Wednesday, March 30, 2011

k9 nosework


There are so many great things about this sport that I decided to try..one of them is the lack of equipment. All we use is a variety of household items and lots of cardboard boxes. I have been wanting to try this for awhile and when I finally found a class to take, I had trouble deciding if I should sign up Pax or Indigo. Pax would be more a of challenge, but Indigo already does a lot of other activities (she is the only one that does agility). Epic was out of the question for this sport.

I decided to take the easy route and bring Indigo, although I have been training Pax at home. I did try Epic and immediately was reminding of why this was not the sport for him. He will stick with herding and flyball thank you very much.

Indigo is doing awesome in our class. It is so much fun to watch her progress each week. She is now at the point that she knows that she is hunting for treats and gets very excited for her turn. I have not been doing a great job with my homework, which is to set her up for some searches in several different locations other than home. I need to try at least two before her class this week!

I love this sport for cross training with agility and flyball and also for dogs that are retired from sports, physically unable to be really active, or dogs that are limited in activity choices because they are aggressive with dogs or people. This is something that can easily be done at home and really improves the relationship between dog and handler as well as increasing the mental stamina of the dog.

I would like to see if dogs with focus issues and limited attention spans during sports like agility and flyball would benefit from regular nosework practice.

I'll post updates on this as we get more advanced. Who knows...maybe we will enter a trial some day!

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