OB360: Sniff and Go: Scent Discrimination and Go Outs

This class is a perfect combination of movement and stationary work for indoor training on those cold rainy or snowy days and hot days you don’t want to venture out.

Learn how to teach your dog how to move away from you in a straight line quickly, do known behaviors at a distance and in the presence of distractions. It is so exciting to be able to send your dog away from you at a dead run and then stop on a dime, swing around to face you and do a cued behavior! I call these 'remote sits'!  Building speed and fun are key parts of this class!

Discover 4 ways to build a send out, 8 ways to increase speed and how to incrementally add distractions. Find out what chaining is and the role it plays in making your dog a movie star or a top competitor!

Using their noses comes naturally to dogs but we have to teach them how to indicate to us that that have found the object that smells like us in a pile of identical objects. Your dog doesn't need to already be able to pick up and carry an object to you if you want to complete the chain at a later date. 

What you will achieve in class depends on your starting point, your training skill, your dog’s learning skill and enthusiasm and your frequency of training. And how precise you want the behaviors to be.

This class is designed for anyone participating in formal obedience, TEAM levels, scent hurdling, Treibball, bird dogs, service dogs and can be adapted as a great trick for therapy dogs. The send out is a basic skill for dogs who perform in the movies! Anyone wanting to learn to teach these two behaviors for fun and exercise will enjoy it too!

You’ll need at least 15 feet of training space (a hallway or larger room) indoors, more outdiirs, one or two sets of 6 identical objects made of wood, plastic, leather, or metal, a paw target made of a non-slip material, dog bed and/or platform and a vertical stand of some sort (ring gates, back of a chair, pole lamp etc). We are flexible to use what the student has at hand for training.

Here's a sample of the behaviors we are aiming for. 

Learning Approach for this class:

The lectures are laid out step by step with text and videos. Videos are short clips usually under one minute. There is no closed captioning or voice over. Videos show me working with my dogs as they learn the skills.

I offer several ways to get the behaviours. You choose one path of information to follow and see if it works for you and your dog. If it doesn’t you can change paths. This class works well if you prefer to do this as a self study class if you can stay focussed on one behaviour at a time and follow instructions well.

There are many lectures to read, some of them are longer. I like to explain the theory behind what we are doing so you understand why we are doing what we are doing. See the syllabus for a list of how many lectures per week and the topics.

The first week, I post the lectures twice, once at the start then halfway through the first week so I don’t flood you with all of them. This is partly due to trying to be flexible with the gold students since everyone comes in at their own location in training the behaviors. Some are just starting out while others want to fix some issues that have developed in a mostly finished behavior.

The level of activity for the handlers is low as the dogs do most of the work! You can sit or stand to do the training. 

My focus for the gold and silver students tends towards improving your mechanics of training which may mean we go back to more basic behaviours than you think you might need. Sometimes single small changes can solve a problem. Other times, it takes more changes. If you master the physical skills and understand the theory, your job teaching will be easier overall and your dog will succeed more easily, be more motivated and less frustrated.

On the Gold Forum threads, I typically will quote something you have said and respond to that. I will give you a time stamp from your video for something I would like to see changed and also suggest what you can change that may help. I may ask to see a video clip of something specific and suggest a next step, or I may not.

Contact me if you are still wondering if the class will work for you and your dog!

Instructor: Donna Hill

Donna Hill (she/her) has had a life long love affair with dogs and a fascination with dog behavior. She has broad practical experience in the dog world: volunteering and working in kennels and shelters, dog sitting and walking, fostering rescue dogs, teaching behavior modification privately, and...(Click here for full bio and to view Donna's upcoming courses)