Reply To: Lois and Monza (August 2014)

[Alana McGee]

Lois:

On Friday, I did a hide under towels and it went very well. Today, I placed 4 hides in the room and MEANT for them to cook for ~1 hr, but we ended up not ‘hunting’ until ~8-9 hrs later. The laundry room is adjacent to this room and laundry ran during the day, there are cycling clothes line drying, the dehumidifier wasn’t running at the time but likely ran in the 8-hrs. So this is a complex room, not to mention, I’m prepping for donating to a rummage sale.

This is a little over 3 mins, I didn’t feel like I could edit out much and this will be our final video.

Confidence/Stress: Monza found all of the hides, but it was much harder. She came over to me for help a couple times and I worked on encouraging her to keep looking without ‘giving it away’. I made a note where she yawns (stress signal). Her body language is much quieter. She didn’t look like she was going to quit, but I could tell she thought this game was a lot different.

Alerts: Her alert is less confident. She does some nose touches and looks back at me as if to say “well I think this is a truffle, but I’m not sure, what do you think?” I marked every nose touch with a ‘yes’. Unfortunately my treats were in a double bag and I fumble with delivery. I’m fumbling so badly and keep marking with a ‘yes’ at hide #4, I started thinking about the deli scene in “When Harry Met Sally” but withheld a giggle fit until after we were done with training. At least there’s humor in a not-so-great training session. I did manage to reinforce enough to get a bow/down at #4.

Ideally I would have handled this like tracking, gradually increasing the age of the scent. I’ll go back to a 30-60 minute aging and do similar hides moving to new rooms.

Question about the truffles. When the truffle pieces have sat out for hours, are they done for training? Do I use new frozen ones? When I picked up the boxes, they didn’t have much odor left for my nose.

I need to count how many pieces I have left and see if it will be enough for the next class.

I hope you had a great seminar this weekend! I can’t believe this is the last week of class.

Thanks Alana and Kristin!