25/05/2026
✨Fun scent work game to entertain your dog inside when it’s too hot to be running around ✨
There are so many different scent work games you can do, but a lot of them involve your dog moving around the house or searching an area. If it’s super hot, though, you might not want your dog running around too much, so this is another version that’s really fun and doesn’t require much movement .
The aim is for your dog to indicate the correct scent box. I used mint tea in one of mine, but you can use anything safe that’s nice and smelly. You’ll just need a few boxes.
I started by teaching Luna the indication. I literally just put the scent box down and shaped the behaviour, she’s very good at free shaping, so the second she touched it with her nose I marked “yes”, and pretty quickly she realised that putting her nose on the box was what I wanted.
Even just teaching them how to work out what you want is a really fun exercise in itself.
Once they understand the indication, you can add more scent boxes and make it harder. This was actually only the second time I’ve done this with Luna. She doesn’t usually enjoy traditional scent work where she has to search for things, but I realised yesterday when sending videos to a client that she enjoyed this version a lot more when she could just lie down and indicate the right one.
I thought that was a really nice example of how even dogs you don’t think will enjoy scent work might enjoy a variation of the game. And I’m often asked to show videos of dogs who don’t immediately understand what to do, so I thought this was a good example!
