NORWEGIAN BUHUNDS
Thought this might be good time to remind you about our Michael Quinney Versatility Awards, particularly for those of you who have helped at Discover Dogs not just this year but in the past. If you read these notes regularly you will know that I love to write about the various things owners do with their dogs, and with these Versatility Awards you can have a lovely rosette by doing various activities, not just showing but taking part in things like attending Discover Dogs, going on Bu Bumbles, taking Good Citizen Tests and doing various activities like Agility, Scent, Park Runs, Rally, Mantrailing, Trick Training, Hoopers, Barn Hunt in fact if you do it there will be points for it, from the Pewter Award 5 points in at least 2 different activities up to Gold with 22 points from at least 4 different activities, so start adding up you points and claim you Award. Details are on the club website under new awards.
The two main organisations in Scent are Scentwork UK and National Nosework Association. SWUK mostly uses halls and carparks and their perimeter for their trials. For both SWUK and NNA the dog is looking for small pieces of material 2cm x2cm scented with the designated odour, but things like hair bands, pipe cleaners, cigarette filters, small pieces of foam in fact anything that will take up the odour can be used . In SWUK you start with cloves in L1 and work up to using gun oil and in levels 6 and above truffle oil is included. Time did his last SWUK competition on the 23rd August last year when he gained his Excellent in L6.The organisation had been taken over and personally I did not like the way it was going, and also to reward your dog for finding the hide, you had to take the dog out of the search area give the reward and then run back in, as the whole competition is based on finding all the hides in the shortest time. In NNA you can give the dog the treat where you find the hide so long as you do not drop food. The trials are much more environmental, and Gun Oil is always used except for the first level Foundation where some trials use Cloves. Before you compete as any level in NNA you must do an Odour Recognition Test for that level, to make sure your dog is up to that standard of searching. You can have 3 attempts, but you must pass it twice. After Foundation there is Pre entry, Entry, Enhanced, Excellent and Elite, there is only one dog UK at the moment that has won out of Excellent. NNA only started just over two years ago and has proved to be very popular; with the trials being held in a variety of places. Time and I started in Entry Level in August 2022, as at that time there was no Foundation or Pre-Entry, these were only introduced at the beginning of last year due to popular demand. You can still start in Entry if you wish but most people like to start at Foundation to get the feel of the competition, which as I have said is so different from SWUK.
In NNA you have a mark sheet, the judges look to award points out of 10 in three main areas Team Confidence, Area Coverage, and Indication and although at every level the searches have a maximum time the speed of the search does not really come into it. First and foremost, it is about finding the hides and if that is equal it goes on marks gained. There are winners and runners up in every trial for those finding the most hides and if you find all the hides in an area you get a badge, and you need three badges in each area to go up to the next level. Foundation trials start with surface hides and as you progress up the levels it goes to inaccessible hides with the difficulty of distractions increasing along the way, and the search arears increase in size, which certainly test dog and handler alike. In Excellent you have 10mins to search an inside and an outside area, you can call it clear if you think you have found all the hides, the number of hides is not known. Then there is the selection test with 20 items which can include plastic boxes, shoes, cardboard boxes, flowerpots, or anything you can hide items in, again the number of hides is not known. Our first trial was at a football stadium, then a farmland museum, a couple of working farms, barracks, museums, a child’s nursery school, storage units and more recently Land of the Lights which is part of Gulliver’s World Theme Park and on the 13th of March we did an Excellent Trial at the Colne Valley Heritage Railway ,where for the first time we had a shed and a gift shop to search! We were thrilled to be awarded the Runner Up Medal and to be only 3 points behind the winner as we both found the same number of hides, just lost out on marks.
We started with the shed there was no scented hide but a distraction hide which apparently had sat in dog kibble for a week or so! If the dog indicates on a distraction, it is called a false alert and if you have two false alerts in a search area you are out of that search. There were 6 hides in the shop and along with most of the other competitors we only found 4, but I was very pleased that Time found the two hidden hides one in a shoe locker and the other in a cupboard behind the pay desk, the other two he found, one was on a shelf with cuddly toys and one in a storage cupboard. He missed the one in a roll of plastic sheeting and on a remote control in an open cupboard.
The Exterior search was a platform that included a post box a telephone kiosk and some luggage There were three hides and the one we missed was the one that was in the wall above a bench but found the one on the fence and one on a brick in the ground.
In the Selection Test there were 20 boxes in 2 rows of 10, 4 contained hides and 4 containing distractions which included kibble, treat pouch, dog brush with mud and dog hair and a tennis ball. I am very happy to say Time found all four hides and gained a badge.
Happy Easter to you all and hope to see you at the AGM and fun day on the 6th of April.
Margaret Deuchar margaretdeuchar@gmail.com