Name: Sansa /Gus
Breed: Kelpie / Lagotto Romagnolo
Age: 3.5 / 1.5 years (2024)
Reward: Food
Location: Tooleen Truffles
Previous Training:
Sansa owner had started some scent work training with Sansa with scent locate with boxes but maintaining focus was proving to be challenging.
Main areas to work on:
Seeing a professional truffle dog search
Learning different ways to train a truffle dog.
Cross checking training techniques
Increasing focus, accuracy, stamina
Course:
Sansa’s owner wanted to try a whole new approach so I started Sansa on the Beginner course in Jan 2022. She was doing well in short training sessions with low distractions and moved into Intermediate 2022 and Advanced in June 2022. She would happily find hides in short training sessions and low levels of distractions. Between 2022 – 2023 her owner was working on increasing distractions by being out in the truffiere and slowly increasing searching time. While Sansa improved throughout 2022/2023 and she enjoyed the game, in small doses, she wouldn’t be able to be a sole truffle dog on a farm with 1800 trees.
Future:
Sansa likes the truffle hunting game but her personally is more suited to herding. She loves to run; her preferred reward would be to run and is not overly excited about food nor toys. We tried many different reward options; Food, pats (affection drive), toy play, chase toy (hunt drive), ball play (ball drive), tug of war (competitive drive). Unfortunately, running was the only strong drive for her and this makes for a challenging reward for truffle hunting. So, although she understands the game and will truffle hunt when she wants to, her drive to search isn’t high enough to be a sole truffle dog as she has reduced search stamina and focus due to not being able to reward her with her chosen currency.
Toolleen Truffles second dog, Gus, from Hevnsent Lagotto Romagnolo, is starting his truffle training journey between 2023-2024. He has already shown exceptional drive, keen to please and is easy to train with his food reward. The difference between the dogs is out of this world. Training Gus is effortless and scent searching comes naturally to him as he is able to be rewarded with his chosen currency, food.
Update 2024:
On July 11th 2024 Gus found his first truffle at Truffle Treasures. Owner Kevin was unsurprisingly over the moon.