By Sally Underwood-Miller
The Great Barrington Kennel Club has been the only AKC member organization in the Berkshires since 1941. The club has hosted two all-breed Conformation shows a year since then, most recently the first weekend in February.
Finding a suitable venue for a dog event is always tricky. We’ve been at the Big E for many years now. It has plenty of parking, accommodates RVs, a convenient location and has lots of space, and nearby lodging and food.
In 2018 we held our first Scent Work trials open to all breeds and mix-breeds at the Big E in conjunction with the Conformation shows. We soon learned that was not ideal. One of the issues we face is lodging that will accept dogs and we wanted to be closer to home in a stand-alone site. Our first local trials were held at Camp Mah-Kee-Nac in Stockbridge. Sites often worry about having more than 100 dogs and what that might mean, but MKN soon learned that we leave a site cleaner than when we arrived, and that we are a happy easy to get-along-with group! Due to a conflict with MKN schedules, we now hold our fall trials at Camp Danbee in Peru, MA, MKN’s sister camp. Our experience with MKN lead us to a search for a new spring SW venue to replace the Big E. We came upon Eisner Camp in Great Barrington. Both these sites – Danbee and Eisner – provide wonderful and varied search areas, as well as lodging and meals for handlers with dogs.
Scent Work is a game played by a handler and dog team that is based on the kind of training one might do to ready a bomb or drug-sniffing dog for that task. Dogs have 100,000 times our ability to detect odor and can be trained to reliably find cancer, COVID, endangered species, invasive species (zebra mussels, lantern flies, etc.), identify low blood sugar in diabetic humans or an oncoming seizure, Search and Rescue, among many others.
Our competitors’ dogs search at five levels – Novice, Advanced, Excellent, Master and Detective, each level becoming more complex and involving more and different scents to search for (Birch, Anise, Clove and Cypress). The searches also vary with Containers, Interiors, Buried, and Exteriors. There is also a Handler Discrimination element where dogs find their handlers scent.
Our most recent trial at Eisner Camp featured all the weather the Berkshires could throw at us – high 80s and sunny Friday, perfect 70s Saturday and miserable, rainy, snow, cold 40s Sunday!
Friday’s 2 Detective trials are for the elite searchers, with 5-10 (unknown number) “hides”, in up to 15 minutes – judge’s choice- interior and exterior.
Saturday’s and Sunday’s classes are Novice through Master levels. We have five judges, a trial secretary who assembles the scores, and a myriad of volunteers, all necessary to hold a trial, and, of course, a Trial Chair who puts it all together
