CYPRESS
With her new titles last weekend, Iona will now be competing in the Masters class at AKC scent work trials. In addition to Birch, Anise, and Clove, this means that she now gets to search for a new odor: CYPRESS! This is how I introduced it to her. I am sure that I could have just set a Cypress hide for her but I wanted to make sure that she understood that Cypress was a new target odor, so I went through this whole process from start to finish. It did not take long. Here are the steps that I took:
1. First I purchased Cypress oil and new green tins. I get mine from K9noseworksource. Next I added the oil to a bunch of q-tips and a cotton ball in a jar. I made them extra strong. I let them sit for a day.
2. Then I put the scented q-tips in the new green tins and added them to my pelican case where I store all my birch/anise/clove hides for easy access. I let those all mix together for a day.
3. Then today, I ran some regular outdoor multiple hide searches with the Birch, Anise, and Clove from the Pelican Case.
4. When I got home, I set up a single switch box with just Cypress. This is what it looked like. Yes, those are tortilla chips, sometimes you gotta pull out all the stops for high value treats.
5. Then we played the shell game with Cypress as the hot box.
6. Finally, I set some easy hides using just the Cypress tin. I ran her on about twice as many, but I just did not video tape them all. Next, when I practice with her, I will set the Cypress as single hide searches for a day or so and then just start using them equally with all the other target odors.