Nosework Training April – November 2026
My friend, Denise, and I usually spend the summer training every weekend at our favorite place, the storage yard at Craftco Metalworks. They are always moving completed work out and bringing in supplies, so the places to hide scents are everywhere. However, in July 2025, Denise had to go to Minnesota to care for her sister.
One of our young club members, Sera, told me at our October trial that she continued to train her dog but was intimidated by the thought of competing. I invited her to come train with me, and I’d help her practice how she would handle her dog in competition and develop a routine that would give her confidence to enter next year’s trials. I took photos of her and her dog working. She takes photos of my dogs with her cell phone.
We set two separate search areas. All the dogs do search 1, then we move to search 2. You can usually tell the end of one search if you see some ball retrieving. The start of the young dogs’ second turn is indicated by practicing an indication on a box as a “warm up,” putting on the harness and/or going through the two plastic cones that in a trial are used to start timing the search. My competition dogs don’t need the warm-up, but often you’ll see a retrieve photo separating their sessions – or me putting their harness on by the start cones for the 2nd search.
We set two separate searches so that each of us gets to run “blind” (not knowing where the hides are). Each search contains all 5 UKC scents and 1 or 2 distractions (balls or treats). You can often see some of the hides in the photos, when they’re in little silver tins or copper-colored “bullets” that reflect the light. The treat distractions are in little bottles. They and the balls are always in plain sight.
All the dogs do both searches.
4/1126: Mercy, Justice and Zeal
Sera took movies of my three with her cell phone. She only retrieved a few photos from the videos, so I put all of them on one page.
I put one hide in a small piece of black rubber pipe. The dogs had to really work to find that one. Unfortunately, Sera got only one photo of that hide.
She did get two GREAT photos of Justice catching the reward treats when he made finds!
See photos of the Craftco Metalworks storage yard where we train
See An Illustrated Explanation of Nosework for Those Unfamiliar with It