NW385: Ambitious Drills for Analyzing Skills

Drill: Analyzing your inaccessible hide skills and challenging your dog with close inaccessible hides.

We’ve worked inaccessible hides in training and encountered them at trials. And we’ve all encountered or should be training for close hides. We can up the challenge with setting up close inaccessible hides!

There are 3 kinds of inaccessible hides. Each kind will have varying degrees of being inaccessible - meaning that some will be less or more inaccessible:

• Contained (in a drawer, cabinet)
• Deep (in a stack of chairs, deep behind a barrier of objects)
• Elevated (above the dogs nose up to ~10 feet)

One of the challenges is that dogs are not always as proficient on inaccessibles or handlers not as confident to read/call them. Early on, dogs may leave when trying to solve an inaccessible to search for something easier. What search hasn't had at least one easy accessible hide?

Before setting up 2 close inaccessibles, ensure or analyze your dogs skill set for a single inaccessible hide of each of the 3 types listed above.

Once you are confident that your dog can solve the varying types of inaccessible hides, set up some close inaccessibles and let's see how your dog does! Ideally you should age your hides at least 20 minutes. Make sure you are using 2 different odors for these setups.

Below are 3 scenarios:

• 2 Contained close hides
• 1 Deep and 1 Contained hide
• 1 Elevated and 1 Contained hide (2 examples)

*Warning that any close hide near an Elevated hide will be a more challenging setup since it would be easy for the dog to believe solving one is solving the whole scent picture.  

When placing your hides, consider how the odor will move or be contained so that the 2 odors couldn't be honestly solved as one inaccessible. Plan for hides about 5-15 feet apart. Contained hides can be placed closer as well as closer in combination with an elevated hide.  Two elevated hides should be placed farther apart so they can each be worked individually.

2 Contained Close Hides

Here is an example of 2 contained close hides. Hides were not aged. The heat was running from the vent on that back wall between the 2 hides. This was pretty straight forward for my dogs. I would consider these as lower degree inaccessibles as the hides were near the door of the cabinets and the one on the left had an opening on the back. What I loved about this search is that Drac jumped on the couch! He is not one to climb/jump up on things in a search so it was great to see. The heater was surely blowing the odor onto the couch.

2 min video example:

1 Deep and 1 Contained Close Hides

Here's an example taking it on the road using an exterior patio. Hides were aged for one hour. One hide is in a metal drawer (pretty solid unit!) and one deep in the right corner. I try to wait as long as I might in a blind to see if they'll stick with it or leave. 

2 min video example:

1 Elevated and 1 Contained Close Hides

This example was complicated by the contained hide (in a drawer) being a bit deep into the corner with a big roll of mats in the way. It would be easy for the dog to believe solving one is solving the whole scent picture. The hides were placed by a student in one of my local classes. The hides were aged about 20 minutes.

One hide is about 7 feet high near the top of the door. The other hide is 3 feet away in a closed drawer about 3.5 feet lower than the elevated hide! The view is a little hard to see on these videos with the weave poles in the way and angle of the video. The most interesting difference between running both dogs is my handling with one being blind and the other when I know where the hides are.

I show the known hide placement run first. I do "keep" her there after finding the first hide, but I DO generally handle that way - not influencing and letting my dog pick where to go next. With Drac (2nd video clip), I am running blind. Starting at 1:17 Drac is showing inaccessible behavior. He never oriented up but looking back it could also look like he is caught between 2 hides. I don't even consider that my student would place another hide there in that corner. I’m being timed and rushed the exit off that hide by influencing him to move to another area. Whether he would have solved the other one, I don’t know. The important take away is that we can't appear to help them find 2 close hides, but instead handle the same. Note: only the teams that knew there were 2 hides got them both which shows how easily we can influence our dogs to find hides!

2 min video example:

I also set this same scenario on vehicles. Hides were aged for one hour. I did set them a bit further apart about 18 feet apart. What I love about this video is that Moxie, who can be worried about tight spaces, climbed under the trailer hitch to get to the hide! What is also nice about the video is that the snow flurries show the wind direction. Steadliy blowing to the right. When Drac ran it, the snow was swirling more and changing directions. It took him a minute longer to find both hides (video not shown). 

2:50 min video example: