Odor, Vehicles and Santa Paws!

Venom is doing really well with his K9 Nose Work training.  He has shown a strong desire to search for food in boxes.  He is persistent and confident in his searching and willing and able to problem solve obstacles.  He goes crazy when he has his nose work harness on and when he sees boxes and knows it's time to search.  For all these reasons I knew that he was ready to move onto odor.  This means that he will no longer be searching for just food, but for food paired with the first target odor which is birch.  I began pairing birch with odor to build a strong association.  This pairing will continue throughout his training.  Once the association is very strong we will begin to do more and more unpaired hides where he is searching for the birch only.

He is doing great on his training so I decided to get him started on vehicle searches.  With vehicle searches the dogs must look at the vehicle as a huge container (box) and have the same enthusiasm and excitement about searching vehicles as they do searching boxes.  We start off by setting the hides in a way that we hope to set the dog up for quick success early on.  These are pictures from Venom's first ever vehicle search!

I was so pleased with how he did.  I am most happy that he loves searching and hunting and is already proving to be a great hunting dog.  Next weekend we will travel to Southern California together to compete in the New Year's field trials.  These will be Venom's first trials on cottontail in a different terrain so it will be interesting to see how he does.

After nose work I had to stop at Petsmart to pick up some things.  Turns out they were Santa photos so I decided to go out to the car and get Venom and get his picture taken.  I wasn't sure how he would react to Santa but he did great!  Merry Christmas everyone!