Going Places With Gabe & Ziva: Three days of UKC Nosework in Council Bluffs

This post is all about a nosework trial. If you don't have any interest in that, I'd suggest skipping on to the next entry. It explains UKC nosework, so if you're a UKC competitor, it's probably a lot of "you already know this."

For the second year in a row, we got to camp on site for the Friends of Bellevue Dog Obedience Club Nosework trials at Sunshine Obedience School just outside of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Gerianne and Dr. George Darnell generously make their incredible farm available for all kinds of events. When we arrived on Thursday, the only thing left to set up for the three-day weekend of obedience, rally obedience and nosework trials was to cover the mirrors in the obedience building.

There are probably ten or twelve organizations in North America that administer some type of nosework competition. The two biggest and well-known are the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) and the American Kennel Club (AKC). The United Kennel Club (UKC) is a registry, like the AKC, and regulates its own version of many dog sports but never quite manages the cache or reach of the AKC, likely because it is a privately-held company and the owners seem determined to keep it small enough to oversee. NACSW was the first organization to offer competitive nosework in the U.S. but the UKC was hard on their heels.

Nosework is the 'sport' version of the serious work of Detection Dogs, the canines who are trained to find everything from drugs and other contraband to human beings, alive or dead, and explosives and other weaponry. As a sport, dogs are trained to find the odor of particular oils while ignoring the distraction of things like toys or food among a series of specified elements. The UKC mirrors the elements -- Containers, Exterior, Interior and Vehicles -- that NACSW uses, but uses Myrrh and Vetiver in addition to the NACSW oils of Birch, Anise and Clove. There are five levels of effort: Novice, Advanced, Superior, Master and Elite, with elements of difficulty increasing with each one, things like increasing the amount of space to be searched, the number of odor "hides," whether the handler knows how many hides there will be, the complexity of the puzzle presented to the dog and handler team. To get an element title, you need to pass twice. To get a Level title, you need to get all four element titles for that level. There are then Championship Level titles, an additional three passes at each element for the Level and Grand Champion, an additional five passes at each element (beyond the Championship).

The UKC rules tend to be heavy on how many "things" will be in a search area, while NACSW and AKC just specify the amount of area to be used. The exception is the Container element -- every organization specifies the number of containers to be used at each level, but only the UKC limits containers to identical cardboard boxes. There are certainly other differences among the rules, some of which apparently caused a number of UKC clubs to abandon nosework after the last major rules modification in 2019. UKC trials are usually smaller than AKC trials -- there were about 425 runs scheduled over the 3 days of this trial, while 400 per day is not unusual in AKC. UKC Nosework is very difficult to find outside the midwest, at least with enough frequency to make progress through titles; one competitor brought three dogs from Washington State to enter this trial along with the previous weekend's in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in an effort to finish up some titles.

I love UKC Nosework for the relaxed environment. If I could change anything, it would be the rule that says you can't accumulate Champion legs until you've got the overall Level title. Gabe came into this trial needing a qualifying score ("Q") in Elite Interiors to finish that overall title, which meant that any passes he had in other Elite elements wouldn't count toward anything until he got it. I've never before met an organization that didn't say "just take my money!" and discouraged entries this way; it seems so shortsighted! But there we were.

Gabe had a rough Friday but came through on Saturday to complete both his Elite Nosework title and his Master Champion title. And incredible Ziva passed 23 of her 24 runs -- the one she missed was totally my fault, of course! -- for a bunch of Grand Champion legs in Advanced and Superior. She even earned two "High in Class" awards for the fastest time in particular level on a given day.

And we just had an absolutely wonderful time! The setting was so beautiful, the weather really quite pleasant, especially on Sunday when it was cool and breezy and the scent puzzles were just marvelous. The Elite vehicle puzzle on Sunday was five cars in a circle around a large utility tractor. Gabe pulled me across the circle from point to point; if there hadn't been two almost identical minivans that the handler apparently couldn't tell apart, we would have had it, but it was a fabulous run, nonetheless! The competitors and trials hosts and volunteers were not just nice but also very fun.