The following is a series of videos showing Nose Work dogs working a Large Parking Lot for six half-Qtips stuck down into some of the cracks in the asphalt. Way back when, we had such a hide in the Exterior Element of a NACSW NW1 Trial. That hide surprised a lot of people…including me and I was the NACSW Judge assigned to that Element! But, as you can see from the attached video, Qtips hidden in cracked asphalt are really no problem to the independent-hunting dog! (But, remember, these types of hides are considered “sourceable” hides and we want the dog to be right on the hide before rewarding the dog which requires a great deal of precision from the dog). This was the very first time that the first three dogs and handlers videoed here ever worked these types of hides. So, we can see a little bit of hesitation, uncertainty and crowding going on. Plus, I think the handlers were waiting for a bit more precision than I would have asked for when first exposing the dog to Parking Lot Hides. But detection dog training is always about continuing to develop ones skill and, overall, I think these dogs each did super to hunt in an area that really had no contextual-prompts to cue the dog what was expected – this was a “real world search” and the dogs had to understand that “The Game” was on based on their search gear and the start-cue. And, because it was their first time and these dogs did not have the experience to search such a large area, I made sure that these dogs started relatively close to a hide with the wind blowing right into their noses. So, I thought the training worked great for their first exposure to Parking Lot Hides!! However, I did not make this same adjustment for the last four dogs who each were NW3-dogs. While I obviously did not upload the entire search for each of these dogs, each team had been given 7 minutes to “finish” the parking lot and they had been told that there were anywhere from 1 to 8 hides somewhere in that huge parking lot! To give people some idea how large the search area was, I added photos of the parking lot itself as well as photos of each of the six hides. Finally, in one video, you can see my pink surveying tape flapping in the wind which was blowing at about 30 mph the whole evening making the accuracy of each dog even more impressive! Overall, I think these dogs did an excellent job as well. So, for you die-hard K9NW-watching friends, enjoy!!!
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 19:17:57 +0000
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