Reply To: Shannon & Cricket (DRTDT)

[Alana McGee]

Today was a great truffle hunting day! While it was too gusty to search outside, we did a few two target searches insides this morning. Cricket moved to find the second target without much of a problem, and we had to leave the room less and she got back into searching much more quickly. We even did one three target find! She is a rock star.

For your viewing pleasure, we have two blind hides we did tonight.

Each hide has one hot target
All of the boxes have a tea ball in them (I think Cricket was starting to learn that the one that made the noise was the right one). Instructions to Wade where to open each box, touch each tea ball and place boxes in a row, and I also asked Wade to wander around the basement as he was doing it (trying to weave in the proofing stuff). I’ve marked the inside of the boxes as hot or cold so I can tell them apart when I open them (and Cricket can’t use the marker smell as a signal).

The second hide – she was starting to alert on the correct box and then leaves it. Wade did come down the stairs at some point, you can see she walks out of frame to go see him after the false alert – I think this is what might have thrown her off. She alerts on the incorrect box, but we check it out and she is able to get back into searching again.

I was *so* surprised it was the wrong box since it looked like a strong alert. I’ve looked at the difference between the alert in the first hide and this one. The only difference I see is that she looks back at me right away after alerting, and she doesn’t at all in the first search until I basically crash into her 🙂

I really enjoyed the blind search – it was a completely different feeling than when I know where the hot target is.

Earlier in the evening (not on film) we had a search where she alerted on three wrong boxes before going to the correct one. I’m not sure what was going on, but you can see something similar in the fist hide on this video – she doesn’t alert incorrectly at all – but it is almost like she avoids the hot target until she has checked out everything else (?) I’m not sure what this is about, but I think it is interesting.