WW246: July 11- Walk On By: Making Intentional Distractors A Piece of Cake

A top concern of many handlers are distractors placed inside a container or placed in the search area (typical in AKC Scent Work). These are INTENTIONAL distractors. Containers already have their challenges with undesirable antics and distractors increase the rate of errors or antics. It’s very easy for dogs to fall for a novel odor especially in a novel search area with a nervous handler! 

Novel odor, usually food or toys, are actually competing reinforcers for your dog. Your dog may have value for odor, but sometimes other odors cause a split in your dogs attention and distracts your dog from it's work.

This workshop shows a step by step process for setting up clear expectations around distractions and how to test for success. It’s important that we start these steps early in the dogs training. 

Using informal drills we can test and build value for odor around distractions. It becomes a discrimination game where we test these distractors against target odor.

Putting it all together we will implement handling approaches that will empower our dogs to self-solve the situation and walk on by to dismiss those distractors!

This is a previously run workshop.  Your purchase will provide access to both the original presentation recording and the student feedback recording. There is no opportunity to submit video or ask questions. 

Instructor: Julie Symons

Julie Symons (she/her) has been involved in dog sports for over 30 years. Starting with her mix, Dreyfus, in flyball, she went on to train and compete in conformation, agility, obedience, herding and tracking with her first Belgian tervuren, Rival. Rival was the first CH OTCH MACH Belgian...(Click here for full bio and to view Julie's upcoming courses)