Meliora Drents

There’s not much I’d rather do on my birthday weekend than a scentwork trial with my girl! It was a “half size” two day trial, only offering Container and Exterior each day, put on by our sister club, Hidden Valley Obedience Club.

Since Iris was a little “behind” in Exterior compared to the other elements, we took this as a great opportunity to catch her back up, and she smashed it. She qualified both days, finishing off her Scentwork Exterior Advanced title, which also polished off her Scentwork Overall Advanced title! She also placed 6th out of 28 on Day 1 and 9th out of 26 on Day 2. The heat slightly dampened her usual speed, but she still got the job done with time to spare.

We also signed up for Container at the Excellent level. The first day, she NQ’d with a false alert – but, from my perspective, she did everything right. Nothing “went wrong”: she wasn’t phased by the distractions, systematically checked every container, alerted correctly on one, and then falsed on a box next to the “hot” box. She just made a mistake in her sourcing but had no issues with confidence, independence, or distractedness – which are much harder things to work on than adjacent odor skills!

I spoke with the judge the next day, who informed me that several other dogs had falsed on that box prior to Iris. He explained that, as the dog understands the “alert” call as a marker, they release positive hormones and pheromones any time they hear it. So when a handler calls alert in the trial on the wrong box, the dog still releases those hormones, and other dogs can pick up on that. It’s an incredibly difficult problem to train for, particularly as it builds upon itself so dogs later in the run order end up facing higher and higher levels of hormones. With some odor present from the adjacent hot box in the mix, you have a really tough problem for a dog to work through.

On Day 2, she qualified in Excellent Container in her usual expert fashion and earned 4th place out of 21 dogs! As usual, she was also a great breed ambassador, receiving lots of questions and compliments 🙂

Iris is now entirely in the Excellent level – one below our goal of getting into Masters by the end of 2023, and we’re not even halfway through the year! Guess it’s time to introduce her to Cypress, to get ready for Masters, because we’re moving on up fast!