The Adventures of Ochoco and Peaches

Week three room set up and our fabulous teacher Shelley Smith!

This is Ochoco's second week of class, we started the series with Peaches but she only got to go to the first class before having emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage (she's doing fine and we are practicing finds at home until her staples are removed). Luckily I have two berners so Ochoco is taking Peaches' place in class. We'll start Peach back up next session.

Today was basically a repeat of last week except that each of us brought an item from home to add to the mix of boxes they had been working with the last two weeks. The hides were not much more difficult, but the added items increased the complexity of the smells and things to search.

Here are some videos of a few of the dogs working week three:

Ochoco does a great natural alert! She found the reward under the cone but was hesitant to tip the cone over so you can see she moves around it a bit and then sits of her own volition (just out of the frame of the video) to alert her find and say "Here it is, I found it." We hope she will do that again as that is what you want to come naturally.

Ochoco is silly, but actually pretty quick in her finds:

(At video marker 45 she runs past it and her head cranks back, she's caught the scent.)

This is Quin, he searches for a favorite toy and is fast and funny.

This is Chloe, she is all business and fast too!

This is Rider, and he is thorough and fast.

More of Ochoco!!!

Here she actually finds it quite early but is uncomfortable putting her head in the box to get the reward, so she does some circling back to it and finally we have to help her a little by lifting the box lid slightly so she feels safe enough to stick her head into the box. (She first finds it at the 26 marker point in the video and possibly has caught a whiff earlier at about marker 16.)

Here Ochoco finds it again quickly, but is again slightly afraid of the wiggly box lid it is in sitting on top of the cooler, so she does a bunch more searching and then goes back to the original find, and we have to help a little by putting the box lid on the floor so she can eat her reward. (Here she catches scent at the 25 marker.)

You may also have noticed that Ochoco goes directly to the instructor at the beginning of each search and checks her hands. The instructor has hidden the treat, so she has the scent on her. I'm not sure why she is doing this and I didn't notice it during class, but only after reviewing a bunch of her find videos.

Ochoco was frightened by a very large branch falling out of an evergreen tree when she was just a tiny 10 week old puppy. She was in an X-pen in the drive way while we were working outside near her. The large, long branch fell on top of the X-pen and bent several panels of the pen and easily could have killed her had it fallen at even a slightly different angle, much of the branch landed inside the pen and smaller parts may have touched her, we are not sure. Although there were no injuries, she was hollering from fear. Obviously this was a very scary moment in her life, and the fallout of that moment is some nervousness about things above her head and things that move unexpectedly near her head and feet, hence her hesitation at putting her head into or eating from things that move like the boxes in the search exercises.

Tomorrow is Ochoco's 18 month old celebration! I can't believe she is a year and a half already. It seems she was just a 20 pound fuzz ball not that long ago. She's now a fit and super trim 90 pound-and-still-growing girl. Happy Day O!