Basic Scent Recognition

There is a reason that we refer to this as “Basic”. Success and diligence in this phase of training is indispensable. A great deal of time is spent with the dogs in this phase because we believe it is an essential building block in the foundation upon which a scent detector dog's career is built. From this phase of training, comes the ability to teach a dog “scent discrimination”. Scent discrimination is the ability of a trained dog to reliably discern between the target odor and other similar odors that the dog will typically encounter in the areas where the target odor is likely found. A dog that is not capable of being taught scent discrimination, will have a very difficult time learning which odors to ignore and which to alert to. Lack of attention to this phase of training can produce an unreliable dog that is prone to “false alerts”. Therefore, we make sure that our dogs know the odor and have it “imprinted” in their minds before moving on to more complex and challenging exercises.