We had a funny little happening the other night...Jason had just come home from school and we were standing at the kitchen bench when I felt Bailey paw me on the back of my leg. I had just tested Jason's BGL's and he was a little over his target range but not high. I turned to Bailey who was sitting behind me and just staring up at me and I said, "What's this about?". I told him Jason was fine and dismissed it as him being overly excited and trying to get my attention.
Several hours pass and Jason is in his room, door closed and building with his Lego, so I go in to test him again. Bailey follows me in and starts to give Jason the low signal paw swipe on his leg, then he lies down a few times which indicates the high signal, then he jumps up and paws Jason insistently about six more times. He's really worked up and excited and reminds me a bit of a malfunctioning wind-up toy. Jason's reading is perfect so we both watch him and I say to Jason "I'm not sure why he's giving you low & high alerts".... then I turn to Bailey and ask him "What's up?"....and then it dawns on me a couple of minutes later....Jason is wearing the same school cargo pants he had on on Friday, and after school that day we did some training and I'd planted the low scent tube on him for Bailey to detect! And I'd also planted the high one on him too, so he was picking up the residual scent inside the pockets from both we'd used four days earlier...and was doing a great job at alerting us to it!
Dogs really do have an incredible sense of smell. I have recently read how dogs can pick up human finger prints that are a week old and smell things up to forty feet under ground. I told my mentor about what happened and she told me of how residual scent can linger on fabric until it's washed and that her own dog that was trained to find very old scent, had found graves over 7000 years old and fairly deep down at that!
The more I do the training, the more fascinating it becomes...
Several hours pass and Jason is in his room, door closed and building with his Lego, so I go in to test him again. Bailey follows me in and starts to give Jason the low signal paw swipe on his leg, then he lies down a few times which indicates the high signal, then he jumps up and paws Jason insistently about six more times. He's really worked up and excited and reminds me a bit of a malfunctioning wind-up toy. Jason's reading is perfect so we both watch him and I say to Jason "I'm not sure why he's giving you low & high alerts".... then I turn to Bailey and ask him "What's up?"....and then it dawns on me a couple of minutes later....Jason is wearing the same school cargo pants he had on on Friday, and after school that day we did some training and I'd planted the low scent tube on him for Bailey to detect! And I'd also planted the high one on him too, so he was picking up the residual scent inside the pockets from both we'd used four days earlier...and was doing a great job at alerting us to it!
Dogs really do have an incredible sense of smell. I have recently read how dogs can pick up human finger prints that are a week old and smell things up to forty feet under ground. I told my mentor about what happened and she told me of how residual scent can linger on fabric until it's washed and that her own dog that was trained to find very old scent, had found graves over 7000 years old and fairly deep down at that!
The more I do the training, the more fascinating it becomes...