Vehicle Searches
No space to train? No time to set up training sessions? Vehicle searches solve your problems. Compact, instant searches to keep your dog busy.
Enrol on Course
Nowhere to train? No time to set up searches? Keep your dog busy and engaged with vehicle searches. Instant, compact but interesting search areas that travel with you!
Search specific skills are a great way to add to your scentwork skillset and have even more fun working with your dog. Vehicle searches provide a great first outdoor search for your dog. And help you learn how to read your dog. As the air movement around the vehicles changes the scent picture, so you will learn how best to respond to your dog.
This course will teach you and your dog how to search vehicles systematically, safely and successfully. Learning the search plan on a car allows you to search any vehicle, and gives your dog more opportunities to have fun sniffing in new and unexpected search areas. As a handler, being in the right place at the right time can make or break a search. So get rid of the guesswork and learn how to get it right from the start. Watch me walk you through each part of the vehicle search, explaining everything as I go. Graded quizzes ensure you get the best from the course, and on completion you will receive a graduation certificate.
An remember, the huge benefit in searching vehicles is that you can do it wherever you may be. You don't need lots of equipment or space. You just need your car, your dog, some scented articles and off you go!
Course Curriculum
Keep your dog busy and engaged no matter where you go. Vehicle searches open up more opportunities for you and your dog to experience the thrill of scentwork, wherever you travel.
This is a Core course, Next Steps level, so work through our Teach your dog to sniff!, Puppy Scentwork or Senior Scentwork course first. And if you have learned how to do directed searches on our Scentwork Skills course, you will gain even more.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Your Instructor
As a professional dog trainer for 30+ years, I have used scentwork to help thousands of dogs work with their owners to be more attentive, less reactive, more relaxed, less agitated. As a universal skill that can be learned by all dogs and all owners, the flexibility, fast results and good old fashioned fun found in scentwork led me to form Talking Dogs Scentwork® in 2011.
Since then I've been working hard to keep up with demand, such is the interest in scentwork. I work hard to stay at the forefront of my profession, staying creative, pushing boundaries and confounding expectations of what pet dogs can do. As the first national provider of scentwork training for non-selected (pet) dogs in Great Britain, TDS has quickly grown into the go-to scentwork training provider, with the TDS Detector Dog manual proving more popular than I could have ever imagined, selling well all over the world, but particularly in the UK, Europe and USA. I specialise in teaching all breed types, all ages, all abilities (physical, mental and emotional) Combining my years as a professional drug detector dog handler for HM Customs with my experience as a pet dog training and behaviour consultant, I tailor my teaching to dogs who don't have jobs, those who have been selected as companions rather than tools of the trade.
I work full time teaching Talking Dogs Scentwork® at workshops. online, at conferences and with major organisations, including Dogs Trust, Puppy School, Victoria Stilwell and the prestigious Woof! Conference.
Some of my working highlights include:
- Drug Detector Dog Handler with HM Customs & Excise
- Sirius Puppy Trainer in association with Dr. Ian Dunbar
- Assistance Dog Trainer for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People
- Behaviourist for Wood Green Animal Shelters
- Founding & running Talking Dogs Scentwork®, part of Talking Dogs Ltd.
- Creating TD Rally® - a sport for pet dogs & their people