Category: Performance Events ¤
  Author: Margie English ¤
   Title: Teaching Scent BEFORE The Retrieve ¤

I've felt for some time that the greatest difficulty in teaching scent
articles was the presence of all those retrieving cues.  If you have a dog who
has already learned to retrieve a dumbbell, the dumbbell itself is a cue to
retrieve.  When we teach scent discrimination, we offer him 2 or more
dumbbells all whispering "Take me, take me."

In my experience, the most eager retreivers are the hardest dogs to teach to
discriminate.  A dog who has been painstakingly taught to retrieve and really
doesn't care for it all that much is far easier to get to discriminate.

A couple of years ago, I asked Bob Bailey to design a program for teaching SD.
I simply described the exercise as it's executed in the ring and asked him how
he'd teach it.  Without prompting, he spotted the retrieve-cue problem right
away, and designed a program in which the retrieve cues were eliminated.  He
suggested constructing a plywood cut out in which you stuck the articles so
that only the ends were visible to the dog.  He was then taught to touch the
scented article with his nose.

I'm no carpenter.  So I used identical magnetized business cards stuck to the
front of the refrigerator and trained my Chihuahua mix to scratch the scented
card.  I used a clicker and puffed wheat, which allowed maximum reps per
calorie.  I used no commands.  

When Minnie was able to scratch the scented card in a group of 10 cards, I
took her into another room and put out a set of scent articles. She already
knew how to retrieve a dumbbell, so she looked at the articles and ran out and
brought me one.  It was the wrong one.   I ignored it.  She returned to the
pile, sniffed around, selected the scented article and brought it to me.
Click.  She hasn't made a mistake since.  I still don't have any commands for
this.

This took about 5 10-minute training sessions.  It would have been faster, but
I made a few mistakes along the way.

Cheers,
Margie