Starting to work on scent articles

The winter project for this year is scent discrimination. I'm going to work on it with all three of my permanent dogs and maybe, if she stays long enough, with Honey the foster dog as well. Honey already quite nicely earns her keep by picking up all of the metal feeding bowls for me when it's feeding time.

My plan is to work using ideas from both Connie Cleveland's video and Shirley Chong's Video. I'll probably end up doing something in the middle. For now, I have a nice new 1/2 sheet of peg board courtesy of my training buddy Charla and her husband Jr. and my training articles which I found at a reasonable price from Custom Canine. I tied down two metal articles with zip strips leaving one metal article loose.

Both Ceilidh and Bronco Sue have a good trained retrieve firmly in place and Ranger is at the "hold" stage of his trained retrieve. He'll pretty much hang on to anything I put in his mouth until I give him the release command, but he's not great at getting stuff unless his prey drive is engaged by motion, i.e. throwing something. I started him out with a fuzzy paint roller and we moved on to PVC dowels, and metal kitchen utensils. He'll get there, just not quickly. Frankly, as long as he's bringing in the game birds, I'm not in a hurry about anything else, other than perhaps a good directed retrieve with him, as he's my primary hunting dog.