One hide, two different search dog approaches

This is a training exercise that I did with tobacco detection dogs Griff and Cooper.
There is one hide, which contains a mixture of cigarettes and hand rolling tobacco. The items were placed in a top locker in a male locker room.
Exactly the same exercise is performed for both dogs, Griff the Springer Spaniel and Cooper the Fox Red Labrador. Normally, for various reasons I don’t like to put multiple dogs over the same hide, but for this exercise I did. The tobacco hide was placed out at 9am in the morning and the dogs performed the search exercise at 3pm the same day.
Both dogs have exactly the same search exercise, they search 5 rooms downstairs in a recently dis-used shop and then go upstairs to search a further five rooms. The search takes approximately 15 minutes per dog, well, it should do.
It was planned that the locker room with the tobacco hide would be the last room to be searched by both dogs, so they would have 9 negative rooms to search before ending the exercise with hopefully a find in the last room.
Things did not go as expected, as normally happens, but this is why we train.
Griff searched 7 rooms and then decided to go it alone, run past rooms 8 and 9 and head straight to the door of the final room with the hide.
Cooper also searched 7 rooms before deciding to do his own thing, also running past rooms 8 and 9 before letting himself into room 10 with the hide.
I’ve cut the video down from 30 minutes to 3 minutes. It’s interesting to watch, two totally different dogs trained to find the same odour. If I’m honest I didn’t expect what happened with either dog, but very happy with what they both did.
In a lot of cases training does not replicate the real thing, but training does give us an idea of what to possibly expect from detection dogs during operational work. As handlers we can learn so much from our dogs during proper, planned training exercises.
www.bwycanine.co.uk/training-seminars

[@연지곤지-c3b]

It is impressive to see the spaniel sniffing the air and searching for it. He seems to like working.😊

[@christinalanserius3317]

Lovely 🎉🎉🎉