Your AKC Scent Work Reports
The American Kennel Club recently announced the date for the first ever AKC Scent Work Master National Championship event — October 12-14, 2025, at the Roberts Center in Wilmington, DE. As of this post (June 14, 2025), the Premium has been posted. The event is limited to 400 entrants, with a first-come-first-serve entry, both USPS …
Our story so far: After years of listening to vigorous discussion about ways people would like to see AKC Scent Work grow but not seeing any real action to effect change, Dave Schneider contacted me in February of 2025. He suggested we create a survey for participants to identify the elements that the community most …
From April 5-11, 2025, Dave and Deb Schneider and I hosted a survey to ask stakeholders what changes they’d like to see in AKC Scent Work. It was completely unofficial with no AKC involvement at all. We posted the link to the “Friends of AKC Scent Work” and WeSmellBetter Facebook groups and asked people to …
As I read the Facebook posts of folks from around the country, I’m always surprised at how different experiences can be depending on where you are trialing. I’ve never used anything but regular mail to enter a Scent Work trial, and I think I may been waitlisted or told the trial was already full 3 …
It’s not uncommon for someone to post to “Friends of AKC Scent Work” or “AKC Scent Work Trial Chairs and Secretaries” groups to ask about software options available for trial entry, trial management or run order/queue management. That, along with the current challenges facing the US Post Office, inspired me to try to pull together …
Doug has been working for several months on some enhancements and finally drew a circle around what he’d done so far and said “ship it.” If you’ve ever been a project manager, you know how… ‘risky’ it can be to tell a creator to go nuts without providing any kind of timeline or scope to …
Our goal at WeSmellBetter is to accurately capture the publicly published results of AKC Scent Work trials and compile and report that information in ways that are useful and interesting to the participants. It is our firm belief that our database accurately reflects the data from the published results within these timeframes: We collect and …
The most frequently asked questions we get is “why doesn’t my dog’s name reflect all their titles in the WeSmellBetter reports?” So let’s talk about that. Our goal at WeSmellBetter is to always have our data match the published AKC Results data. Whenever anyone writes that something in our reports is “wrong,” we investigate that …
I hope to occasionally post some useful “overall” data. This is a start, looking at things from 2017-2024. Largest Classes (All Years) Gosh, how about the West Coast, eh? Largest Trial By Year
We love nosework. It is our dog sport. We are grateful to have the AKC version. But there are things about AKC Scent Work that could be improved. Not all of those are under the control of the American Kennel Club, but some of them are. The AKC …