Scent Articles- day 3!
I'm doing good on my scent article training commitment! Three days in a row for the Duck :) And still zero practice for the boys...
Due to Zumi's tendency to grab all the things(!) I decided to put gobs of wet food on the correct article. This allowed her to actually care about licking and thus some smelling, and gave me time to grab the article as she was licking it and prevent her from picking it up. My goal was to not allow her to do any retrieving until she at least started to think about scenting first.
Plan went well! Likely because Zumi is so young and has way less history of retrieving, it wasn't hard to get rid of the grabbing. 1.25 sessions and the rest of that second lesson she wasn't attempting to pick up anything. I started taking video for the remaining 3/4th of that second lesson.
Lesson 3 had zero attempts to retrieve so I started encouraging her to pick it up after licking off the food. Zumi would be a good girl and start biting a different one :) And then we got a few more grabby retrieves without scenting on some more reps. But overall I felt good about our lesson today and saw some scenting (for food) going on. If needed I can always go back to not letting her retrieve, but I think for now I'll continue with the higher amounts of food than I usually do and encouraging a pickup after licking.
For those who are interested in joining training scent articles this month, I've set up a facebook group to provide motivation and shaming.
