Teaching "FIND" a good thinking game for your dog.  Dog must use nose instead of eyes to retrieve.  This can be a fun game for children to play "hide and seek" with the dog, or it can be a lesson on how to hunt or search for a hidden item.  I used a bag of rice and White Italian Truffle Oil.  Adrina will "find" a particular toy or find one of our dogs if it has run off.

I start indoors by teasing the dog with the object and getting her interested in it.  I give the object a name, in this case "truffle".  Adrina already loves to retrieve and bring objects back to us, so it was very easy to teach her this game.  I close her behind a door and then place the object where she can see it.  I let her out and go with her saying "find truffle".  As soon as she locates the object, I praise and treat her with a high-value treat.

Once she is competent at finding a partially hidden object, I move on to the next step, hiding the object under something in an easy to locate place.   In this case, I used the same rug but hid the object further out of sight.  Once she was 100% at finding the object in different places out of sight, we went on to the next step.  If she ever made a mistake and couldn't find it, we backed up to an easier step.  You always want to finish the game with a successful find.

Once Adrina was successful at finding the object in increasingly more difficult hidden places, we started training out of doors.  I repeated the indoor activity by just placing the object on top of the ground and walking with her near to the location.  Once she was finding the object outdoors with good result, I started by digging a small depression and setting the object in it.

I then made it more difficult by putting some dirt over the object and then with each success, covered it a bit more.  This photo shows where the object was completely covered and she is about to unearth it.  Each level of difficulty was rewarded with a very yummy treat.

This game can be taught with children where someone holds the dog and the other person goes away and hides partly behind something, partially visible.  The person hiding makes calling sounds to the dog while the person holding says "find Jennie or James".  When the dog goes to the hidden person, have lots of fun and treats.  Again, continue to make this game more and more difficult as the dog understands the word "find".