No Nonscents

No Nonscents is the name of the Scent Hurdle team that a group of us are trying to get off the ground. Amanda at manymuddypaws has been talking about forming a Scent Hurdle team for a couple years now. She got a few of us interested too and today we had our second practice. The first few times Amanda mentioned Scent Hurdle to me, I just kind of brushed it off, thinking that my dogs could not do "that". But it is a lot of fun and it is fun working as a part of a team.

Scent Hurdle is similar to Flyball (Scent Hurdle actually is a much older sport than Flyball) but instead of a flyball box at the end, there is a box with dumbbells. The dog must pick their own dumbbell out of the box (by scent) and race back over the hurdles so the next team member can go.

Today we started with scent discrimination work and all the dogs are doing great. I thought it would be really hard to teach the scent stuff, but all the dogs are catching on so quick - it is really amazing to watch.

I am training Bosley to be on the team. Poor Maggie just gets to watch from the sidelines. Maggie's idea of retrieving is to get the dumbbell and run away trying to get someone to chase her. I am sure during an actually race, she would be trying to entice all the other dogs to engage her in a game of keep-a-away. Bosley takes things, like retrieving, a little more serious.

Maggie can be our team cheerleader (that is more her style anyway)!

Here is Maggie at practice today, hanging out on the couch with Gyp. Maggie looks pretty content with her job as "cheerleader", don't you think?