Searching High and Low

While I've only once tried out Barn Hunt with my dogs (and they weren't all that good at it) and have never done more than basic Nosework with them, Pallo does love to use his nose to find things. He is actually pretty decently trained to find anything that smells like me. He has found my cell phone more than once after I've lost it on a walk or at the park.

A hidden tennis ball

With an opportunity to use some stacked hay bales to work Pallo's nose, I couldn't pass it up. I put Pallo into a down stay outside the barn while I went inside and hid the ball somewhere in the stack of hay bales. Then I would go back outside and release him with the cue "go find it" which sends him off after his ball.

Then Pallo searches low.

And then Pallo searches high.

He has no problem at all climbing up and over and around the hay bales, or using his nose to find his ball. However, since he is just searching for my scent, it is very distracting to him for me to touch the hay anywhere else, such as previous hiding spots or leaning against the bales to hide the ball.

Overall, he is a very thorough searcher. He hops up and down and around on the bales, searching in the nooks and crannies, searching high, searching low in all the places. But, he doesn't really search in a grid pattern naturally, so kind of hops around spot to spot checking. Which means he sometimes misses the right spot for quite a while.

But he always finds the ball again.

You can see the ball hidden in the hay right next to his nose. In the next instant, he grabbed the ball and brought it back to me.

After finding the ball, Pallo gets his reward in a quick game of fetch.

And for everyone who was wondering why Koira was pouting on Wordless Wednesday yesterday- it was because I went out to the barn to play with Pallo and left her inside!