Olivia Discusses Nose Work Odor – What Is It?

Nose work odor, what is it? It never dawned on us that the average bear would not know what it is that we are searching for. How does it get in places for us to find? When our blog friend, Cecilia, asked the other day I decided I should do a short post about it. This yellow box is our odor kit. It contains all the odor and vessels we usually use when we practice our sniffing on our own. The container is air tight to keep the odor in and our noses clueless.

Out main sniffing organization is NACSW. They use three odors in their searches, birch, anise, and clove. These odors are essential oils. A “hide” may be made of one, two, or all three odors together. We buy them from a local company and they will last for many years.

For AKC Scent Work, there are four odors – birch, anise, and clove like NACSW but they also add cypress at the higher levels. There are other sniffing organizations that use other scents but we don’t participate in others.

How do we make hides from these little bottles of essential oils? It is a simple process. We have small glass jars where we put just two or three drops of the oil on the inside wall of the jar. Q-Tips are cut in half and added to the jar. Mom rolls and shakes the jar for a short time and then we let the Q-Tips “cook” for a day or two. Cook means sit in the jar to absorb the oil scent. Once they are cooked, we are ready to make some hides.

There is a huge array of vessels one can use to make a hide. Here we have a few of ours, from left to right, a small plastic hide, a 3D printer hide with a magnet in the bottom of it, a straw, a metal smiley tin, a plastic smiley tin, and a large metal tin. Each hide has three Q-Tips in it.

Hides can be placed anywhere since they can have magnets in them, we also use earthquake putty for sticking them on things, or they can be set places. With 3D printers, things are even more fun as one can create things like rocks which look just like a rock. There are two types of hide placements, accessible and inaccessible.

Accessible means we can get our nose right on the hide. Lower level trials are always accessible. Hides need to be secure so dogs don’t grab them. This hide under the old tractor is a great example of an accessible hide.

An inaccessible hide is one we can’t get to, no access. It can be under something large or up high. We need to communicate the rough location to our human and they need to have the courage to call it. This photo is a high hide in a small closet area.

Hopefully this gives you a bit of an insight into what a hide is and what exactly it is that we are looking for. This is another accessible hide in the corner of the wood porch. We dogs love to get right to the hide and handlers prefer it too as there is no guess work but there are a lot of inaccessible hides in trials. With practice humans learn to recognize our inaccessible hide behavior. We are just thankful we get to search and play so many great games with our noses.

We’re joining Brian’s Home Blog in the Thankful Thursday Blog Hop!