K9 Nose Work exercise can help give your dog confidence or calm him down in all aspects of his life. Remember, Extreme Nose Work requires that you and your dog attain a certain level of skill in K9 Nose Work, so consult your Certified Nose Work Instructor before attempting new and challenging searches; and any search – extreme or not – conducted on property not owned by the handler requires the permission of a property owner or designated manager, so be a creative, respectful, and responsible handler and choose pet friendly search locations. For all you dog/handler teams who are ready to take it to the next level, ask Penny how to design your own Extreme Nose Work training exercises!
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