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Complete Guide: How to Train Your Dog to Hunt Truffles?

Complete Guide: How to Train Your Dog to Hunt Truffles?

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Training your dog to hunt truffles can be a rewarding and fun adventure!

Here is our professional guide to help you get started hunting for truffles.

Your pet can be an excellent truffle hunter. To do this, you need to go through a few important steps that are not that difficult.

Not all breeds of dogs are natural truffle hunters, but breeds such as Labrador, Cocker Spaniel, Lagotto Romagnolo, Springer Spaniel, German Shepherd, etc. have innately developed instincts and this is easiest for them. Of course, these are breeds used for professional truffle hunting, but our experience shows that almost all breeds can be trained to collect truffles.

Exercises to start with at home?

Start with the Truffle Smell Association.

Basic exercise - 1

Hide a truffle under your dog's food bowl and place it constantly in different places without the dog seeing you!

For example: behind the door, under the bed, in the bathroom behind the door....Truffles smell much stronger than his favorite kibble.Whenever you are ready, use the command SEARCH loudly and clearly. Also, a few drops of truffle-flavored olive oil added to his kibble helps the dog associate the smell of truffles with food. The exercise is done at home, when the dog begins to unmistakably use its sense of smell to find its food. Usually from 7 to 10 days your dog will be an expert in detecting the aroma of truffles.

Important: your dog remembers the places where the food bowls were placed and checks these places first. Therefore, each meal should be in a different place.

You must make sure that your dog uses its sense of smell to find its food. And then you can move on to:

Basic exercise - 2

Very important: all exercises from now on are done when the dog is hungry, it is best if a meal has been missed.

You can use fresh truffles or truffle-flavored olive oil - placed on a small ball of cloth.

In this exercise, we need to remove the food and separate the smell from the food.

How to do it?

Hide a truffle in a secret place without the dog seeing you, for example under a carpet, under furniture, in a low cupboard. Wait 15 minutes and use the command SEARCH loudly and clearly.

At first, your dog starts checking the usual places for eating and then starts using his sense of smell to find the food. When the dog finds the hidden truffle, you must use the command BRAVO and give him a small piece of cooked meat as a reward. Change the secret places of the hidden truffle each time. You can use 3-5 hidden truffles in different secret places in different rooms. Don't forget, always carry a reward with you and immediately reward the dog with a pardon, the BRAVO command and meat. You can cut the meat into small pieces and give it one for each discovery of the hidden truffle.

Important: during training, the dog should be hungry.

When you finish the exercise, you can feed the dog 70% of its normal ration.

After about 7-14 days, your dog will be an expert in detecting the aroma of truffles.

Basic exercise - 3

Here you should go outdoors, preferably in a park or a nearby forest.

If you plan to train at lunchtime. The dog should skip dinner and breakfast. The principle is as follows: the dog eats in the form of small rewards after each truffle discovery.

Start by hiding 3-4 truffles under the leaves or at a shallow depth in the soil. The dog should not see where you are going and what you are doing before the training. It is best to hide the truffles in the forest at least 1 hour before the training, so that the truffle has time to smell.

Let the dog go and with the command SEARCH, let him go and lead him through the forest near the places where you have hidden the truffles.

After the dog finds the first truffle, praise, petting, and a reward follow. And so on until he finds all the truffles.

This exercise is done every day for 1 hour for 2 weeks. It is best to change the forest, park, yard.

After this period, you should lead the dog to forests where there are potentially wild truffles, and start with Exercise-3 and increase the time, walk and tour in the forest.

Important: Searching for truffles with a dog is training that must be practiced constantly. If you interrupt your forest outings for more than 2 weeks, you must repeat exercises 2 and 3 again.

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