Yooper Paws Nosework Club

Yooper Paws Nosework Club!

This is a group dedicated to Canine Scent Detection Enthusiasts. Members of the group can attend practice sessions with other teams to enhance skills and grow as a human/dog scent detection team. The Yooper Paws Nosework Club is open to all nosework disciplines and skill levels. We will focus mainly on searching for scents, objects, and people, perhaps adding in searching for other dogs when available.

Joining the Club

Once the Intro Workshop or Searching for Scents Class has been completed, you'll receive an invite to join the FB Group: Yooper Paws Nosework Club. This is where practice sessions will be coordinated. Practice Sessions will cost $10 per session or $40 per month. There will be at least 1-2 sessions per week except for holidays, vacations or extreme weather.

We use a traffic light theory system, with the green, yellow, red color code, for the Yooper Paws Nosework Club allowing all dogs regardless of their reactions to people or other dogs to participate. All activities can be tailored to your team's needs.

Intro to Nosework: 

The Intro to Nosework Workshop is now available online for you to work through at your own pace. 

Intro to Searching for Scents:

In this class, you will learn the basic foundations for teaching your dog how to search for a specific scent. We will focus on the basic starter scent of Birch to teach your dog about scent value, creating a find indicator, and develop teamwork skills. Then you can decide if you want to pursue competitive nosework, service dog medical alerts or keep it as a fun enrichment activity for you and your dog. 

At this point, we are including new students in regular Nosework Club Sessions. Beginners will enjoy 10-15 minutes of basic training, then can watch the Club Members practice, joining in with simple searches.

The cost is $125 which can be paid via PayPal, Venmo or Cash before the first class.

We are also offering a starter nosework kit with the start scent and 2 vessels to hide with scent inside, plus supplies needed to store and transfer samples. This started kit is $18 and can be purchased during Club meetings.

We are also offering the 2nd scent, anise, and 1 hiding tin for $5 for those that are ready to move up.

If you have any questions, please email us at yooperpaws@gmail.com

Teaching Scent Based Alerts

Medical Alert Workgroup - Scent Based Alerts

**Early Bird Price: $75 if registered before July 31st!

Yooper Paws of Love and Cindy Campbell Dog Training are again partnering to bring you another Medical Alert Workgroup to teach you how to train your Service Dog to do Medical Alerts for a wide variety of medical disabilities that present with scent based indicators of a need for action.  

We will be focusing on training a specific alert behavior the dog can do to let their human know a medical issue is about to happen based on the dog smelling a biological change in their handler.

This is geared toward the following alerts:

• Migraine Alerts
• Diabetic Alerts
• Cardiac Alerts

This workgroup will meet for 6 Zoom based sessions beginning Wednesday, September 4th  and taking place every other Wednesday night for the next 12 weeks.  It's not mandatory to participate in the Zoom meeting as each meeting will be recorded and a replay made available.  But it's definitely more beneficial for you to participate live and ask your questions during the Zoom meeting.  

We will also be using our +R SD Task group on Facebook as a platform for group communication between Zoom meetings and can start a Facebook Messenger Chat for those in the workgroup that want meeting reminders and help with the assigned homework.  Yes!  There will be homework!  After each Zoom you will have 1 or 2 actions to do with your dog in the training process.  These should take you less then 5 minutes a day, but are best if you can do them daily and why we meet every other week so you have time to build up your SD team between the Zoom Meetings.

For this to be successful, we must keep the Workgroup small and therefore we ask that you only participate if you have already have a Service Dog or Service Dog in Training that is at least 1 yr old or older and that you have been training together as a team for at least 6 months.

The cost of this class is $125, which is an awesome deal considering all the information and support we offer to all the workgroup participants!  If you'd like to register, please fill out the form below.  You will receive an email with payment options once your registration has been processed and you have been approved as a participant.  

**Scholarships are available, please fill out the registration form selecting the scholarship option.

Thank you for registering!  

You will receive an email once we process your registration.  Feel free to reach out to yooperpaws@gmail.com if you have any additional questions.

Scents & Loose Leash Walking

Scents & Loose Leash Walking...What do they have in common?

One of the most common things I hear as a dog trainer is how can I stop my dog from pulling me all over the place on our walks.  Sometimes people don't like my answer!

In a world where tools have become the way to control and correct our dogs when they do a behavior we don't like, often people what an easy answer to this question.  But an easy answer simply does not exist.  A dog's natural pace is much faster then the slow pace of us humans.  Dogs also find a quick pace moving back and forth to more enjoyable and self reinforcing then if they are asked to walk in a straight line at a snails pace.  So here are the bullet points of my answer:

• Meet your dog's needs of sniffing, running, chasing, playing first!
• Add value for walking next to you or near you!
• Choose your walking rules wisely!

Meeting your dog's needs

Depending on the age and breed of your dog, needs vary from dog to dog.  But all dogs have basic needs beyond that of food, water, and shelter.  We tend to forget to take those needs into account before we set out on a walk because we get so focused on the thought that my dog needs exercise, my dog needs to potty, my dog needs to see the world, etc.  But if we explore those thoughts a bit more, we often realize that instead of exercise, they need mental stimulation or instead of seeing the world, they need to smell the world.

When it comes to exercise vs mental stimulation, there isn't an exact recipe for how much of each a dog needs.  There is kind of a rule of thumb with puppies, that is 5 minutes of exercise per month old.  However as dogs grow past 1 yr old, that really doesn't apply any more.  Adolescent dogs between the ages of 1-2 seem to have unending energy and would go all day if let them, but that's not necessarily healthy for them and can easily turn them into super athletes.  Check out this blog post from May to help you determine if your dog needs more or less exercise: MAYbe My Dog Needs More Exercise.  Mental stimulation is just as important, if not more important, than physical exercise.  Adolescent dogs need more mental stimulation in the form of simple training, games, and teamwork skills.  Check out my February blogposts on enrichment and reinforcement to learn more about mental stimulation for your dog.

We often talk about Puppy Socialization as buzz words in the dog training world, but it's important to understand that socialization doesn't end when a puppy grows up and it's not just about meeting new people or other dogs.  Socialization is really about processing new or noval experiences.  We, as people, think in terms of seeing things or watching things.  However our dogs process the world around them with their nose, sniffing things in the environment.  The dog's nose is their strongest organ and capable of detecting things that we can only begin to understand.  Yet we often don't embrace that and help them to learn to understand what they are smelling.  If I can only get one message to my clients struggling with adolescent dogs, that's to embrace the sniff-a-bout walk and learn to do it well.

A sniff-a-bout, often called a free walk, is all about allowing a dog to go at their pace in an environment.  Unless you have lots of access to fenced areas in your community, you often need to use a longline of 15+ feet to do a sniff-a-bout correctly.  When using a longline you need to have your line attached to a back clip on a harness for safety and not on the front harness clip or a flat collar.  I have resources for learning how to do this type of walk in my Crazy Adolescents Classroom if your dealing with a teenager.  I can also teach you how to do sniff-a-bouts successfully in private sessions.  

How Sniffing the Environment affects Leash Walking Skills

The key to doing a sniff-a-bout is that your dog learns to take their time, savoring the moment and hunting for those smells that are buried under the surface.  

Often in our attempts to exercise our dog enough, we teach them to do some quick sniffing as they go-go-go.  They then develop a habit of going faster to smell more things or may learn to bounce back and forth from side to side racing from one tree to the next or pulling to reach that person/dog on the trail.  Somewhere along our mission to provide exercise for our dogs, we accidently teach our dogs to pull to what they want the most.  Then we allow them to practice this behavior as adolescents as we make our walks longer and longer in an attempt to help our dogs be calm at home.  This is often when I get called in to help.

There is a learning process for both people and dog when we make the change away from walks focused on exercise towards walks focused on sniffing.  To make it easier for people, especially owners of adolescents, I suggest that they spend some time learning how to work together as a team using a longline.  The first step generally involves the person sitting in a chair or on a blanket and allowing the dog to walk circles around them.  This helps the dog to realize that the goal is not to rush forward.  Once the dog begins to see that we are not going anywhere they will typically start smelling the ground and things in the environment that they can reach.  And eventually they look back to us wondering what we are doing just sitting here.  That's when you capture their desire to engage with you and either throw a treat party or produce their favorite toy!  I like to toss some treats out into the environment to see if they go back to sniffing after they've found the treats or turn back to you for more.  Once they get the hang of this you can work on calling them back to you when they get near the end of the line so they are instantly racing to the end of the line.  Then slowly with time and practice you can add in moving through the environment together without racing and pulling on the leash.

Once you can navigate longline walks together as a team, you can slowly add leash walks where you are actually covering some distance together as a team.  This will help you fine tune your leash skills allowing for sniffing in appropriate places and loose leash walking between sniffing places.  Then you can also expand this slower paced, environmental processing to other aspects of life with your dog.

NOSEwork is FREE!

Free Exploration Time!

Azul and I were shopping at a pet friendly store and we're surprised to see another dog in the store. This raised Azul's excitement level a bit so after we were done shopping we took a 15-18 min sniff-a-bout.

The location is a small practice football field that is empty and the grass is long because it's not football season. That means extra smells for Azul! There are baseball fields nearby with some practice sessions just starting so there are people coming and going in the distance. And there is occasional road noise from the traffic. Azul is wearing his everyday harness and flat collar. There is a traffic lead attached to the back harness clip incase another dog shows up or I need one of Azul's Service Dog tasks. And there is a 10ft Paracord leash attached to Azul's back clip and my waist belt to ensure that we are save in this wide open environment. Azul is free to explore the field going any direction he wants as long as he doesn't go too fast. I try to be as quiet as I can so that Azul can do his doggy thing uninterrupted. I might give so gentle encouragement to explore a certain area such, "Oh what's over here!" And I will no doubt offer praise and encouragement for making choices that I like such as exploring these tires. This kind of free activity is important to help dogs develop good habits and make good choices appropriate to their ability which in turn helps develop their confidence and makes them more resilient when life doesn't go as planned.

June Theme of the Month

 

The NOSE Knows!

Dogs naturally know how to use their nose for things that come natural to dogs.  They figure out pretty quickly which scents are appealing to them, which scents mean danger, and definitely which scents come from desirable mates.  But with a bit of training we can teach them which scents are important to us and which scents they should ignore.  

Dogs easily learn that most people foods smell delicious without much training.  And if we completely ignored that, our dogs would gladly enjoy any people food they can reach.  Through training we can teach them that greater rewards are available when they control themselves and ignore people food.  My dogs don't raid the trash can because with reinforcement I've taught that the treats I give them from my hand is much greater then any treat they find on their own.

Dogs that work in scent related fields need to learn to ignore many people scents.  Service Dogs learn to ignore other people, focusing on their person.  Police dogs learn to ignore environmental smells like people, other pets, and various other common household scents and search for chemicals or scents such as drugs, bombs, even gun powder.  Dogs are being trained to detect new smells all the time!

The June Theme of the Month is going to be all about helping your dog develop their sense of smell in a way that is more rewarding for them and fits well within the people world we ask our dog to live in.  Posts will include these topics:

• The nerdy side of how the dog's nose works.
• The enrichment effects of nose work games.
• The stress relieving side effects of sniffing.
• Training the Service Dog nose.

I hope to bring a guest speaker or two in to talk about the NOSE via recorded Zoom Chats and I will be sharing some of my best The NOSE Knows Moments with the Yooper Paws Pack.  Be sure to subscribe to this blog (right hand column in the web version) to get the latest posts delivered to your email box.

 Find It Games!

This is one of my “Go-to” games for rainy days or any down day that I want to give my dog some mental work in a fun way because exercise is out of the picture.  What makes this game so awesome for our dogs is that it’s easy to start simple so they can learn to use their nose, but it’s also easy to keep changing it up to make it constantly harder so that we are challenging our dogs.  This is typically the 2nd game I teach all my dogs and especially dogs that I want to train medical alert skills to.

Before the game, use a 2nd person to hold your dog or place them behind a gate while you hide the treats.  Once your dog has learned the cues that go with this game you can ask them to down/stay while you hide the treats.  Start the game using the same treats every time you play and your dog will associate that smell with the objects they are finding.  Once your dog becomes more advanced you can start hiding different items and add in a “sniff” or “smell” cue to tell your dog which scent they are searching for during the session.

At first, allow your dog to see you drop 2-3 treats on the floor in the center of the room, then go to the dog and release them to find it.  They will run to the treats and gobble them up.  Slowly start moving the treats further away from each other and closer to furniture or other obstacles in the room.  Once you’ve made it to the outskirts of the room you are using, start positioning your dog so they can not watch you hide the treats.  By this time, they should be starting to understand the game but if they struggle too much, place the treats in easy to find places such as the center of the room again.  Slowly add in hiding spots that are at different levels; on the floor, on a low ledge, on the seat of a chair, on top of a shoe, etc.  Make sure all hiding spots stay below the dog’s nose when you're in the early stages, but as your dog progresses, you can pick higher hiding spots.  One rule that I use is I never place a treat on a table top, even a coffee table, as I don’t want my dogs to think that it is ok to eat food left on tables.

Here are a few more slow progression steps I take as my dog learns to search better:

• Make the area bigger, hiding treats in multiple rooms.

• Switch to an old dog toy that has been played with often.  This allows you to add in your sniff cue.  Present the toy, place your dog in a different room to hide the toy in an easy spot, give your search or find it cue, and if your dog struggles you can shake the toy a bit to get them interested.  Use the same toy over and over again until the dog starts to get the idea. 

• Raid the kitchen for smelly items that the dog can’t actually eat such as a banana, empty spice container, or nearly empty peanut butter jar.  Loosen the cap on the container or jar to allow the smell to escape.  Garlic, pepper, and cinnamon are some of my go to smells in the beginning.

• Slowly pick items that are not as smelly such as clothing, a hat, bandana you or another dog has worn.

• Hide the treat in places where the dog can’t reach without assistance.  This allows you to build in a behavior or alert you want your dog to give when they find the treasure.  Our dogs sit and stare at the place the treat is hiding.  Make the first higher hiding spots something that is easy to see and smell.  I have a chandelier in my living room that works well for this.

• Once your dog is really good at the game you can hide items inside boxes, dressers, and other containers.  Make it easy at first by leaving a door or drawer slightly open until the dog understands to alert you for help in opening the container for them to find the object.

• When your dog is really good you can play with items that you frequently lose such as your keys, phone, inhaler, or meds container.  If you associate the name of that item, you will be able to ask your dog to go find your phone which is an awesome task!