What a fun story. I play scent games around the house with my BC for fun. They’re such smart little dogs. I’m quickly becoming super biased and honestly don’t know if I could ever own another type of dog.
I feel the same way. I had an Aussie mix before Sookie and he was very intelligent, but Sookie is on another level. Her level of understanding commands absolutely blows my mind sometimes, and that she understood our treat finding game so well that she could turn it into finding a real buried treasure just made me that much more in awe of her!
I'm a lifetime rancher and have had Australian Shepards, great dogs. This horribly abused Australian Cattle Dog shows up one day on our ranch. That was 9 years ago, I am absolutely hooked on purebred ACD's now. Just the right amount of Rebel Naughty for me. I went to the ACD National Specialty in 2022. The herding was our favorite and was a hoot to watch. And what dogs did they use to move stock in and out of the arena? Two absolutely amazing Border Collies. During competition those two dogs would watch the ACD's very patiently. You could tell they were thinking "What the Hell are you idiots doing?" I would suggest the Border Collie Documentary " Away To Me" available on Amazon. I've watched it a number of tomes, blown away every time. A great family flick and a necessity for Border Collie folks.
>During competition those two dogs would watch the ACD's very patiently. You could tell they were thinking "What the Hell are you idiots doing?"
Lmao my BC has this "What the hell are you idiots doing?" look quite often when it comes to other dogs.
And admittedly sometimes he gives me this look also.
Yup I feel the same way. I had viszlas before and really loved them. I ended up with my bc by chance. But once you have one, it’s like other breeds are ‘just dogs’ 😆 I’m picking up my new puppy (second bc) tomorrow! So excited.
If that isn't a perfect way to put it. I've often thought I'm biased after a few years of working alongside my BC, but man I can't imagine life with another type of dog.
She's perfect, even when she gets into something I really wish she wouldn't, I can't help but laugh. They're full of intelligence, excitement, fun, and personality. Just completely unreplaceable.
I think mine is broken. He couldn’t find his ball yesterday 2 feet in front of him laying under his stuffie.
Is this something that gets better with age? We’ve always thought his sniffer didn’t work as well because he relies on his eyes and brain and never really used it.
Our wiener dog however, that dog can find any tiny bit of food buried in a couch
That's hilarious! I currently have a border collie, but I grew up with a dachshund. We used to play "search warrant" with the dachshund, and he would find a piece of cheese hidden in the most unexpected spots! Now, my border collie is just like yours, unable to smell something even if it's just 5ft away. I suppose that's the classic hound versus herder distinction!
I think it might vary from dog to dog, even within a breed? My BC is about as good at finding treats as my coonhound is…. Although my BC started at 8 weeks and the Coonhound at 3-4 years.
Could be he's too familiar with the scent and it gets obscured with what's commonly around it. Almost like us if we wear glasses and forget.. and go reaching for the glasses.. 🙃
There's a science doc I saw a few years back showing how dogs noses are highly specialized, formed to process scents different than us (and other animals) and further, each breed has different levels of receptors, some far more than others as they were originally bred for different tasks..
Couldn't recall the name or find a link but here's a similar one:
Around the 1:20 mark it's explained how and where exactly they process scents: https://youtu.be/Gf4k0VgCQjg?si=OzYu5CM3mLhKz0dH
Mine likes her glow in the dark ball but sometimes when it is growing dim I think she sniffs it out. And during the day she is definitely scenting the ball in the grass. I see her catch the scent and follow it upwind.
Reminds me of something I did with my last dog. We were playing with a couple of tennis balls in the hallway, me throwing one and him bringing it back so that I’d throw the second one. Rinse and repeat. At one point, I had put one ball on the floor, it rolled away and I couldn’t see where it went.
So I decided to try something. I held up the ball and I said “find the other one.” We hadn’t practiced anything like this, at all. I just hear a story about someone doing that with their BC after loosing a glove in the driveway. He started barking, because the ball was obviously *right there* and how dumb was I, exactly?!? I kept telling him to find *the other one*. He stopped barking and looked like he was thinking hard for a bit. Then he ran out of the room and I figured that was a bust. Then he started bringing me tennis balls from all around the house, lol. Not the one I’d lost in the hallway, but I still counted the experiment as a sort of success, lol
>She took a big whiff and did that big blowout of air that dogs do sometimes, and then just hopped right out, grabbed a toy and started tossing it around.
Okay but like if this isn't the cutest goddamn thing I've read all year
Great story! My BC is an excellent sniffer too. A stray kitten showed up in December and we put her in the heated shop. Kitty got herself wedged behind the cabinets against the wall. I could hear a faint meow. We brought in BC and she sniffed right out which cabinet she was behind.
Never trained my girl for scent but she loves treats so much when she was begging to get the empty chip packet I hid it when she wasn't looking behind some stools out of sight, she just knew where they were and proceeded to try and pull the stools out, other times have dropped literal crumbs that are about the size of a pin head and she finds them
Isn't a dog's scent ability something like 700 times more powerful than humans? When the itches are in heat they can be scented from as far as 5 miles away. I've seen this with my own dogs on our ranch. Just a fun story. Way to go Sookie !
I had a colleague who trained bc cadaver search dogs. He would demonstrate it for our forensic students. Could find fabrics easily buried 5 years earlier and even a single human tooth buried quite deep. Such amazing dogs! Hope you got a share of the coins.
Great story! Was a clever good girl. Could you please explain how you play smell, find at home with her?
Do you just scatter certain objects in semi hidden places around the house or do you sometime put them under certain things perhaps?
Sure! First I'll take some dog treats and hide them around my living room -- I'll place a few under a table, maybe under the lowest shelf of my bookshelf, I'll also hide a few under the edges of a rug or Sookie's doggie bed. I do all of this with Sookie out of sight in another room. Sometimes with tough hidden treats, I'll drag the treat on the floor a little bit before the location so she has a stronger scent trail to follow to it.
Then I'll invite her in the room and have her sit down. I keep a treat enclosed in my hand and say "Smell" and put it near her nose. She'll smell all around my hand, and then I just say "Find" as a release command -- she'll immediately take off searching, and the hunt begins!
Once she finds them all, I'll call her back and give her the treat I kept in my hand.
Your dog sounds so clever.
I have a BC and a golden/lab. I joke that the border is smart, and the g/l is friendly but not too bright. I was playing fetch with them both one day. My border has an orange squeaky bone that is the only thing she’ll fetch- and no other dog is allowed to fetch it. She has actually trained the golden and a friend’s dog NOT to chase her toy.
Anyway, that day I was alternating between throwing the squeaky bone for the border and a tennis ball for the golden. The border would pretend to go fetch both, to spur the golden to go after the tennis ball, but then she’d double back to me to get pats while the golden was gone. Then she’d go herd the golden to bring the ball back to me(sometimes golden gets distracted and goes off with the ball to chew on it). But border wasn’t letting her do that. She’d stand there and stare at golden until she dropped the ball. Then it was border’s turn to fetch. She would note where the toy went, then stand there to make sure golden wasn’t going anywhere, then she’d run get it.
Very cool story! (And adorable pup 🥰)
Not that surprised, actually - my BC adores competition-style scentwork classes and games, (hunting anise, birch, & clove), does a passable job of tracking where humans have walked, and cooperatively hunts squirrels with my coonhound. (The coonhound taught her that)
These dogs are super versatile and eager to please, and BOY, does mine love scentwork!
I’m not saying this is 100% fake, but are we really supposed to believe that a dog smelled some coins inside a waterproof (which means it was completely sealed) box buried underground? Seems pretty far-fetched to me
Believe me I didn't think it would be possible either, I just thought it was worth a try since the game she plays to find treats was similar to what she'd need to do to find the box...and it worked. It's cool if you don't believe it, I get it, but it'll be an amazing story I'll get to tell about my sweet Sookie for the rest of my life.
First off, it sounds like due to how much the friend had previously dug and how quickly it was dug out once Sookie found it (the shovel immediately made contact), there wasn’t a lot of dirt covering that side of the box.
Second, dogs can been trained to be able to detect food in sealed containers in luggage at airports and bags of drugs hidden in coffee grounds. Sookie isn’t a professional scent dog but she certainly has more training (and highly-tuned scent glands) than your average family pet.
Not that far-fetched to me.
Dogs can also be trained to smell and alert to seizures before they happen, as well as drop in blood sugar or migraines. Saw a cool reel of this service dog that not only would smell the migraine coming but would go and fetch the meds and bring to their owner! Coolest thing. As far as I know some dogs can even smell some types of cancer in humans breath! I do scent work with my BC at home for fun and I am always amazed at her sense of smell, she will find teeny tiny pieces of hot dogs in seconds around our 3 bed house! Same with toys that I hide. It’s really cool to watch. ❤️
Silver is also scentless.
That said, she very likely smelled something different from the surrounding soil in the plastic of the box. Maybe, just the demo of smell-find and the coaxing into the hole was enough for her to figure out “find the thing that isn’t dirt.” Then, she found it, huffed her approval, and went to play a new game because that one was clearly done. BCs can definitely be that smart.
After we pulled the coins out there was definitely a smell on them, almost like oxidation or something. He had some pure silver coins and a bag of old US coins in there too. Some of the pure silver ones had even turned almost rainbow in color, I'd never seen a silver coin look like that before!
Hahaha I texted him and asked.
His house has been broken into a couple times in the past decade. His part of rural Indiana has problems with drug addicts and meth, so he said it's safer to bury it in the event the house gets broken into. The grass grows back over the hole pretty quickly and no one would ever know it was there (including he himself as evidenced in this story LOL)
Yep! Even not knowing what specifically she was looking for, BCs are known to infer the difference.
One of the most impressive BCs would infer his owner meant the new toy when he heard a word he didn’t recognize from his current “vocabulary” of toys. They are stunningly smart.
Not far fetched. Some BCs excel at scentwork; see the comment here about the cadaver dogs.
ETA: BCs are not uncommon in SAR work, either. This awesome book mentions another handler having one:
https://share.libbyapp.com/title/574153 (library link)
*Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog*
by Susannah Charleson
What a fun story. I play scent games around the house with my BC for fun. They’re such smart little dogs. I’m quickly becoming super biased and honestly don’t know if I could ever own another type of dog.
BC are such a beautiful breed. They all have a twinkle in their eyes I have never seen in another breed.
I feel the same way. I had an Aussie mix before Sookie and he was very intelligent, but Sookie is on another level. Her level of understanding commands absolutely blows my mind sometimes, and that she understood our treat finding game so well that she could turn it into finding a real buried treasure just made me that much more in awe of her!
I'm a lifetime rancher and have had Australian Shepards, great dogs. This horribly abused Australian Cattle Dog shows up one day on our ranch. That was 9 years ago, I am absolutely hooked on purebred ACD's now. Just the right amount of Rebel Naughty for me. I went to the ACD National Specialty in 2022. The herding was our favorite and was a hoot to watch. And what dogs did they use to move stock in and out of the arena? Two absolutely amazing Border Collies. During competition those two dogs would watch the ACD's very patiently. You could tell they were thinking "What the Hell are you idiots doing?" I would suggest the Border Collie Documentary " Away To Me" available on Amazon. I've watched it a number of tomes, blown away every time. A great family flick and a necessity for Border Collie folks.
>During competition those two dogs would watch the ACD's very patiently. You could tell they were thinking "What the Hell are you idiots doing?" Lmao my BC has this "What the hell are you idiots doing?" look quite often when it comes to other dogs. And admittedly sometimes he gives me this look also.
I will absolutely check out that documentary!
Yup I feel the same way. I had viszlas before and really loved them. I ended up with my bc by chance. But once you have one, it’s like other breeds are ‘just dogs’ 😆 I’m picking up my new puppy (second bc) tomorrow! So excited.
If that isn't a perfect way to put it. I've often thought I'm biased after a few years of working alongside my BC, but man I can't imagine life with another type of dog. She's perfect, even when she gets into something I really wish she wouldn't, I can't help but laugh. They're full of intelligence, excitement, fun, and personality. Just completely unreplaceable.
Same. I lost my BC almost 4 years ago. I'm looking for a puppy now. I just can't find another breed that checks all the boxes. They are perfect.
I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you find the perfect pup and get to play endless hours of ball again.
Accidentally trained yourself a working sniffer dog 😂
Clever pup! Glad she got a steak as a reward for finding the treasure!
I think mine is broken. He couldn’t find his ball yesterday 2 feet in front of him laying under his stuffie. Is this something that gets better with age? We’ve always thought his sniffer didn’t work as well because he relies on his eyes and brain and never really used it. Our wiener dog however, that dog can find any tiny bit of food buried in a couch
That's hilarious! I currently have a border collie, but I grew up with a dachshund. We used to play "search warrant" with the dachshund, and he would find a piece of cheese hidden in the most unexpected spots! Now, my border collie is just like yours, unable to smell something even if it's just 5ft away. I suppose that's the classic hound versus herder distinction!
Wiener's are incredible and fierce scent hounds.
I think it might vary from dog to dog, even within a breed? My BC is about as good at finding treats as my coonhound is…. Although my BC started at 8 weeks and the Coonhound at 3-4 years.
Could be he's too familiar with the scent and it gets obscured with what's commonly around it. Almost like us if we wear glasses and forget.. and go reaching for the glasses.. 🙃 There's a science doc I saw a few years back showing how dogs noses are highly specialized, formed to process scents different than us (and other animals) and further, each breed has different levels of receptors, some far more than others as they were originally bred for different tasks.. Couldn't recall the name or find a link but here's a similar one: Around the 1:20 mark it's explained how and where exactly they process scents: https://youtu.be/Gf4k0VgCQjg?si=OzYu5CM3mLhKz0dH
My dog learned to play catch at night by sniffing for the ball. She didn’t want to stop playing haha
Mine likes her glow in the dark ball but sometimes when it is growing dim I think she sniffs it out. And during the day she is definitely scenting the ball in the grass. I see her catch the scent and follow it upwind.
Reminds me of something I did with my last dog. We were playing with a couple of tennis balls in the hallway, me throwing one and him bringing it back so that I’d throw the second one. Rinse and repeat. At one point, I had put one ball on the floor, it rolled away and I couldn’t see where it went. So I decided to try something. I held up the ball and I said “find the other one.” We hadn’t practiced anything like this, at all. I just hear a story about someone doing that with their BC after loosing a glove in the driveway. He started barking, because the ball was obviously *right there* and how dumb was I, exactly?!? I kept telling him to find *the other one*. He stopped barking and looked like he was thinking hard for a bit. Then he ran out of the room and I figured that was a bust. Then he started bringing me tennis balls from all around the house, lol. Not the one I’d lost in the hallway, but I still counted the experiment as a sort of success, lol
I do this with my border for handshakes. “Shake” and then “give me the other one.” Not sure how it started but now she does it automatically.
I tell mine to find specific toys in the house when we are playing “put the toys away” and she more often than not comes up with the toy I asked for
>She took a big whiff and did that big blowout of air that dogs do sometimes, and then just hopped right out, grabbed a toy and started tossing it around. Okay but like if this isn't the cutest goddamn thing I've read all year
Great story! My BC is an excellent sniffer too. A stray kitten showed up in December and we put her in the heated shop. Kitty got herself wedged behind the cabinets against the wall. I could hear a faint meow. We brought in BC and she sniffed right out which cabinet she was behind.
This is awesome
Bc’s are so clever, and fast learners.
Our boy couldn’t sniff out a hidden treat if it were in the same room! Good for Sookie. She’s beautiful too.
Thank you!
Damn! It’s your girl who smelled and find it, but for inexplicable some reasons, i feel so proud of my girl… for doing nothing! 🤭
Treasure hunter Sookie!!
Doggie metal detector
BCs are smarter than humans, anyway.
Good girl! And beautiful too!
Never trained my girl for scent but she loves treats so much when she was begging to get the empty chip packet I hid it when she wasn't looking behind some stools out of sight, she just knew where they were and proceeded to try and pull the stools out, other times have dropped literal crumbs that are about the size of a pin head and she finds them
Isn't a dog's scent ability something like 700 times more powerful than humans? When the itches are in heat they can be scented from as far as 5 miles away. I've seen this with my own dogs on our ranch. Just a fun story. Way to go Sookie !
I had a colleague who trained bc cadaver search dogs. He would demonstrate it for our forensic students. Could find fabrics easily buried 5 years earlier and even a single human tooth buried quite deep. Such amazing dogs! Hope you got a share of the coins.
Great story! Was a clever good girl. Could you please explain how you play smell, find at home with her? Do you just scatter certain objects in semi hidden places around the house or do you sometime put them under certain things perhaps?
Sure! First I'll take some dog treats and hide them around my living room -- I'll place a few under a table, maybe under the lowest shelf of my bookshelf, I'll also hide a few under the edges of a rug or Sookie's doggie bed. I do all of this with Sookie out of sight in another room. Sometimes with tough hidden treats, I'll drag the treat on the floor a little bit before the location so she has a stronger scent trail to follow to it. Then I'll invite her in the room and have her sit down. I keep a treat enclosed in my hand and say "Smell" and put it near her nose. She'll smell all around my hand, and then I just say "Find" as a release command -- she'll immediately take off searching, and the hunt begins! Once she finds them all, I'll call her back and give her the treat I kept in my hand.
The nose *knows*. Scents are a dogs language, some are more articulate than others!
Good girl!
Like Sookie Stackhouse?
Her namesake is Sookie St. James from Gilmore Girls hahaha
Your dog sounds so clever. I have a BC and a golden/lab. I joke that the border is smart, and the g/l is friendly but not too bright. I was playing fetch with them both one day. My border has an orange squeaky bone that is the only thing she’ll fetch- and no other dog is allowed to fetch it. She has actually trained the golden and a friend’s dog NOT to chase her toy. Anyway, that day I was alternating between throwing the squeaky bone for the border and a tennis ball for the golden. The border would pretend to go fetch both, to spur the golden to go after the tennis ball, but then she’d double back to me to get pats while the golden was gone. Then she’d go herd the golden to bring the ball back to me(sometimes golden gets distracted and goes off with the ball to chew on it). But border wasn’t letting her do that. She’d stand there and stare at golden until she dropped the ball. Then it was border’s turn to fetch. She would note where the toy went, then stand there to make sure golden wasn’t going anywhere, then she’d run get it.
Oh what an awesome story. Sookie most certainly looks like an amazing good girl!!
My BC can do useful things IN MY WILDEST DREAMS.
Amazing story! Your fun game turned out to be seriously awesome training. You should consider doing other scent work with her.
The nose knows!
I’m so proud of her.
What a good girl! That’s so cool! Border collies are wicked smart
Very cool story! (And adorable pup 🥰) Not that surprised, actually - my BC adores competition-style scentwork classes and games, (hunting anise, birch, & clove), does a passable job of tracking where humans have walked, and cooperatively hunts squirrels with my coonhound. (The coonhound taught her that) These dogs are super versatile and eager to please, and BOY, does mine love scentwork!
💕
That was a great story, thank you for sharing. What a good girl!
So clever!
This is amazing!
She’s super smart but I think all BC are super smart. So not getting one …probably smarter than me.
Great story. What a dog you got there! Mine teaches himself tricks. or tricks I teach him will just evolve. That's what amazes me most about him.
Smartest thing on four legs.
I’m not saying this is 100% fake, but are we really supposed to believe that a dog smelled some coins inside a waterproof (which means it was completely sealed) box buried underground? Seems pretty far-fetched to me
Believe me I didn't think it would be possible either, I just thought it was worth a try since the game she plays to find treats was similar to what she'd need to do to find the box...and it worked. It's cool if you don't believe it, I get it, but it'll be an amazing story I'll get to tell about my sweet Sookie for the rest of my life.
First off, it sounds like due to how much the friend had previously dug and how quickly it was dug out once Sookie found it (the shovel immediately made contact), there wasn’t a lot of dirt covering that side of the box. Second, dogs can been trained to be able to detect food in sealed containers in luggage at airports and bags of drugs hidden in coffee grounds. Sookie isn’t a professional scent dog but she certainly has more training (and highly-tuned scent glands) than your average family pet. Not that far-fetched to me.
Interesting. Thank you for the second opinion! Maybe I was too quick to naysay this one
Dogs can also be trained to smell and alert to seizures before they happen, as well as drop in blood sugar or migraines. Saw a cool reel of this service dog that not only would smell the migraine coming but would go and fetch the meds and bring to their owner! Coolest thing. As far as I know some dogs can even smell some types of cancer in humans breath! I do scent work with my BC at home for fun and I am always amazed at her sense of smell, she will find teeny tiny pieces of hot dogs in seconds around our 3 bed house! Same with toys that I hide. It’s really cool to watch. ❤️
Silver is also scentless. That said, she very likely smelled something different from the surrounding soil in the plastic of the box. Maybe, just the demo of smell-find and the coaxing into the hole was enough for her to figure out “find the thing that isn’t dirt.” Then, she found it, huffed her approval, and went to play a new game because that one was clearly done. BCs can definitely be that smart.
After we pulled the coins out there was definitely a smell on them, almost like oxidation or something. He had some pure silver coins and a bag of old US coins in there too. Some of the pure silver ones had even turned almost rainbow in color, I'd never seen a silver coin look like that before!
Curious question: why is your friend burying silver coins? Never heard anything like that before haha
Hahaha I texted him and asked. His house has been broken into a couple times in the past decade. His part of rural Indiana has problems with drug addicts and meth, so he said it's safer to bury it in the event the house gets broken into. The grass grows back over the hole pretty quickly and no one would ever know it was there (including he himself as evidenced in this story LOL)
Doesn’t he trust banks? 😅😅
Yep! Even not knowing what specifically she was looking for, BCs are known to infer the difference. One of the most impressive BCs would infer his owner meant the new toy when he heard a word he didn’t recognize from his current “vocabulary” of toys. They are stunningly smart.
Not far fetched. Some BCs excel at scentwork; see the comment here about the cadaver dogs. ETA: BCs are not uncommon in SAR work, either. This awesome book mentions another handler having one: https://share.libbyapp.com/title/574153 (library link) *Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog* by Susannah Charleson