08/02/2026
I wanted to share this video of Element demonstrating her understanding of my cues for her in nose work. I think it is easy to not be clear with your cues in this sport since it is so up to the dog to do the job.
In this situation, I'm looking at two cues. 1) Her cue to recommunicate at the current hide and 2) The cue to move on and find another hide.
Her cue to continue to re-communicate on the same hide is my physical support of the hide. In the long run, it will be the absence of the verbal cue to find a new hide that means the current hide is still the one in play, but we aren't all the way there yet on that.
Her cue to find a new hide is the verbal "Find"
Not everyone needs to or should teach a dog to recommunicate at the same hide, but it can be useful in several scenarios:
1) If you don't see your dog find a hide in a trial, the repeated reinforcement can increase the likelihood of the dog communicating again
2) If a judge asks "where", as you take a deep breath to answer the question, your dog may opt to recommunicate
3) If you need to teach an intentionally trained final response for any reason - in her case, grabbing hides was a problem
4) Just to allow additional reinforcement opportunities - to build odor importance, to build stickiness, to increase motivation, to reward effort and then finishing the problem, and probably more.
The important thing if you do teach recommunication is that your dog also understands when the current ATM (hide) is out of money and that they need to find a new ATM (hide).
I like to clarify the cues to my dog with simple setups that do not involve challenging searches. The first few times we did this setup, I pulled the first hide to help her move on.
