Leerburg / Dog Training Articles / Scent Work/Nosework / Nosework/Scent Work Essential Oils Go Rancid Over Time

Nosework/Scent Work Essential Oils Go Rancid Over Time

By Ed Frawley

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Leerburg has made and sold scent work kits since 2017. We have always offered refills for the small bottles (called DRAMS) for all four major scent work organizations. The information in this article is why we recently started to sell “essential oil refill kits for AKC, CKC, UKC, and NACSW training kits”. So rather than a customer having to buy one dram at a time, for just a few dollars more they can buy replacement drams full of oils for their entire kit.

Another part of the reason for us doing this is in the civilian dog sport community there is a misunderstanding about the shelf life of the oils used to train with.

We have learned a lot about essential oils over the years. What most people don’t understand is there are different shelf lives for each type of oil. In addition, there are different companies making oils with the same name. For example Birch, Cypress, and Anise all have different varieties, on top of that companies also sell blends of the various oils. To our dogs, they all smell different.

Unfortunately, there are well-intentioned trainers out there who pass along inaccurate information about your oils. For example, we have found some people saying that anise and fennel are the same. When in fact they are not. They both have a licorice smell but a dog can tell the difference. If you go to CHATGPT (AI on your computer) you will learn the difference. Your dog can tell the difference without having to use a computer.

The point here is that it is important to make sure you do your research and only use oils the organizations you choose to compete in require. People who are new to the sport need to be sure to get the correct training aides and they need to keep them pure. They also need to understand that over time oils will go bad, or rancid.

I went to the manufacturer's website for the products we sell and found the following shelf life listings for their oils. These times are based on keeping the oils in airtight containers in a cool, dry environment. No dog sport trainer consistently keeps their training kits in a cool, dry environment so these manufacturers' shelf-life numbers mean very little.

Below is what they listed for their oils.

Anise – 2 to 5 years
Birch- 1 to 2 years
Clove – up to 4 years
Cypress – 1 to 2 years
Wintergreen – up to 5 years
Pine – 2 to 3 years
Vetiver – 3 to 8 years

Every dog trainer has their training kits put together. When they go train they put scent in an odor box and go do their training session and when done they put their kit back in their training box, toss the kit in a training bag, and go out and run a training session. When done, that bag goes in the back seat of their hot car.

Once oils start to go rancid, they are not going to smell the same. In addition, if trainers scent a q-tip with an oil and use the same q-tip for multiple training sessions they are only kidding themselves because at some point (and who knows when) the oils are going to change their base odor.

This is especially true when trainers dip a Q-tip in the oil Vs using a small eye dropper to put one small drop on the end of the q-tip. For one thing, no one needs that much odor to train with. Secondly, if they reuse that q-tip in more training sessions the more likely there will be a chemical reaction and an odor change.

The new trainer that sees how small the eye dropper drop is and then thinks that if a little drop is good then dipping the q-tup in the bottle will be way better – is not good training. The bottom line is oils go rancid over time, which is why we are selling Scent Work REFILL KITS for each organization.

But the important thing for new trainers to do is every so often wash the odor boxes and eye droppers with dawn dish soap. This does not need to be done every week. I leave that up to the trainers.

There is another consideration that has recently come up for people that use 3-D printed odor boxes. When we opened our 3D lab in early 2020, we quickly learned that not all filaments are the same. Not even filament that’s labeled INDUSTRIAL. Some filaments gradually get soft and dissolve over time with certain oils. I can't count the number of filaments we went through before we got to the point we are at today. We have jars full of the various essential oils in our lab with odor boxes in them. Some for close to a year and the boxes are just fine.

One thing I want to make clear about our training kits. We don’t fill the dram bottles with oils until the orders are mailed out. In other words, we don’t have a bunch of kits made up with oils sitting on our warehouse shelves.

Dram Bottle -
Dropper application – around 65-75 uses
Dipped q-tip – around 20 to 30 uses

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About Author

Ed Frawley

Ed Frawley is the founder of Leerburg. He has been training dogs since the 1950s. For 30 years, Ed bred working bloodline German Shepherds and has produced over 350 litters. During this time, Ed began recording dog training videos and soon grew an interest in police service dogs. His narcotic dogs have been involved in over 1,000 narcotics searches resulting in hundreds of arrests in the state of Wisconsin. Ed now solely focuses on producing dog training courses with renowned dog trainers nationwide. If you want to learn more about Ed, read about his history here.