The First Minnesota ELT-S Trial, Elite-Select

The first ELT-S Trial (Elite Select) in Minnesota was Sunday, and I was lucky enough to get one of the twenty spots. This is new in NACSW Nose Work and has only been available for a couple months. The trial was at the Richfield Middle School.It is a half day trial with Elite type searches, but smaller areas and shorter time limits. There are no formal placements and in order to get an ELT-S Title you need to accumulate 350 points. Each trial has a maximum of 100 points. Each search has its own time and number of hides parameters. We had four searches:

1. Cafeteria – 3 minutes, unknown number of hides
2. Bandroom – 3 minutes, unknown number of hides
3. Lobby – 1:30, 1 – 3 hides
4. Art Room – 2 minutes, 2 hides

My day started in the cafeteria where I found one hide. Mom felt like we missed one, but I didn’t find anything else. It turned out that there were three but we missed two. Most dogs missed one or two in that search.

Next we went to the bandroom where I found five hides. This was the most fun search of the day. In the video, you will see soccer dots on the floor here and there. They mark out of bounds areas, where breakable things are located. You may also wonder why Mom wears a timer. Well, this search is an ideal example. Although the official timer person will give a thirty second warning before the time is up, sometimes I may be working on something. By having our own timer which Mom starts right before we start our search, we can use almost every last second if need be. If you “time out”, you lose points, so it is best to not do that. I did great in this search and only six of the twenty dogs found all the hides! Mom also had a feeling there was a hide in the cabinet. She was super happy when I started to work that hide at the end.

Our third search of the day was the lobby. This was really nice because it was a high hide. I have a lot of trouble with high hides and we have been practicing at home. It must have helped some. There was only the one hide and Mom called finished and we ended up getting first place in that search.

The last search of the day was the art room where we had two minutes to find two hides. I had trouble finding the second one but I did find it in time.

At the end of the day, I placed fourth out of the twenty dogs, finding nine of the eleven hides, and I have 81.8118 points towards my 350 points needed for a title. We had a great time sniffing at our first ELT-S Trial and we are looking forward to entering another one. This was my last trial for 2023, so now we will be working on problem areas to prepare for 2024.

My GBGV Life is happy, so we’re joining Comedy Plus for Happy Tuesday!