Meliora Drents

The South Coast Vizsla Club put on a wonderful scentwork trial on Sunday, April 2nd in Chino Hills, CA. Iris had a great day, earning 5/5 qualifying scores – including finishing off her AKC Scentwork Container Advanced (SCA) and Buried Advanced (SBA) titles! I waited to make this blog post because I wanted to utilize the videos of our searches by Play Paws Record.

Excellent Interior & Handling Breakdown

She did her first-ever Excellent Interior run in the morning and executed it beautifully. At this level, there are two rooms with three hides across both rooms, but you have to clear the first room before moving on to the second. This was a successful search not only because of Iris’s skill, but due to my ability to read her and make thoughtful handling choices. See the video below:

The first room was a potentially difficult setup, with three distinct “areas” – the entryway, kitchen, and side hallway. Iris starts her search in the entryway but decides quickly to turn into the kitchen, where I notice her shift from searching behavior to sourcing behavior – when Iris detects scent particles, her pace slows, she starts to close her mouth and “chuff”, and her nose moves back and forth in a more detailed “bracketing” motion. Notice also how I don’t immediately enter the room, or block the door. I know that she is independent enough to not need me in the room with her to know what to do, and I don’t want to inadvertently apply body pressure to her that could force her in or out of an alert, so I am careful in tight spaces like this to stay out of her way. While she does pass directly over the hide, she doesn’t alert, and decides to exit the room. I let her, but make a big mental note to self to come back to this area.

She almost immediately then finds a hide in the entryway underneath a chair. She does a nice job sourcing and then alerting here. I reward her, and have her continue searching. While I want to return back to the kitchen, I let her search the entryway area, knowing how quickly she bypassed it originally. She does give the other chair a good sniff, which I suspect is because she knew she had just found a hide and was reinforced on a duplicate of that chair. I made a small mental note, but was fairly certain she would have found the hide if it was there. I also let her check out the hallway. But with no other shift from searching to sourcing, I turn my body towards the kitchen, which subtly directs her back in that direction.

Once again, as soon as she enters the kitchen, I see her shift into sourcing behavior. She even puts her paws up on the counter, which suggested to me that she remembered sourcing here before and was trying a new tactic to solve this puzzle. At this point, I’m confident the second hide is in there. So when she makes to leave the room, I softly gesture her back into the kitchen. Sure enough, she finally figures out the puzzle and alerts. I’m not really sure why she took a few passes to find that hide – my best guess is there was perhaps a swirling air current caught in that room that was dispersing the scent cone and making it difficult for her to determine the direction to get to source. Nevertheless, with a bit of teamwork, she got it.

Since early on in our scentwork journey, I’ve prioritized allowing Iris to search independently, with confidence, tenacity, and joy. We built up her skills so slowly that she was nearly always able to find success on her own without needing guidance or encouragement from me. So it often looks like I’m doing almost nothing other than calling “alert” and dispensing treats. At Novice and Advanced, I rarely needed to do more than that and stay out of her way. But as we are entering the upper levels, with a strong foundation of independent searching, I’m starting to make subtle yet deliberate handling choices. This search was the perfect picture of the teamwork balance I’m hoping to consistently strike.

Advanced Searches

While waiting for our afternoon runs, we visited Julianne and Ruse (@breeze.e.bear) at the Southern California Sporting Spaniel club training day, where Iris got to run and splash around in the pond for an hour and a half, and then the four of us went to lunch. We had a blast! But by the time we returned to the trial site for our Advanced runs in the afternoon, she was obviously tired.

It was especially noticeable in her Advanced Interior run (which we did for fun/as a bonus – since this is our favorite element!) where her searching behavior was much slower, and her sourcing/alerting a little lazier. The judge, who had been the same as the Excellent Interior in the morning, even commented on it. It was a lesson learned for me that keeping Iris fresh for trials will be especially important as we advance to more difficult levels. Compare the video below with her Excellent Interior search from the morning:

But, she still did her job and easily earned a qualifying score, and that was the theme of the other elements as well. Her times ended up solidly middle of the pack, when she is usually a placement contender, but she did good work despite being hot and tired and Q’d in all four elements at the Advanced level! Her last run of the day was an Advanced Exterior. One thing you’ll notice in the video below is that I don’t call alert right away on the first hide – it’s tough to see from the angle, but her nose was still moving, so I waited for the nose freeze to make the call. This was both to maintain a good habit generally, and also, in case the judge asks, I need to be able to point to exactly where I believe the source is.

With the closing out of her Advanced Container and Buried titles, Iris is now at the Excellent level in 3 out of the 4 elements, lagging only slightly behind in Exterior due to handler error 😉 Our goal is to be trialing at Masters level (the level after Excellent) in all 4 elements by the end of the year, which is now well within our reach!

Congrats also to Julianne and Ruse who qualified in 4/4 Advanced runs on the same day!!