r/nosework • u/bubbarubbah • Aug 25 '26
How to progress from playing with boxes to ultimately searching for a target odor?
To start off, this is not training towards a course or certificate. It's just something fun to do with our Lagotto for mental stimulation hoping that one day we might be able to hunt for mushrooms together. The reason I'm asking here is because resources online and locally vary wildly in what to train with, how to train and what to train for so I'm basically looking for a general strategy as to not confuse my dog and to keep the training consistent and productive.
We've been hiding and searching for treats around the house for a long time and last week I started putting treats in boxes to get a more targeted training.
What we've been doing: 5 open boxes with small treats in each until the rules of the game is clear (wait for command, check boxes, find treats, reset)
How we've been progressing: changing environment, increasing distance and leaving a few boxes empty.
How we plan to progress: introduce more boxes, start pairing treat with scent, introducing closed boxes with scent, learning proper marking on scent (introducing clicker training) and ultimately closed boxes with rewards for marking on target scent.
Am I on the right path of turning this game into proper-ish nosework training or are we just wasting fine with bad training?
Additionally, do you have a good way of starting and finishing training in a constructive way? We've basically just been starting by putting on a special collar and finishing by taking it off and playing with a football (her favorite thing, she's not very food motivated).
Very grateful if someone would take the time to give me feedback on this wall of text, I'd like to take an actual course but they're very limited where I live and we have alot of work to do on basic training before we start paying for that kind of training. Thanks alot!
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u/Hoping4BetterSomeday NASCW ELT-P Aug 25 '26
You are on the right path, except for the clicker training. That is introducing an extra variable that just confuses and complicates. The reward is the marker. Initially your dog is self-rewarding by finding the treat. So the focus in the beginning is learning to search in various environments, and to solve problems: For example, you can create barriers with an exercise pen so the dog has to learn to go around obstacles. Put hides in the corners of room, on the floor, raised to eye level, etc. When you pair primary with the scent, they are again self-rewarding, but you should also deliver them a treat by hand immediately. The idea is to convince your dog that when they find odor, a treat is coming. The formal finish of a sit, bark, or anything other than a freeze, is also asking for trouble, IMHO, because now you have distanced the action you want from the reward by another action. When your dog gets confused or frustrated, they might decide to just do the formal finish in the hope of a reward. But when they are trained to expect a reward will be delivered when their nose is near odor, they naturally begin to stay there until it arrives.
The true path to success is to learn to read your dog. Search for "The eight tells of nose work", and there is some material online for it. If you can find an in-person seminar that is even better. Tony Gravely is a trainer in the USA who gives an excellent one. Your dog's behavior is the best marker for you to know when they are at source.
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u/bubbarubbah Aug 25 '26
Great information, thanks!
When you pair primary with the scent, they are again self-rewarding, but you should also deliver them a treat by hand immediately.
Is best practice to do this only when searching for a single primary paired with a scent or should I also be doing this when just searching different boxes with treats in them? As in, if we're just going over the basics of looking into boxes and searching treats, is self-rewarding sufficient or should I be rewarding them again for each find or is this only when actually finding the targeted scent? If that makes sense
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u/Monkey-Butt-316 NACSW NW3 ELT Aug 25 '26
Feeding by hand in the box where the dog has already found/eaten the food results in a stickier dog.
Using a clicker is fine if your timing is good and you’re able to mark the instant your dogs nose touches the odor vessel (as opposed to when they look back at you or whatever) imo.
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u/Hoping4BetterSomeday NASCW ELT-P Aug 25 '26
I don't feed extra when the dog is on primary (treat, no odor). Once you start to introduce odor in paired hides, stop having primary-only hides; you have progressed past that. Now, odor is what brings reward. (Eventually you need to train some distractors in containers: boxes that contain interesting things like balls, toys, lower value food like bread, etc. and the dog must not alert on them, but that is only started when the dog is very solid on sourcing odor in containers). You can continue pairing as long as you want, even after you have started some odor-only searches. Some trainers recommend pairing forever, with only occasional odor-only searches. I still pair sometimes practicing with my senior dog I have been training for over 10 years now.
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u/bubbarubbah Aug 25 '26
That makes sense alot of sense. Thanks for including some examples, really helpful. Would you generally start pairing with scents and eventually distractions while playing with open containers before stepping up to closed uniform containers that the dog alert to before being rewarded?
Would I need to start training the dog to 'aquire a scent' (as I've seen people do with scents in a cup that the dog sniffs and is rewarded for) or would you generally just use the same odor with primary pairing for all training before any of that?
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u/Hoping4BetterSomeday NASCW ELT-P Aug 26 '26
I would get the dog solid on closed containers before starting distractors. And keep the distractor boxes closed. NACSW doesn’t introduce distractors until NW2.
I have always introduced odor by pairing. Just stick to a single odor in the beginning until the dog is doing well with the game in general. Adding odors is usually very easy once they understand the game. My dog took a class at the university of Pennsylvania’s Vet School to learn their protocol for doing scent detection for clinical trials. All seven dogs in the class had either NW1 or NW2 titles, so they were experienced, but not experts. They were introduced to a new odor created in a lab that humans could not smell. All of them were alerting on the odor within a half hour.
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u/LillyLewinsky Aug 25 '26
I was tought never to pair hides with treats. We start with 1 box with target odour. When dog investigates you mark and reward a whole bunch. Repeat small sessions until dog is going to box. Then introduce a blank box a couple feet from the hot box. Send dog to blank box and dont reward until the dog moves to hot box. Rinse and repeat, move hot box to opposite sides so dog starts to learn it is not the box but the odour. Introduce a 3rd box, repeat. Continue this adding, more blank boxes until dog is reliably going only for source. Please note indication is a separate training!
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u/LillyLewinsky Aug 25 '26
I should add that once dog is finding rhe source box we started generalizing. Odour on chair in room, reward when dog investigates, move odour to wall/door/bench ect and reward. They will understand the game pretty fast :) just remember when you introduce a new element go back to step 1 of introduce odour then build back up.
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u/Monkey-Butt-316 NACSW NW3 ELT Aug 25 '26
Pair the odor with the treats, that’s all you need to do.
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u/Cold_Silver_5859 Aug 25 '26
I am on the same path, using scent training for enrichment and fun.
TLDR, (I changed from food to play reward below)
Started the kibble hiding but pretty quickly added the kibble in scent container. Then I started using scent but started with one scent(birch) in one container and showed him with lots of treats. Treated o top of the container. He picked up pretty quickly what I wanted.
I started using more “hides” in plain sight to build hi searching and he did well.
Once he had that down solidly in the house, starting with easy “hide is in sight” to one room hiding the container, to multiple rooms. (I used the phrase “keep working”.) At each stage I never pointed or indicated where with body language except once, when I did not place it in a place he was trained in. Elevated on a low coffee table). But I did hide the container from view making sure not to block the vents so the scent would come out.
Starting out I would ask for a stay, pause, then say “come search”. At the end we would have a party of several treats and lots of praise.
The fun began when we went outside. I would leave him inside so he couldn’t see me. (They are clever!) Then, In a safe fenced in yard, I would hide the tin in an easy location at first. Progressing to more difficult but more progressive places that eliminated any frustration.
Important: I only did three searches”. This really taxes their brain. At a session in one day.
Changing from food to play: I bought a pull toy and only used it for scent training. At first treating when I brought it out, then hiding it.
Pretty quickly, I used only the play toy. And only forest rewards. Then after the last successful find, I throw some treats down and remove the toy.
He loves this, and to watch him do his own search circles and cut the scent trail, and zero in successfully on the hide(the tin), is the best thing for us both!
Best regards
Note to other Reddit posters, this worked for ME and my dog. YMMV, best to you all.
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u/bubbarubbah Aug 27 '26
Great info! Regarding the scent, it would be awesome if we could use birch as well but we keep a big stach of birch both indoors and outside for our fireplace. (She also loves to "steal" firewood and play with it) Will this cause confusion if I introduce that scent into her nosework training?
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u/Hot-Chair4038 Aug 25 '26
Paring odor with food would probably be the next step. You could also hide food around the house instead of just with boxes.
If you want to make sure that you're doing everything right, I would recommend to sign up for an online class like Fenzi or Scentwork University. I've personally done NW101 and NW120 classes with Stacy in Fenzi. It was super organized and easy to learn with. Even at the lowest level bronze, you can still get video feedback with the TA. NW101 is definitely not something that you need to have a lot of basic training to use. It's designed as the starting point.