Reply To: Mary & Salu

[Alana McGee]

Hi Mary

This is a perfect realization, and well done. “So, I started wondering about Lola and her requiring occasional mental breaks and then it dawned on me that Lola creates her own breaks. Every so often she takes a lap around the yard and rolls around doing what I call “just being Lola” and now I know that’s how she resets as she always go right back and starts working again. So much learned this week….”
We also agree with this. Different dogs can have very different styles of truffle hunting, and these two are excellent examples of that. We love those A-HA! moments.

It likely is excitement that he is consuming the truffles. Has he consumed a vial? When you say the vessels are fair game, what do you mean, that he is now mouthing teaballs as well?

Yes there are things you can practice to avoid having him do that aka eat truffle. It is more common for this to occur with pieces than whole truffles- in exactly this kind of situation wherein the the dog is already excited and out falls the odor source and down the gullet it goes!

To work on ‘not eating’ truffles to begin with you would work in a familiar space and practice at close quarters with a ‘naked’ truffle. The first step is having him alert on it while you hand is protecting it, overtop of it, above ground- thus not giving him an opportunity to eat it. You then increase the difficult by repeating the alert exercise with your hand sligtly off, and then in various stages more complex until he is more confident not putting it in his mouth.

I believe we have an exercise written up for this but it may take me a bit to locate it.

In his case it it likely more excitement, but we will see as things progress.

Nice harness 🙂

0:27 GOOD
1:17- great job guys. If you could elongate your party there. Have him do a few re-alerts even on truffle in hand to build that confidence and lengthen your connection with him here. He can have several deli meat treats… and he’ll be like WOWZA.

1:20 a REALLY nice transition into another find.

1:56 Good. Wow. He’s lovely. This was interesting because he found it, but didn’t want to interact with it immediately when it was exposed tucked next to that rock. Watch the few seconds around that again. NICE re-alert. Perfect. Very nice reward sequence, nice verbal praise and energy. Give him a second cookie for that. That was really nice and he is still staying in a down at source at 2:12. Very pretty.

Interesting to note that as soon as it is uncovered (in the last two hides) he looks immediately to you!