His Redness has a couple of AKC scent work matches scheduled, so I’ve been working on Handler Discrimination with him.

In HD, the dog has to indicate which container contains the article that has been handled by the owner, bypassing containers which are blank and one which has an article scented by the judge.

When he’s tracking, Toka lies down when he finds my glove or wallet, so I want him to indicate the same way when he’s found my article when he’s doing an HD search.

Today we played the ‘assembly line’ game, where the scented article is placed at the end of a line of objects, and moved closer & closer to the start of the search.  The game teaches dogs to check each article carefully.

In his first run, he forgets he’s supposed to lie down as soon as he ‘finds mine,’  but he remembers after a few seconds.

We had fun!  What makes me especially happy is that each of the other socks had been handled (and therefore scented) by other people.

Here’s the link:   HD – Assembly Line Game