Scenthurdle!

Izzie and I had scenthurdle practise tonight, only a few of us showed up so we decided to do a couple runs as a "team". Izzie and i have been training since December starting from scratch with no retrieve or scenting behaviour, she's now had a lightbulb go off and is putting it all together! Tonight she was flawless, she's really getting confident at driving away from me to the box to find her dumbbell. I'm so proud! Here's a video of one of the runs we did tonight:

Clicky!

Very cool! Go Izzie!

Woah. That looks SO COOL! The whole team looked awesome

Here's another vid:

Clicky Again!

That is so awesome! I love how you can almost see them thinking

Wow! I've never seen this before. What scent are they looking for when they smell the dumbbells?

They're looking for their handler's scent. In a race the dumbbell are marked with a number that matches their vest number so the judges can tell if they get the correct one or not.

Scenthurdle is what flyball is developed from and is often called "the thinking dog's flyball" up here as it requires the dog to use a little more brain power to find what to bring back (though i do believe there are flyball dogs that do this well too). It died out as a sport largely when flyball became popular, but up in my province (and in some parts of Europe) it's catching on again. We now have 2 teams in our club, the older racing team will be racing against 6 other teams next month. It's really fun and i hope it catches on more as it's something that's fun to teach and dogs can do it well into old age.

Naw, it takes a lot more brains than flyball.

VERY cool and I'm super happy to see you've progressed so far!!