Scent Detectives: Active Searches for Confidence and Connection

Strengthen your dog’s ability to navigate the world with more ease using rewarding, search based activities designed for sensitive or anxious dogs.

What Is Scentwork?

Scentwork, sometimes called nose work, is an enriching, low-pressure activity that allows your dog to use their extraordinary sense of smell to search for and identify specific odours. It taps into your dog’s natural way of exploring the world and gives them a purposeful outlet for sniffing, searching, and problem-solving. It’s suitable for all dogs, but particularly valuable for those who are anxious, overwhelmed, or reactive.

Scentwork provides both mental stimulation and emotional support, without the pressure of unpredictable social settings or overwhelming spaces. It allows your dog to build confidence, express natural behaviours, and engage in rewarding activity that feels safe and meaningful to them.

What Makes the Dog’s Nose So Powerful?

Your dog’s nose is extraordinary. While we see the world, they smell it, with detail, depth, and emotional relevance that we can’t begin to fully imagine.

Dogs have around 300 million scent receptors, compared to our 6 million.
Their sense of smell is believed to be 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than ours.
If scent were vision, what we can see at one-third of a mile, a dog could “see” clearly from over 3,000 miles away.

This incredible ability is why dogs can detect cancer, locate missing people, or alert to changes in human health. But it’s not just for working dogs. That same powerful sense of smell can be used to help your dog feel safe, engaged, and purposeful in everyday life. Through scentwork, your dog gets to use their brain and body in a natural, fulfilling way, turning everyday environments into confidence-building experiences.

How Scentwork Supports Emotional Change and Connection

Scentwork taps into the SEEKING system, your dog’s natural motivation for curiosity, learning, and purposeful engagement.

The SEEKING system is one of the brain’s primary emotional systems. It motivates exploration, engagement, and the desire to interact with the world in meaningful ways.

When your dog engages in scentwork, this system is activated in a safe and rewarding context. This helps release dopamine, a neurochemical linked to emotional wellbeing, focus, and motivation.

How Scentwork Can Help Sensitive Dogs

For sensitive, anxious, or overwhelmed dogs, this kind of emotional engagement can:

Shift focus away from negative emotional systems like FEAR or PANIC
Support nervous system regulation through purposeful, emotionally safe activity
Support your dog in developing a sense of agency and emotional safety
Encourage a more confident, optimistic outlook over time

About the Course

This eight-week, self-paced course gives you everything you need to start meaningful scentwork with your dog, using active searches that build focus, confidence, and connection.

Whether your dog is anxious, overwhelmed, reactive, or simply in need of purposeful engagement, this course offers a supportive way to meet their emotional needs through structured, rewarding search games.

You’ll learn how to:

Learn to set up active searches using safe, familiar spaces
Teach your dog a clear and consistent active indication
Create search patterns that support focus and regulation
Improve your ability to observe body language and recognise signs of emotional change
Use scentwork to support connection, confidence, and emotional resilience

Because the course is designed with sensitive dogs in mind, all activities are adaptable, achievable, and based on rewarding education and relationship-first learning.

You don’t need prior scentwork experience, just curiosity, a few basic materials, and a desire to support your dog in a new and meaningful way.

You can start right where you are and move at a pace that feels right for your dog, all within the comfort of your own home.

Ready to get started?

Join Scent Detectives: Active Searches today and support your dog with rewarding, confidence building scent games from the comfort of your home.