Building Drive & Determination in Your Nose Work Dog Drive building is something that is inherent in the foundation of the K9 Nose Work training philosophy. As we begin to focus on our dog’s development and our development as handlers we spend much time building skills we and our dogs need for competition. During this time it is important to not leave drive building by the wayside. We will explore ways to infuse your training with exercises that build hunt drive in your dog while simultaneously building and challenging your skills as a handler. As a progression of training, it is helpful to build and foster your dog’s determination to get to source. We have created the association between the target odors and our dog’s primary reinforce (food or toy), so our dogs have a definite desire to get to source – let’s take that a step further! We will explore pathways to create a dog who will not leave a scent problem until they have achieved success! Developing Clarity & Precision with Your Nose Work Dog In order for us to continue to foster success in the blind hide settings that we experience when we trial our dogs, it is critical to build clarity for our dogs and therefore for us as handlers. When our dogs are super clear on what specifically produces reinforcement, we begin to see more consistency from them in getting what we want – which is more easily readable, confident, ORGANIC behavior while at source. Alongside this clarity will emerge more precision from our dogs in solving different scent pictures, thereby improving our ability as handlers to understand what we are seeing in blind scenarios. We will identify and discuss transitions in the training process that are critical to a dog’s development of this clarity over time and when it is appropriate to make those transitions.

Sponsor:Tri-State Dog Obedience Club
Speaker(s):Leah Gangelhoff, CNWI

Contact: Pauline Imbro-Allen
 Email: pimbro@icloud.com