Scent training is a fun way to encourage your dog to have fun
Dogs love to use their noses, and teaching them to find things with their nose reinforces this need.
Drug detection, pest detection, produce detection, and bomb sniffing are some of the jobs we think of when it comes to scent training, but there are also many medical conditions that dogs can learn to alert to that are scent related, cardiac, some seizures, high and low blood sugars, and increased anxiety to name a few.
Scent training is a great way to entertain your dog if it cannot be outside or active for any reason. It's also a very useful skill.
Nick has been trained to find my phone by scent alone, without adding additional scent to the phone. Finding the phone is helpful because I constantly loose it, and every with the sound alert, Nick is able to find it and bring it to me much quicker.
He also alerts me to low blood sugars. Being a diabetic, this is important. I have had many lows in the middle of the night that he has alerted me to, but I had not realized what he was doing.
Scent training is much simpler than it sounds. Even though we may not be able to smell what the dog is alerting to, the dog can do so reliably. It becomes a fun game, especially when there are great treats as a result of the alert.
Since I live in an area where rattlesnakes are endemic and I take Nick into the outdoors, I will be training a rattlesnake alert as his next scent game. The alert will be different than the others because rather than directing me to the snake, he will be directing me away from it.
There are many areas of competition for scent dogs, from Barn Hunt to formal Obedience.
Once a dog has learned an initial scent, training the next scent is much easier than the first.
In conjunction with Yoopers Paws of Love, I will be offering an on line scent based medical alerts class in the fall.
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