“I Train Puppies to Sniff out Truffles at a Luxury Resort and Farm. They Cost $8,500 and We Only Sell Them to Guests—Here’s What My Job Is Like”, 2021-09-19 ():
Jim Sanford, 67, works as a Lagotto Romagnolo dog trainer at the Blackberry Farm resort in Tennessee.
He trains the Italian breed to hunt locally grown black Périgord truffles, which can sell for over $1,000 a pound.
This is what his job is like, as told to freelance writer Rebecca Treon.
…At 33, I married a librarian, who never had much use for an elephant. When we returned to the states I came to Knoxville, Tennessee to put two African Elephants through charm school. By the end of that, my son was in school and I had to find something else to do, so I found Blackberry Farm, a 4,200-acre resort and hotel in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.
I’d never worked at a place like the Farm before. I started doing groundskeeping there in 1999. I soon started a fly-fishing program, followed by a horse program, and then added sheep and chickens.
In 2007, Sam Beall, the owner, asked if I could teach a dog to find a truffle. I told him, “I can teach a dog to find anything.” We decided to start a Lagotto Romagnolo program and got our first dogs, Tom and Lussi; he was 5-years-old and she was a puppy. I started with both of them from square one and trained them to find truffles.
Training a dog to hunt truffles uses the same technique as any scent work, including search and rescue…Truffles have a very particular odor when they are mature, and you imprint that scent to the dog and reward them for finding it. It’s quite simple and straightforward…We train our dogs to locate the truffle by scent but when they find it, we don’t want them to damage the truffle. The truffles grow several inches below the surface so once the dogs start digging, I immediately call them off, go to the spot, and carefully dig up the truffle. It works quite well.
Once we got Tom and Lussi trained, we harvested more than 200 pounds in just a few months. We harvested truffles from a farm about 100 miles from us.
…I get my dogs from one Lagotto Romagnolo breeder in Italy. Currently, we have two males and 6 females. We sell the puppies exclusively to guests of Blackberry Farm. We now have 4 litters a year with 6–8 puppies per litter. We’ve had about 300 puppies born at Blackberry Farm. They’re a medium-sized, hypoallergenic dog. Most are pets, only about two of the dogs that have gone to guest families are used for truffle hunting.