K9 Kamp: Mastering Hide & Seek with Mr. N – A Campfire Coaching Moment

At the beginning of K9 Kamp, I declared my intention of having Mr. N find my keys for the “hide and seek” theme. Well we kind of got caught up with other flashy tricks like rebound and weave and I barely worked on it. So I scrambled to put something together. Luckily, something clicked in Mr. N’s brain during our last session and he’s been pretty good about finding the keys. We need to work on him alerting to my keys once he has found them next.

Basically I dabbed some essential oil on my keys and let him sniff the oil bottle then told him to “find it.” We’ve worked on “find it” before only with food. Once he found the keys and started sniffing at them, I would jackpot reward him right next to/on top of the keys.

There’s other methods of training this and I don’t know if I necessarily picked the easiest way! Oh well. He picked it up pretty quickly once he figured out that essential oil + keys = food. I’m looking forward to him being able to alert me to where my keys are, I often misplace them. He’ll be glad too. Lost keys mean delayed walks.  For our second hide and seek exercise, can anyone spot Mr. N? Any guesses as to which statue he’s standing next to? Think folklore.