NW3 Training - Converging Odor.
I have been training Iona daily with NW3 level puzzles. Stacy Barnett’s 250 class at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy has been awesome for guiding our practice. One area that she can have a hard time with is converging odor and so I have been practicing this skill with her. In the following videos, I will show you a few situations that I set up for and comment on our performance.
In this first search area, I set up a converging odor puzzle in a corner. Furthermore, one tin had a bunch of holes in it while the other tin had zero holes. This alcove is at the bottom of the stairs and near the mouth of a parking garage, there is a big eddy in that back corner.
This search is really interesting because she completely sources the closed tin hide and then leaves it to go to the tin with all the holes, only to return to the closed tin hide in the corner. This really does show the strong pull of accessible odor. In this next search, I set up two crack hides. As the odor lifted up and out of the cracks, it pooled in the corner by the door. You can see her work these scent cones on the way out and on the way in. When practicing for NW3, it is a really good idea to get your dog used to working a known area after they have already found all the hides. Generally she is pretty good about ignoring scent cones that she has already worked but these must have seemed different enough. You can also see her catching snippets of odor further down the hallway.
Finally, I set up a search with two hides in the same plane. They are tins are both on the close corners of the benches. She really whiffed this one. However, I think that the issue here is not that she had a hard time sorting through converging odor, but rather that she did not get deep enough into the corner. Once she got her nose into the pooling odor around :45, she was able to source the second hide very quickly.