Scentwork
Program

Our program is designed by Melissa Sowa, a national level competitor and an AKC judge. With her expertise, our classes are truly set apart from other local options! Our goal is to provide teams with such a solid foundation that things like lack of independence, low search drive, false alerts, or poor handling, don’t become problems if a team decides to compete. All of our instructors are successful competitors or judges

Scentwork is a canine sport that is accessible to nearly every dog!

Older dogs or younger dogs, natural athletes or natural couch potatoes–all of these dogs can learn to love using their nose to hunt out the odors hidden in this game.

Much like narcotics detection or bomb detection, scentwork (sometimes called nosework) is a game of hide and seek. An odor source is hidden some place like in a container, on a vehicle, or in drawer and the dog has to find it and communicate to their handler that they found it!

Intro to Scentwork

This class is all about building a solid foundation for your pup–a love of searching, an understanding of their job to find the birch oil, and how to use their nose to read the odor. Our philosophy is always to teach skills so that if a student gets hooked later and wants to compete, they have a foundation that allows them to easily trial.

♦ Introduction to Birch odor

♦ Build up a love of searching

♦ Begin odor obedience (stay at source)

♦ Learn about searching containers

♦ Start to develop an indication

♦ Humans start learning to read when their dog is on odor

♦ Humans learn how to appropriately handle odor, scent q-tips, and prevent cross contamination

Teams may stay in intro for more than one round if they are still building a joy of searching.

Intermediate Scentwork

This class builds on the foundation learned in intro. Dogs continue to build search drive, continue to expand their searching experiences, and are introduced to another odor, Anise.

♦ Introduction to Anise odor

♦ Build more drive to search

♦ Continue to increase odor obedience

♦ Once they have a love of searching we really start to develop a clear indication (“I found it!”)

♦ Begin to increase the challenge by closing containers, adding distractions, increasing the number of containers or size of search area

♦ Humans continue to refine their understanding of what their dog looks like on odor and how odor moves

♦ Experience vehicle, exterior, and interior searches.

Teams can expect to stay in Intermediate for several class sessions as they master the skills.

Advanced Scentwork

This class is really designed for those competing or ready to compete. We introduce additional odor (clove and/or cypress) and but it’s about strengthening skills like odor obedience, indication, and independence when searching. We also trouble shoot problems like lingering odor, pooling odor, elevated hides, inaccessible hides, false alerts and more.

♦ Introduction to Clove/Cypress

♦ Continue to increase odor obedience

♦ Trouble shoot your indication

♦ Increase the challenge by closing containers, adding height to hides, adding distractions, and placing more challenging hides

♦ Practice typical hide locations like thresholds, corners, and seams.

♦ Potentially focus on specific elements like vehicles, exteriors, buried, containers, or interiors

Teams can continue to stay in advance to work through challenges or simply learn more from Melisssa about searching and odor.