(Mommy’s Note: This game is a way to burn up some of your dog’s energy when the weather is bad. It’s also a good way to fend off boredom in a motel room! Just be sure to adjust your dog’s diet by decreasing his breakfast or dinner a bit to compensate for the number of treats.)
When your dog can find human hiders quickly and easily, it’s time to increase the challenge again by hiding treats (or, if he doesn’t like treats, toys) for him to find.
Put the dog in a Sit-and-Stay where he can’t easily see what you are doing around the rest of the room. (Mommy and Daddy tell me “Kennel,” which is the command for me to go into my crate and wait for them to release me.)
To begin with, take a half-a-dozen treats and put them in fairly obvious places around the room: on the floor in the corner, under a table that is easy for your dog to get beneath, on the seat or arm of a chair he can reach easily, on the edge of a bookcase shelf, etc. Go back to where your dog is in a Sit-and-Stay, offer him your hand to sniff to get an idea of what to hunt for, release him from the Sit-and-Stay and say “Hunt-It-Up!” (or whatever command you want to use to initiate this game). Walk around the room with the dog, giving him hints if necessary, and praise him every time he finds a treat.
Next time, repeat the process, but put just a couple of treats in the room where the dog is in the Sit-and-Stay, and put the rest of the treats in the room beyond. Walk around with the dog and praise him as he finds each treat.
As your dog improves at the game, gradually increase the difficulty:
- Stop accompanying the dog, so he has to find the treats by himself.
- Use harder hiding spaces: put the treats into tighter corners, places where the dog can only squeeze in from on direction, under a cushion he has to move to get the treat, just inside of a closet door left ajar that he has to nose open, etc.
- Hide the treats over a wider expanse of rooms, until the dog has to go through every room of the house — each with just one treat in it! — to complete the game.
- When you have visitors, show them how the game works, and ask them to hide some of the treats.
My Mommy and Daddy play this game with me every night, during a little break in their TV-watching. If they forget, I sit and stare at my treat jar to remind them!