What is Nose-Centric™?

The Nose-Centric™ Dog Training system optimizes a dog’s natural behaviors, especially sniffing, to promote healing, recovery from fear, improve behavior, and reduce reactivity.

This method brings the dog’s sense of smell to the forefront of training and rehabilitation, from the overlooked to the forefront.  

After watching, studying, rehabilitating, and training dogs for 15 years, I have learned that utilizing a dog’s sense of smell can improve confidence, attentiveness, and positive behavior while reducing reactivity. We can also form deeper, trusting connections with our dogs by speaking their language of sniffing.

Here’s a brief demonstration of how the Nose-Centric methods helped a feral puppy.

The Nose-Centric™ Dog Training system is all about using a dog’s natural sniffing behavior as a reward. 

In humans, inhaling through the nose calms the vagus nervous system, helping to maintain a state of calm and prevent the activation of the fight-or-flight response, which is associated with stress hormones[i].

For dogs, sniffing can increase optimism and enhance their quality of life.[ii]  In mice, sniffing stimulates the release of dopamine, a key neurotransmitter in the brain's reward system, linked to motivation and exploration[iii]  Oddly, the olfactory system of a dog has not been studied much. 

However, in 2022, it was discovered that the olfactory pathways in dogs extend to various regions of their brains, much more extensively than humans’ olfactory systems, although scientists do not fully understand the significance of this connectivity.

Together, we'll identify the root causes of any concerns and pave the way for a happier, more harmonious relationship!

    • Improved trust, cooperation, and understanding between you and your dog by optimizing the dog’s natural behaviors, such as sniffing.

    • Reduces your dog’s fear and anxiety, even with severely fearful and feral dogs.

    • Teaches the dog to avoid conflict naturally.

    • You become more relevant to your dog.

    • Encourages your dog to remain in the thinking brain, rather than resorting to fight, flight, or freeze instincts.

    • Increases dopamine in the brain, which is naturally rewarding for your dog.

    • Decreases your dog’s reactivity and alarm barking.

  • By tapping into a dog’s amazing sense of smell, we can address behavior concerns at their root, rather than merely treating symptoms. Utilizing effective relationship-building methods, tools, and training techniques, alongside Nose-Centric methods, allows for a holistic approach to behavior improvement.

    It's about embracing the unique way our canine companions perceive the world and using it to guide them toward positive behavior.

    • Reducing fear and anxiety

    • Builds trust and connection between dog and human

    • Teaches the dog to avoid conflict by sniffing (a dog’s natural way to avoid conflict)

    • Improves attention on the handler

    • Reduces alarm barking

    • Reduces reactivity

  • Nose-Centric™ works great on its own, but can also be easily incorporated into more traditional training methods. If you can connect and build trust with a dog, a more cooperative, rewarding, and understanding relationship is easily achieved. I find it is best to start with Nose-Centric™ methods to “break the ice” and then move on to more obedience-based training to fine-tune behaviors. This benefits ALL dogs.

    For fearful and feral dogs, Nose-Centric™ methods are essential to help the dog overcome fearful behavior. Nose-Centric™ activities can be more fun and engaging for the human end of the leash, too.

    For Trainers - If you work with fearful or feral dogs, I can 99% guarantee this is not like any other training method you have experienced. The results will increase demand for your skills and improve results.

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It is an entirely different approach to training your dog.

    • Working with severely fearful and feral dogs compelled me to develop a method to reach these dogs and earn their trust, ultimately helping them become happy, well-adjusted human companions.

      Traditional training methods lack the ability to build a trusting relationship with these dogs, especially within a reasonable timeframe. With Nose-Centric methods, dogs show significant improvement in just three sessions. I quickly learned that applying Nose-Centric™ methods helps ALL dogs become more well-balanced.

  • No. Unlike “Sniffaris” or Nose-Work, where the handler is passive, Nose-Centric methods require the handler to be proactive in understanding a dog’s natural behaviors, including sniffing, to build trust and overcome behavioral concerns. Nose-Centric™ is also an entire system for building trust, utilizing guided routines, acknowledgment, and becoming a trusted partner to enhance your dog’s quality of life.

  • Yes, but not in the common way of thinking. A dog using their nose and belonging to a pro-social group is highly rewarding to dogs. I gauge how well the training is working by looking at the dog in front of me. If the dog is improving and happier to see me at the next session, what I am doing is working.

    • My version of positive training is based on the long game. The dogs I work with have experienced a significant improvement in welfare and quality of life. I consider that positive, and so does the dog. I put the least amount of stress possible on the dog. But for change to happen in any living creature, good stress (eustress) is a necessary component. If you avoid any stress in your life or your dog’s life, your life will stagnate. I am constantly putting good stress on myself by challenging my capabilities and learning more.

      Dogs are capable of much more than most training methods give them credit for. They are willing to change quickly to feel better. The dogs in my program learn that we will face challenges together as a team, according to their capabilities, and work together to succeed. Allowing a dog to languish in fear using slow and complicated training methods is inhumane, decreases dog welfare, and frankly, enables the dog to build fearful behavior habits, adding to the dog’s depression or anxiety.

Dogs thrive when they enjoy the outdoors and face challenges working with their human.

    • Scientifically speaking, reinforcement builds behaviors. But trust isn’t a behavior. It’s a state of mind. To build trust with a human or a dog, shallow rewards are not enough. Nose-Centric™ methods go deeper, beyond surface rewards, to build deep trust with your dog and with you in your dog.

      Additionally, many fearful and feral dogs are reluctant to accept food as a reward. Instead of waiting to start rehab until they will take food, Nose-Centric™ methods allow the dog to begin healing right away. The dog decides what is rewarding, and they always choose improvement, exercise, and walks, even if it is a little stressful at first.

      Dogs often find the bond with a human and praise more rewarding than foodor other dogs[i]. Dogs have evolved to cooperate with humans to survive more effectively.

      Training based solely on food rewards will backfire. As soon as the food is gone, the human has broken the contract they made with the dog, thereby breaking trust, and the dog won’t exhibit those behaviors.

      I use plenty of food reinforcement when teaching obedience and recall. I also use it for decreasing fears of specific things, such as slippery floors. But I do not rely on it to build a trusting relationship with the dog.

      A dog’s most valuable reward is living with a prosocial group that provides them with safety and a good quality of life. We are enough for our dogs to follow if we act trustworthy in the dog’s eyes.

  • Workshops, Online Courses, Consulting for Trainers, Private and Virtual Lessons, Social Media, What Dogs Have Taught Me Podcast

[i] Zaccaro, Andrea etal. Neural Correlates of Non-ordinary States of Consciousness in Pranayama Practitioners: The Role of Slow Nasal Breathing, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (2022)  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.803904

 

[ii] Duranton C, Horowitz A, Let me sniff! Nosework Induces Positive Judgment Bias in Pet Dogs, Applied Animal Behaviour Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2018.12.009

 

[iii] Johnson, Natalie et. Al. Sniffing is Initiated by the Actions of Dopamine on Ventral 1 Striatum Neuronsdoi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.19.581052

1.Peter F. Cook, Ashley Prichard, Mark Spivak, Gregory S. Berns, Awake canine fMRI predicts dogs’ preference for praise vs food, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 11, Issue 12, December 2016, Pages 1853–1862, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw102