It’s so strange. After years of nose work training, all of a sudden my dog is doing something differently. At our last trial in Salt Lake City he false alerted on a container. That means he said there was odor in the box, but he was wrong. Sometimes during trials they put “distractors” in the boxes–food, toys, tennis balls. Normally, Atlas ignores those things (or shows some interest but doesn’t give me an alert.) The alert really is reserved for “Hey, there’s odor here. So feed me.” But, he false alerted. So, in training this week, we worked with containers and distractors. He false alerted all over the place. WTF

The trainers suggestion was that we go back to basics at home. Simple, high value hides with odor. Good advice. We trial again down in Tucson in a few weeks, so our work is cut out for us.