In October Alice and Silk got to participate in the Inaugural AKC Scent Work Master National Championship. The event was held at Roberts Centre in Ohio, the same site where I was able to compete in the very first AKC Scent Work trial with Maya in 2017. Coming back with her granddaughter Alice (and a lot more knowledge about the sport) was a great opportunity.
The event was scored tournament style. Correct alert calls were worth ten points, wrong calls and missed finish calls lost 5 points, and other faults like dropped food lost 2 points. The rules were mostly AKC Master rules, but with the pressure of 2 minute search times for everything.
We started the first day with buried and container searches. The tighter times weren’t a big deal in those classes and both girls qualified on both runs. We didn’t actually know this until the next day though- all you got after calling finish was a “thank you” from the judge.
In the afternoon we ran exterior, which was a huge area. I knew Alice hadn’t found everything when I called finish, but we were out of time and I didn’t want to lose more points for timing out. Interior was 2 hotel rooms with a total time of 2 minutes. By the time we ran this, the hides had been in place for at least 12 hours. Alice took most of the time she had to source the one hide in the last room of the day since odor was pooling all over the place by then- luckily it was the only hide in the room.
The second day was another buried, interior (just one room this time), and exterior search. At the end of the the day there was an optional Handler Discrimination Challenge. These were combined element searches with 3 cotton balls with handler scent hidden. I like this setup a lot better than the current rules for master HD- it would be nice it AKC was experimenting with a potential rule change but I don’t know.
Neither of the girls were perfect over the two days, although Silk was close. She finished in 20th place. Alice was also far enough up in the rankings to advance to the finals on the 3rd day. A medallion for the Highest Scoring Dog of each breed was offered and Alice was the PBGV winner. This was a nice touch to recognize the diversity of breeds in the sport, but as a preservation breeder I would like to see AKC require full pedigree information for dogs to be eligible for this type of recognition.
Finals was 2 rounds, one was containers and interior in a large boardroom suite and the other was buried and exterior in a garden area. The time for each was 2 minutes 30 seconds, which was tight. Scoring started over on day 3, so a good performance on the first 2 days didn’t necessarily mean a dog would end up on top. Both girls had some great moments but also some mistakes on day 3. Overall this was a really fun event and we would definitely participate again.
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