Reply To: Chris (access until November 15, 2014)

[Alana McGee]

Wind effects how scent moves- aka how Daisy approaches the problem of finding the truffle. We cover it later in the course and much more heavily in 201 as it is very important for forest searches to set yourself up for success. We haven?t created a video yet demonstrating this, but please take a look at the following video on Youtube used for a SAR demo.

It gives you a good idea of how scent moves over vast distances. They talk about ?rafts? but for our purposes it is essentially the same thing as truffle odor.. Pretend the red smoke is truffle odor. For example, if Daisy didn?t hit that scent column, she would never know there is a truffle. She has to physically hit that scent column in order to be able to track it back to source.

As for cooking, basically you need to just not be in the area- so go do something else for a while. It is more complex, and it breaks up training games into one off training sessions basically, but it is good to start to practice it, at least occasionally. You can do a cooking session and the reset without ?cooking? and run her through again. Odor being built up in an area changes the concentration of those VOCs for Daisy, and it very well may alter how she searches. Some dogs have no problem with it, but there are complex scenarios later where we ask you to work in very saturated environments which can be tough for dog because they are surrounded by odor but still need to pinpoint the source of strongest odor. That mimics real world heavy production scenarios. That is an advanced skill however, and not there yet!

Keep practicing the multiple hides indoors, and glad to hear the outdoors is going well. And yes, you can most certainly alternate between the two hide spaces!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Alana McGee. Reason: typos