Casey

I am a passionate animal lover, dog trainer, and scentwork nerd. I am very fortunate to have had great fun, and great success in training and competition. I started competing in animal sports with alpacas in the early ‘00s. I encourage all dog trainers to take a crack at training a less biddable animal— once you can train an alpaca, you can train anything.

I cannot speak about my experience without highlighting my dogs:

Prim

Prim is my best little partner, and has won many high in trial, high combined, and achieved her Master scentwork titles as well as “Detective”. In October, we flew to Ohio to attend the inaugural AKC Scentwork Master National, at which we were finalists. Prim has overcome much and is the poster child for the benefits of scentwork in our complex and senior dogs. She is a high octane dog who needs an outlet, even in her senior years. I am forever thankful to scentwork for helping me catch health issues proactively. Any time she started suddenly struggling in searches, I was able to quickly do a vet workup and get ahead of any issues. She now has a titanium knee, is short a triceps, and has gel foam in her spine, but she still brings her whole heart to searching.

Rhea

Rhea is a methodical, thoughtful searcher and incredible scentwork dog. Her style is “slow fast”— she doesn’t look like she’s moving particularly expeditiously, but if you time her against “fast” looking dogs, she keeps up with her efficiency! Rhea taught me about “differently motivated” dogs and cultivating love for the game without having an easy reward mechanism. Rhea proves that even with indifference to food and toys, you can be successful in this sport. She achieved her Detective title in just 13 runs, with many placements, including one where she was the only dog out of 26 to qualify. She made breed history becoming the first and only poodle of all varieties to achieve the highest handler discrimination title “HD Master Elite.” At only three years old, Rhea has an exciting career ahead of her!