This is a scent article exercise I created for Mighty. Mighty most recently earned his Utility title. I would like to see him more confident on his scent article work so I decided to spread his articles apart so that he had to learn how to slow down and stay in the pile until he could commit to and find the correct article.

By spreading the articles out he had to really learn how to work the pile by going from article to article and not bailing out when he couldn’t find the correct one right away. The first few times I did this exercise with him, he did panic and grabbed any article when he couldn’t find the correct one right away, but with patience and persistence we kept working it until you can see the great results I got from this exercise in this
video clip. Mighty is now learning how to settle into the pile and focus on finding the correct article without the Retriever breed’s genetic desire to return as quickly as possible with “something”.