With the growth of public interest in sniffing for scent, it’s a common approach to throw a bunch of boxes into a room and see what happens. If all you want to do is have fun finding food, you don’t need me. Unfortunately, this frequently causes failures in scent detection because most of the options are wrong. Dogs find the wrong boxes, and that’s no fun. Most dogs perform normal behaviors like digging and biting at hidden food, and those aggressive alerts can destroy property, and be faulted or failed. Failures are cemented by repetition, and retraining is a common outcome. In comparison, we only show the dog one choice, and it’s the right choice. Careful management of the environment allows virtually errorless learning. The protocols we’re using make success easy and dogs learn quickly, with clarity, without ever pressuring the dog or sacrificing motivation. Repeated successes build great habits and generally avoid common errors. I’d love to see more teams succeed in scent detection, and would be happy to demonstrate why approach makes a massive difference in scent detection training, outcomes, and most importantly of all, motivation for sniffer dogs.

Sponsor:IAABC Foundation
Speaker(s):**Dr. Carla Simon

Contact:
 Email: courses@iaabcfoundation.org
 Web: https://iaabcfoundation.org/