Yooper Paws of Love is dedicated to providing training with love to you and your 4-legged friend!
My mission as a trainer is to EDUCATE owners to ENGAGE better with their dogs to EMPOWER them to function as an effective team together. As a trainer, I help families & their dogs learn to enjoy each other’s company by developing a teamwork and games based approach to dog training that is as individualized as the family I’m helping!
Play Learn Connect September Challenge Sniff & Search Together!
🐾 The Power of Sniffing: Play, Learn, Connect
Sniffing is not “just” sniffing. For our dogs, every breath in through their nose is a window into the world. They can smell stories left behind by other animals, discover what food or plants are nearby, and even sense changes in the environment that we’ll never notice.
When we allow sniffing on walks—or build sniffing games into playtime—we give our dogs more than enrichment. We give them freedom, confidence, and joy.
🐶 Play
Sniffing is the ultimate play activity for dogs.
It’s fun, self-rewarding, and deeply satisfying.
Games like “find it” with treats or toys hidden in the grass make walks interactive.
Following a scent trail turns an ordinary sidewalk stroll into an adventure.
When your dog plays through sniffing, their body and brain both light up with happiness.
🧠 Learn
Sniffing is how dogs learn about their world.
Every new smell teaches them what’s safe, what’s familiar, and what’s different.
Sniffing helps dogs process stressful environments by gathering information.
Allowing dogs time to investigate reduces anxiety and builds confidence in new places.
Sniffing isn’t wasted time—it’s your dog’s most natural classroom.
❤️ Connect
When we slow down and let our dogs sniff, we connect with them on their level.
It tells them, “I see you. I value what matters to you.”
Standing still while they sniff becomes a shared experience, not a tug-of-war.
Celebrating their discoveries (“Good job finding that!”) strengthens the bond of trust.
Connection happens in these quiet, sniff-filled moments.
✨ Play, Learn, Connect isn’t just a motto, it’s a way of living with our dogs. Sniffing builds joy, teaches resilience, and deepens our bond in ways no structured training plan ever could.
🐾 Ready to explore more ways to help your dog thrive through Play, Learn, Connect activities?
With the Longline Workshop coming up this weekend, I wanted to take a moment to share some important information about longlines and why we as dog owners need to become more skilled at using them successfully.
Picture of Azul wearing a dual clip harness and 12 ft longline and Finnegan wearing a collar and 10 ft line, both sniffing a very interesting spot along the side of a quiet road.
In case you are new to Yooper Paws of Love and/or the idea of using a longline to walk your dog, here are a few previous blogs that may find especially helpful before attending the workshop this weekend.
First and foremost is making sure that your dog has the right gear to walk safely. Longlines come in many lengths from 15 ft to 50 ft. Personally, I make my own so I can make the length match the environment. For the purposes of this workshop, we will be looking at using a 15-20ft longline. Check out this post on Taking a Sniff-a-bout to learn more about choosing the correct gear and environments to practice with your longline.
It's also important to understand WHY we all should be taking a longline based sniff-a-bout with our dogs, daily if possible but at least a few times a week. Generally dogs walk at a much faster pace then us so it's unnatural for a dog to walk right beside their human for long distances. Longlines allow dogs to cover more ground, often moving side to side while sniffing which can greatly reduce the amount of time the dog is pulling to get from Point A to Point B. While we as humans, learn about our environment using our eyes and ears the most, our dogs learn about the environment using their nose first, then their ears. Check out this post on Environmental Processing to see how allow your dog to sniff can meet their needs and help to build their confidence in new environment.
Understanding how scents impact your dog's ability to walk nicely on a leash and how you can use their love of scents to improve leash skills. Check out this post for more on Scents & Loose Leash Walking
What the majority of my clients struggle with is how their dog acts when they see another person or dog while out on a walk. The dog might struggle with feeling unsafe or might want to greet the newcomer so badly that they loose control of themselves. Both are extreme emotions that often lead to barking, lunging, and pulling on the leash. This is the main focus of our Longline Workshop this weekend, to teach owners the basic skills they need for managing the leash around distractions before facing it a real life situation. Check out this blog, Introducing New Dogs Slowly to see a bit about the set up we will be using in Private Sessions and Mini-Group Sessions to help owners and dogs become more confident and/or less over-excited when seeing new dogs or people.
What to expect at the Longline Workshop
The Longline Workshop
This is going to be 2 hours of fun! You can sign up for a 15 minute longline management session, then you will be pointed in a direction towards your private practice space. There you can practice your skills and receive additional support from a Canine Coach if a challenge presents itself.
Sessions will take place April 15th from 1-3pm. All borrowed gear should be returned by 4pm when the supervised Longline Walks will end.
Your dog will need to be wearing a well fitting harness for this workshop. If they are prone to pulling, a dual clip attachment will help. If you need to borrow a harness or longline, please let us know in advance and we will do our best to match you with equipment that will work for you. Using a collar or head halter solo without a harness can lead to increased injury and should not be used with a longline any longer than 8-10ft.
(Absolutely no aversive collars are allowed at any Yooper Paws activities!)
15 Minute Training Sessions
We will start out by showing you some simple leash handling skills that show you the best way to control your longline without hurting either yourself or your dog. It's best to have 2 hands on your longline at all times, however we know that is not realistic. We therefore teach you how to decide which hand is going to be for strength and stopping power and which hand is going to be for taking up slack, letting out the line as needed, and sending gentle feedback down the line to your dog.
Faith & Joshua demonstrate basic longline skills with Echo.
Once the leash is comfortable in your hands, we will walk with you around our "safe" light distraction area to help you practice your skills with the longline and teach your dog how to respond to your body movements and changes. We will also go over a few different ways to reinforce your dog for making great choices such as returning to you instead of pulling toward a distraction or checking in with you when they feel safe. There are several low key games you can play with your dog to help them focus on either you or the environment your in more then focusing on the distraction. We will teach you a few of these games to help.
Then after your mini-training session, we will point you to an area for you to practice more skills. We will have 3 locations to choose from depending on your comfort level with the longline and your dog's comfort level around other dogs. The easy level will be a simple out and back walk by yourself in an area without other dogs. The middle level area will be a spot where you can see other dogs at a distance but keep a great enough distance that both dogs can remain calm. And the highest level area will be where you can easily see other dogs and follow the leader on a specific path, gradually reducing the distance between dogs. Dogs will get a turn to be the leader and the follower if there are enough people who choose the highest level. Obviously 15 minutes is not enough time to teach you all the skills you need to safely walk your dog around distractions if your dog has a previous history of struggling. The goal is not to create the perfectly skilled leash walking team in 15 minutes, but to lay the groundwork for leash skills that will improve your teamwork and make your walks more enjoyable for you and your dog!
The challenge of walking an adolescent dog is struggle that most owners face at some point.
Understanding the challenge of walking adolescents is the first step to setting up your "Train Smarter" walk with your dog. To understand the behaviors we often see in adolescent dogs, we have to understand a bit about how their brain is working (or not working!) at this stage. The puppy brain is designed to stay close to their family (canine or human) processing and enjoying the world around them from the safety their family provides. The adult dog brain is designed to think for themselves based on their basic need to survive and thrive which includes finding food, water, shelter, etc. The adolescent brain is basically a time of transition where the brain is forming new connections as the teen learns to explore their environment more intensely to begin to seek out the skills they need to survive and thrive. While this is how nature designed the canine brain, we ask our dogs to live in a "people world" where survival depends on how they cope in the world we put them in. That will be a future blog, but for now I want to focus on how the brain changes impact our adolescent dogs. Here are common struggles that adolescents go through:
The environment is majorly exciting to all the dog's senses which almost immediately sends the adolescent into a higher emotional state simply by entering a new environment.
Due to hormonal changes and the natural desire to find a mate, other dogs often become a huge distraction. This is even true for altered dogs without hormones getting in the way as the brain is still driving this motivation.
With the rewiring of the brain, the dog often seems to have forgotten basic training skills that they previously new well. This often makes it seem like they are suddenly stubborn or defiant but really they are simply experiencing a stage of forgetfulness that is pretty close to what we've come to call brain fog in humans.
With all the changes the dog goes through periods of higher fears and lower ability to control or self regulate their impulses. This means they are prone to repeating the puppy behaviors of jumping, pulling, being vocal, and other habits we've been working on for months.
When you add those all together they lead to increased challenges any time we take our dogs out for an adventure. This often discourages us as owners to the point that we start to hate our time out with our dogs because it seems like its one struggle after another. Then the dog picks up on this they begin to hate going out on adventures too. This is where "Train Smarter, Not Harder" comes into play because our dogs still need exercise and exposure to things that will be in their world.
When we walk with a puppy, we often follow the theory of spending 5 minutes per months old so a 3 month puppy gets 15 min walks and a 4 month old puppy gets 20 min walks. This leads to slowly making walks longer and longer which is perfect for the puppy stage. But if we continue this practice into adolescence we often build their stamina to a point that we humans have a hard time keeping up with. Adolescents actually excel when we take shorter walks that focus on more on keeping their emotions and arousal level down to a more manageable state.
If you're not sure how to keep your dog under threshold check out these blogposts:
The number one reason our dogs need to go out and about is to explore the environment and sometimes moving around makes that too challenging. When we set out on the mindset of we need to walk a certain distance or be gone a certain amount of time or accomplish x,y,z on this walk, we set ourselves and our dogs of for failure. The main goal of our walk should be to create a pleasant experience for both us and our dog. The trick is how do we do that? The simple answer is to design a walk that will help our dog explore while also helping them to stay calm and under threshold. This is where I developed the sniff-a-bout!
Learning to take a slower paced sniff-a-bout is a challenge to us humans because we more focused on accomplishing tasks...we go for the walk because it needs to be done without thinking about what the main purpose of the walk is which should be environmental processing for our dogs. The video above is a great example of giving the dog time to explore the environment at their pace and a good example of how I teach myself and my dogs to do a sniff-a-bout walk.
When you are first starting sniff-a-bouts with your adolescent dog and you've set everything up for success, add a blanket or small chair to your gear list and head out to your location. Since we typically condition our dogs to go from one place to another on our walk, we have to then teach them to stay in one area a bit longer. This is where the blanket comes in. If you sit down and do something boring to your dog, they will wander nearby and begin sniffing around. You can toss treats out and about if they are used to snuffle feeding in the grass or you can use the treats to reward when they chose to check in with you. Eventually our dogs usually will come back to us to engage in whatever activity we want to do next. At this point I like to have a brief training session or play a short game before ending the walk.
Now you may be thinking if we don't go anywhere, how is my dog getting exercise? From experience I can tell you that a dog who thoroughly explores the environment for 20 minutes is typically more content to go home and nap then the dog who walked for 30 minutes non-stop. One of the other perks that you gain from the sniff-a-bout is that you and your dog enjoy some time together without practicing the bad behaviors that they've been doing on a walk.
The point of a sniff-a-bout is to meander here and there with no end destination in mind. You walk at the dog's pace and the direction they want. When Azul goes too fast, pulling on the leash, I stop walking until he can check in and put slack in the leash. Having high value treats to teach the release of leash pressure helps. For Azul, I used treats when he was younger but then I conditioned him to use the smell he previously pulled to as his reward for releasing the leash pressure.
Near the end of this video, you can see his reaction to seeing a dog quite far away causing him to pull on the leash. At this point he is beginning to be too excited so I need to move away from the distractions until his excitement can come down to a more manageable level. It's also important that we choose our tools carefully on walks to keep us all safe. This is why Azul wears a harness with a dual clip leash! Most of the time I'm holding the leash with pressure on the back clip. But the front clip prevents Azul from pulling me off my feet if he hits the end of his leash suddenly.
We have to be aware of trigger stacking on our sniff-a-bouts. In the video, Azul was still fairly excited from seeing a little dog in the road when another dog charged the fence a few feet away. You can see how the dual clip setup helps me to maintain control and calmly give Azul a chance to refocus in my direction. A very light pressure on the back clip is used to help lead him back to me when he's a bit too close to the fence. The issue with trigger stacking is that if we have too many unexpected distractions in the environment we are walking in, our dog will have more extreme reactions to each trigger as their self-regulation ability decreases with their emotional reactions increasing. The whole goal of the sniff-a-bout is to stay calm and avoid triggers so we have to slowly build up to more distracting environments.
Leash manners do not happen overnight! It takes time and patience with a ton of practice for both person and dog. By taking more sniff-a-bouts and less focused walks with our adolescents we prevent them from practicing the behaviors we don't want such as pulling, barking or lunging at a time in their life when their brain is changing so rapidly that they simply can't control themselves. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on training heel and loose leash walking with your adolescent. That means you need to keep those training sessions short and in environments where you know you have a greater chance for success. Make your exercise walks be about the dog and your training sessions about training without mixing the two together for an exercise walk.
Check out this post by Crazy2Calm Canine Coach, Elliot Brooks to learn about improving your heel training for working dogs and anyone who wants to take their dog with them into pet friendly public places.
Only allow off leash sniffing (especially for teen dogs and older dogs each spring) in controlled areas where your dog can't wander away and unfamiliar dogs can't enter unexpectedly.
If you don't have a fenced area, use a longline attached to a back clip harness. Stay with your dog to supervise!
To make sniffing enrichment, you need to be present to "enjoy" it with your dog.
**Safety First means knowing your dog's abilities, your abilities as a guide, and your environment and making any adjustments you need to stay safe!
Train Smarter, Not Harder with Sniff-a-bouts
Here are some tips to help you get started on your sniff-about walks.
Notice the gear used in this walk is a harness and longline and the environment we are in is a large open yard where distractions are somewhat predictable. Gear designed for giving the dog freedom while maintaining safety is essential to all sniff-a-bouts. Longlines are great for giving the dog freedom to make choices and move at a pace that is natural to them in the moment.
Choose the right location! When you're first starting out, try a large open field where there are few things to get tangled on and you can possible triggering distractions before they come close. Very early on, I want to take my dog away from any triggers to prevent them from going over threshold but as your teamwork skills improve on sniff-a-bouts you can slowly add in distractions at a distance and slowly decrease the distance as your dog becomes more comfortable around that trigger.
Time of day is super important! Not so much per your routine in your household, but the routine of the distractions in the environment you will be doing the sniff-a-bout in. Avoid the busiest times of day for any environment avoiding popular dog walking trails early in the morning and later in the evening when more people are walking the dogs. If you are doing the sniff-a-bout near a playground, go during the school day when there are less kids playing.
Until you're very comfortable using a longline, practice sniff-a-bouts in a large field or open area at a park. The fewer things to get wrapped around or tangled in the better. Allow your dog to engage with the environment, going in any direction they choose unless their choice leads to a hazard such as a pond, sidewalk, parking lot, or anything that is dangerous.
Walk with your dog or sit down and relax depending on how quickly they move from spot to spot. Walk peacefully, only giving cues that are necessary that guide your dog down the path of making good choices. For example: if my dog gets near the opposite end of the longline, I'll cue "This Way" to get them moving back in my direction without fully recalling them.
Have some treats available to reward your dog for making good choices along the walk. Sometimes I even take my dog's meal and scatter it along the ground for them to enjoy hunting for it. At the end of your sniff-a-bout be sure to reward your dog for re-engaging with you as you walk back home or to the car.
Be sure to reward yourself too! Taking a snack, beverage or other treat for you can make this slower paced walk more enjoyable which in turn makes you want to repeat it more often.
The more often you go on sniff-a-bouts and practice using the longline together as a team, the more distracting environments you can enjoy together! You can even add in some doggy parkour to your sniff-a-bouts to make them more fun!
Dog's naturally process any environment they use looking at things, sniffing things, listening to the sounds, etc. While this is a natural occurrence, some dogs do a better job of environmental processing then others do. We tend to focus so hard on teaching our dogs to walk nicely on leash, ignore distractions, and focus on us as handlers that we often don't take the time to let them process their world as a dog. And this seems to be the #1 thing I see in any dog that struggles with fear, anxiety or a lack of confidence...they simply never learned to process new environments or changes in the environment. This leads to being easily triggered by new things coming into the environment such as that person who is approaching or that dog on the other side of the park. And this leads to the behaviors that we as people don't appreciate our dogs repeating; barking, lunging, jumping, pulling, etc.
One of the reasons I like to meet with new clients at or near a local park is so that I can see how their dog processes the environment we are meeting in. Does the environment stress them? Do I stress them? What coping mechanisms have they developed? And many other questions like this.
Then the first thing I want to teach them is how to process new environments safely and effectively as a team. AKA - Take a sniff-a-bout at the start of the training session and slowly work up training new behaviors.
In this video, Azul is wearing a longline attached to a back clip on his harness. We are walking in one of his favorite parks because there is tons of shade no matter what time of day. The layout of this park allows provides us an area of park surrounded by a sidewalk, slower traffic roads, and houses on the other side of the road and from any place in the park we can see all the way across the whole park. While this makes for a small area to explore (roughly the size of a small city block) there is plenty of distractions present that we can work at a safe distance from. Azul pretty much leads this walk by moving in any direction he wants to move as long as he doesn't cross the sidewalks that create our boarders. Together we zig-zag around, moving at his pace (as long as he doesn't pull by trying to go too fast). This video is just under 2 minutes long, but we generally do this same activity for roughly 10-15 minutes and hotter days, we often stop and sit under a shade tree to watch the distractions all around us.
In this video Azul and I are using a longline on a rarely used trail. This trail is a mowed section inside a marsh that connects to a paved bike trail. Here we tend to see more wildlife than people with the occasional off leash dog. We use a longline for safety to make sure Azul doesn't chase wildlife or approach another dog uninvited. But it's a good environment to practice our skills together. This is his walk, on his time as he had been working for me all day. By exploring and processing this fun environment he can empty his stress bucket if he needs to. You will notice I hurry him on a few times. I don't like to do that on HIS walks but this day we only have 15 minutes to make the loop and it's much hotter then normal so I want to get us back to the vehicle for water ASAP. I spend most of his walk managing the longline and watching his body language. I can learn so much about how he's feeling by watching his movements.
In this Video, Azul has already taken his sniff-a-bout around the park and has chosen to lay down to "watch the world go by" while resting in the shade.
I've done this with Azul since he was a puppy and honestly this is how I survived adolescence! Huskies are known for being hyper and active breeds that often want to to go-go-go so I've made a point of reinforcing his ability to simply relax and watch things. By doing so Azul has learned to process things using his eyes and ears more thoroughly instead of relying solely on his sense of smell as many dogs do. Azul gets plenty of opportunity to process smells every day. But as a Service Dog, he needs to be prepared to go in lots of new and different environments, many of which he shouldn't be sniffing everything. So watching and listening are invaluable tools in his environmental processing toolkit.
More about processing new environments as a Service Dog coming up in the next blog!
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.
--Depending on breed, dogs have around 300 million olfactory sensors, which allows them to process smells 40 times greater than humans.
--Dogs' nostrils work much better than humans. Dogs can use and move each nostril independently! Human nostrils function together. This helps dogs tell which direction the smell is coming from. The shape of the nostril allows dogs to smell when they exhale as well as inhale.
--Dogs also have an organ that humans do not, called the vomeronasal organ or Jacobson's organ. This allows dogs to smell pheromones which are used to distinguish different animal species and determine mating readiness.
How do these fun facts apply to daily life with our dogs?
Imagine walking into a candle store and each inhale you smell a new scent, often overwhelming our senses. Dogs experience this overwhelming smell each and every time they step outdoors. We can use their amazing sense of smell to our advantage in so many ways by teaching them to detect smells that mean something to us. (medical needs, missing people, chemicals, etc.) But doesn't it also make sense that we allow dogs to use their sense of smell the way nature intended?
Even if you don't train your dog to distinguish specific scents, using their nose has a ton of benefits for your dog. The act of sniffing their environment is a huge stress reliever helping to relax and calm your dog. Sniffing in a new environment is the #1 way a dog processes that environment to determine what is in that environment; people, animals, food, etc. This helps to determine if an environment is safe or hazardous, exciting or boring, unusual or normal.
Not only can dogs remember the people in their lives by scent, but they can also smell fear, anxiety, and sadness. This helps dogs to determine if a stranger is friendly or not. Yes, people stink! That doesn't mean that all dogs are born recognizing what fear smells like. They learn that based on their previous experiences. That's why some dogs have a fear reaction to most people while other dogs think most people are friendly. Dogs save smells to long term memory much better then other senses such as sight or sound. It's often said that dogs see with their noses simply because smelling is their strongest ability.
Many wild animals and dogs that live out in the open typically chose to avoid environments that have potentially scary things such as prey animals. But when we take these animals out of the wild and ask them to live in the people world such as we have with domesticated pets, we often prevent them from exploring the environment freely. Dogs that have a wonderful life with their person still typically go in environments that people chose, on leash/off leash, fenced in yards, neighborhoods...people control these choices, not our dogs. This means we often (accidentally) take away their freedom to choose whether they can be in an environment or not. If they are on a leash, they can't really leave the area if they perceive danger.
Our dog's may have learned from previous experience to avoid skunks or may have never seen a skunk so they may not understand the hazard involved. Azul has never come across a skunk in the wild, so it's hard telling what he might do. Cam on the other hand ate a baby skunk when he was younger and I swear Cam burped skunk scent for a month! While that may be a funny story, it definitely taught Cam that skunks should not be messed with. Cam has also learned that bears are scary and so I can tell by Cam's body language when a bear is nearby. Unfortunately Cam has also learned that strangers, especially men are scary and even more so if they reach to pet him. We can't always control what our dogs find scary or perceive as a threatening and changing their mind becomes even more challenging.
However as dog owners, we have a responsibility to our dogs to pay attention to their body language, helping them to put more distance and space between us and the things they find scary.
That means it's up to us people to help our dogs learn what is safe in the environments we want our dogs to be in. This is especially true for Service Dogs that have to learn to feel safe in so many more environments to support their handler. We can help our dogs feel safe in new environments by allowing them to explore and process the environments we want them to enjoy.
This is why sniff-a-bouts are so important to me as a dog owner, dog lover, and dog trainer! I have tons of blogposts about why & how to take sniff-a-bouts with your dog which can easily be found using the search feature in the web version of this site. And I make sure all my clients understand and learn to add sniff-a-bouts to they dog training. Every group class I teach starts and ends with a sniff-a-bout! I even have a YouTube playlist for sniff-a-bout videos!
I will have more fun games that involve teaching your dog how to use their nose to distinguish scents that are relevant to their daily life in my next blog! So stayed to tune to my June theme: The NOSE Knows!
As a working dog, Azul has some very busy days and needs time to relax. This picture was taken on a particularly busy day. Often we spend time sniffing this green space while we wait for my son, but on this day Azul sniffed and added to the p-mail on a few trees and promptly chose a shady spot to relax. While this was a pretty busy day, nothing we did was exercise or anything that would tire Azul out physically. Mental activity and extra focus on his Service Dog duties is where most of his energy was spent.
Now you may be thinking that Azul is not sniffing in this picture so what does it have to do with sniffing?
While Azul's body is resting, his nose is still going like crazy most likely sniffing where the bunnies gathered earlier that day. He's also watching several birds fly from tree to tree nearby and occasionally picks his head up to sniff the air when a person exits a nearby door. On a typical sniff-a-bout day Azul would be rushing to check out the birds, greet the people and so forth. Often on busy days we stay in the car while we wait. But this day, Azul asked to go out in the grass where he could relax and still sniff the environment and the things moving around him. You see Azul has learned very well how sniffing helps him to relax while taking in environmental changes.
Azul has taken at least one meandering type sniff-a-bout every day of his life since he came into our family as a young puppy. A sniff-a-bout is walk where we basically wander together going wherever Azul's nose takes us at the speed he takes. Some days I have to ask him to slow down so I can keep up but I rarely have to speed him up. Depending on the activity and stressors of the day, we might travel up to 1/2 a mile during the sniff-a-bout or as little as 30-40 feet.
If I had to give the single most important activity I do with my dogs, that would be the sniff-a-bout! This activity allows me to determine what my dogs need most in that moment. Maybe they simply need to go potty. Perhaps some wildlife walked through our property in the wee hours of the morning and the boys have been waiting all day to go get a closer sniff. Sometimes hunting squirrels or moles is the most important activity of the day. Sometimes these activities are driven by something exciting in the environment. But more often these activities are driven by the actual needs of the dog in that moment.
Cam, my older dog with anxiety tends to need to Go, Go, Go, far and fast when he's had a stressful day. Since he is off leash trained and sticks to our property Cam tends more to Zoom circles around Azul and I because staying in one place too long does not help him get rid of the extra anxiety he's been storing up.
Azul on the hand is my explorer who likes to sniff every single blade of grass, the full circle of every tree trunk, along the base of every barn on our property, and so forth. He only picks up speed when he's on the hunt of something really good or he thinks Cam has something wonderful to sniff. However if I take Azul on an exercise based walk on a local trail or play a game that involves speed, he is ready to GO! The days where we have less activity Azul likes to draw out the sniff-abouts as long as he possibly can. The days where something exciting or stressful has happened, he will ask to go on another sniff-a-bout by hanging out by the back door. (We leave by the front door when we are going to work or run errands, but use the backdoor for sniff-a-bouts.)
Yesterday was another really busy day starting at 6am and not ending until close to 11pm. We started with a sniff at the empty dog park at 6am which is one of Azul's favorite activities. This was followed by a 1 mile trail hike. Once back home Azul went to sleep for about an hour until I left home without him. During these times Azul tends to beg Dad for everything which included 2nd breakfast, Find It Games, another sniff-a-bout and lots of belly rubs. When I returned home I had several Zoom appointments where Azul laid at my feet sleeping in his typical fashion. Then it was a few quick errands and picking up my son. And last but not least we had some parkour fun where Azul met a new fur friend and worked on the mini-obstacle course followed by another 1 mile trail hike. By the time we got home, Azul and dinner and headed to bed. Unfortunately I had still had more Zoom meetings, but this time Azul did not lay by my feet like normal as he never left his bed.
After that busy day, we spent today resting! Azul slept all night and most of the morning when I finally begged him to go outside to sniff about noon. Azul watched some squirrels play while Cam chased a few balls, then we started our sniff-about. Today's sniff-a-bout took us about 100 feet away from our back door to a tree that is falling over from a windstorm. This tree is nothing new, Azul has seen it a million times. But today I swear, Azul sniffed each and every leaf and probably multiple times. He never acted as if he smelled something amazing that locked him in and he couldn't leave. Azul simply wandered back and forth from trunk to tree top.
You can see in this video what Azul's sniff-about looks like. While the video is only a little more then a minute, Azul did this exact same thing for roughly 15 minutes. So what does that tell me about Azul's mood for the day? Well, he was still tired since we didn't venture too far from the backdoor. He wanted to take advantage of the free time so he kept moving even if it was back and forth which is rare for him. His nose never stopped moving for more then 1-2 seconds which tells me the smells were not amazing, but good enough for him to be content.
You may here traffic noise in the video, which is why Azul is wearing his harness and longline. (Our safety gear for all sniff-a-bouts!) While my goal is to remain as quiet as possible on sniff-a-bouts, I still give the occasional direction such as go around or fix it if the longline gets tangled. If he moves toward a boundary line, I'll cue him to stop and move back towards me. When Azul is hunting something, he often does not hear these directional cues, but when he is sniffing to process the environment or relax in the environment he follows the guidance really well.
By silent observations on sniff-a-bouts I can tell what is going on with my dogs both physically and emotionally. I then can better provide the things they need to balance out their day. My dogs work hard taking care of me. The least I can do is spend 15-30 minutes a day helping them to take care of their needs. Here is another part of our 15 min sniff-a-bout around and under this tree.
Directions on how to learn to do a relaxed sniff-about will be coming soon in another blog. I wanted to help you understand why I urge all of my clients to go on sniff-a-bouts as often as possible. It's such a little act of kindness that we share the fluffy pups we share our lives with.
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