The Adventures of Ochoco and Peaches: March 2011

Announcing: Kaibab's Fuzzy Peach NW1 !!!

Yea! Peaches got her K9 Nose Work NW1 title! (She was one of 23 out of 39 competitors to get their titles that day.)

She got a perfect score of 25 in all four events, Vehicle, Interior, Container and Exterior and placed 10th overall with all four elements combined by time and score.

In three of those four events she also got a "Pronounced" recognition which is at the judges discretion and reflects the teamwork exhibited between dog and

handler. She also got some great comments from the judges on her score sheets, my favorite being "Awesome to watch!".

Her highest placement was 2nd in the Interior Search at 0:9.49 seconds, she was in the middle of the group for the other three elements. There was some really tough competition with very fast and accurate dogs running! The fun part was that many of us have trained and/or taken classes together for over a year now and all of our dogs were clustered in about the same ranking. We had lots of fun cheering each other on and giving the thumbs up that we had passed our element. (You can't talk about where the hides are so you don't spoil it for others, as all the hides are in the same place for the whole day.)

We had gale force winds pretty much all day!! With numerous gusts in the 50-60 mph range. By the end of the day all of the EZ-up tents had come down and the wind had actually broken the metal framing on one of them into pieces! So we had to make do with moving cars and vans all over the site to create visual barriers so you couldn't see the element from where you were queueing up.

We had 175 volunteer positions over the two days that made the trial come to life, and what a task that was—I was the volunteer coordinator, along with many, many hours of planning and organizing the event as the right hand to the event host. We had young dogs, old dogs, rescue dogs, pure breed dogs, deaf dogs, a blind dog, reactive dogs, pet dogs, dogs highly titled in many other sports including several Master Earth Dogs and dogs with TDX titles, you name it, and yet all of them were allowed to participate on an equal basis. And to boot we had all kinds of people participating too, the oldest was a slightly frail woman at 73 with cute fuzzy white Coton de Tulear who placed 14th! What an amazing thing.

While Peaches isn't the first berner to get her NW1 title, I think she is the second or third! She is the first Kaibab berner to get one and with all of Mary-Ann's accomplishments and others with skilled Kaibab dogs, I consider that a real honor! We are going to aim for the first berner with NW2 and NW3 titles though!!

This is the first "official" title for both of us, although back in the fall Peaches took 1st overall and 4 placement ribbons including 3 1st places in individual elements at our "mock" trial.

I encourage you to try Nose Work. It's so fun and natural for the dogs and teaches the handler so much about reading their dog and team work—with the dog in the lead not the human.

Here are some photos that tell the story of part of the trial:

The evidence of high winds...

The judges steward giving instructions for the Vehicle Element

Peach at the start line just catching a whiff of odor

The cue to "Find It"

Off she goes at a full clip

Here she is heading directly to the stream of odor she picked up at the start line. These three vehicles are the ones she is to search.

Pulling me directly to the correct vehicle without even considering the others.

Here the wind is playing havok with the odor and pulling it under the vehicle and around the post, we had 50-60 mph wind gusts all day!

And over to the post and pooling

A little guidance from me brings her back towards the vehicles since we know it not on the post.

Here she picks it up again swirling under the vehicle.

And here she begins an excellent job of detailing looking for the source.

She is continuing her detail of the vehicle.

Sniffing lights, bumper, license plate

Bang, she catches it and whips around the corner.

Zeros in...

Nails it dead on! (It's a little 1" round metal container with 1 q-tip cut in half that has the scent of birch oil on it, and is hidden up and under the running board invisible to both of us visually.)