Learn to hunt truffles with your dog
with Kristin Rosenbach
Hi, I’m Kristin
I’m here to guide you in one of the most rewarding partnerships you’ll ever build.
The truffles are just the beginning.
Truffle Dog School
Truffle Dog School is designed to meet you exactly where you are in your learning journey. From beginners to professional dog trainers, get the guidance you need to succeed in truffle hunting with your dog. For 16+ years, my relationship-focused approach has guided hundreds of students worldwide, helping teams grow from first finds to trusted hunting companions.
Each path is designed to take you from beginner to truffle hunter.
Online Course
The ONLY comprehensive online truffle dog training course
- Detailed training, from start to finish
- Downloadable homework plans
- Lifetime access with 10+ hours of video
- Online support thread inside
- Course improvements and updates
- Priority scheduling for private lessons
VIP Coaching
Online coaching membership for all levels of truffle dog teams
- Access to the full online course
- Monthly coaching calls with Kristin
- Special topic sessions and webinars
- Growing resource library
- Access to past recordings dating back to January 2025
- Substack Community subscription
Best value
Private Lessons
Take support to the next level and work exclusively with Kristin
- In-person instruction in Arlington WA
- Virtual options available
- Truffles provided for all in-person lessons
- Fully customized truffle dog training program
- Substack Community for packages of 4 or more lessons
- Hybrid options available
Join my newsletter and I’ll send you a free 30-minute video about how to start truffle hunting with your dog.
Client testimonials
Articles
I write about truffle hunting, forest stewardship, and the partnership between people and their dogs in the forests they share. My writing goes beyond technique to the questions that shape how we hunt: how to care for the land, how to listen to our dogs, and what it means to work together.
What Happens to the Forest When We Love a Place to Death
A widely-known truffle hunting site near me has been loved to death. This is about what’s actually happening underground and what responsible hunters need to do differently.
What Transfers From Nose Work to Truffle Hunting: And What Doesn’t
If you come to truffle hunting with a nose work background, you’ve already done some important work. Here are the differences you need to know.
Work With Kristin
Truffle hunting isn’t something you teach your dog. It’s something you learn together. Here’s what guides every lesson, course, and coaching session. Real expertise, a gentle approach, and a partnership that lasts well beyond the hunt.
Learn
from the
“Trainer of Trainers”
Kristin has been pioneering truffle dog training in the PNW for 16+ years. She founded 3 businesses, developed curriculum for 4 leading dog training programs, and had others model their own programs after hers.
Grounded in
Partnership
“It’s just a truffle”
Through Kristin’s genuine, gentle, and meaningful approach to teaching humans and dogs, her words, having been quoted for many years now, will remind you…”It’s not about the truffle. It’s about you and your dog.”
Connection, Communication and Cooperation
Having continually revised her curriculum over more than a decade, these three pillars have emerged as the foundational building blocks for a lasting and rewarding truffle hunting partnership shared with your dog now and for years to come.
Follow on social media for tips
Latest Instagram Posts
If you’ve come to truffle hunting from nose work — or you’re thinking about it — this is for you.
Nose work builds real skills. A dog that hunts purposefully. A handler who knows how to watch. That foundation matters and it transfers.
But some of what nose work builds works against you in the field. The visual anchors aren’t there. The judge isn’t there. The boundaries aren’t there. And some of the handler habits that earn you ribbons in competition are exactly the habits that get in the way when the dog is trying to work a live target underground with no one to confirm the find but you.
Truffle hunting isn’t a harder version of nose work. It’s a different activity that asks something different of both you and your dog.
I wrote about what transfers, what doesn’t, and what that means for teams making the transition. Link in bio.
📷 Wyatt — a dog who does both — photo courtesy of Heather Ringwood / @happydoginstitute
#nosework #trufflehunting #truffledog #scentwork #scentdetection
Sixteen years of truffle hunting. Five dogs. And today was the first time a stranger has ever asked me if I needed rescuing.
(To be fair, I was on my hands and knees on the forest floor at the time. Reasonable question.)
Today didn`t go the way I expected, in almost every way a hunt can not go as expected: new site, a dog who needed time to settle into it, an interruption I didn`t see coming, and a very aroused dog who needed real time to come back down. What it turned into was one of the more useful days Shadow and I have had together — and it taught me something about my own habits I didn`t know after sixteen years of doing this.
Full story is up now. Link in bio. 🍄🐾
#truffledogtraining #belgiansheepdog #belgiangroenendael #trufflehunting #pacificnorthwest
Finding wild truffles with your dog is an act of reciprocity. The forest offers something extraordinary. We bring attention, patience, and a dog whose nose can read what we cannot. What we owe in return is care.
Wild truffle hunting lives in the space where the dog’s world and the forest’s world overlap — underground, invisible, governed by relationships between trees and fungi that took decades to form. To enter that space well, you need to understand dogs. And you need to understand nature. Both. And right now, as this practice grows, that second piece isn’t always part of what’s being taught.
The forests that make this possible are not infinite. What grows beneath our feet is ancient and delicate and irreplaceable in any single lifetime.
I put together a free stewardship guide for anyone who wants to enter these places as a guest worthy of the invitation.
Link in bio.
#truffledog #truffledogtraining #forestecology #trufflehunting #scentdetection
Happy Earth Day. 🌱
If you hunt truffles with your dog, today feels like a good day to talk about what we owe the forests we love.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about site stewardship — the practices that protect the ecosystems we depend on and the ones that quietly damage them even when we mean well. That article is still there if you haven`t read it.
Today I`m making the student quick reference guide available as a free download — a practical one-pager you can keep, share, or bring into your own teaching.
Both links in bio.
#truffledog #truffledogtraining #earthday #sitestewardship #forestethics #trufflehunting
Shadow found his first site this week. I named it after him.
If you saw our recent acclimation walk reel, this is what that kind of work leads to. I wrote about what happened in the forest — the find, the restraint it took to get there, and what it taught me about trust and the partnership that builds in places you`ve never been before.
New essay on Substack. Link in bio or copy here:
kristinrosenbach.substack.com/p/shadows-reach
#truffledog #truffledogtraining #workingdog #belgiangroenendael #trufflehunting
We didn’t find a truffle today – and that was the whole point.
This was an acclimation walk near a site I plan to hunt in the future. Shadow wore his everyday gear, we walked the trail, and when he chose to take me off it I followed. No ask, no cue. Just paying attention to what he wanted to show me.
The terrain is challenging – low branches, downed trees, dense ground obstacles. I needed to see how we’d move through it together before asking him to work here.
He was focused enough that I reached to unclip his leash and stopped myself. That moment of interruption would have cost more than the leash was worth.
A successful outing doesn’t always end with a truffle. Sometimes it ends with information.
#truffledog #truffledogtraining #trufflehunting #workingdog #dogtraining
Shadow has already found truffles in the wild — but that doesn’t mean training stops.
For this session I set up a blind search in a field we’ve worked in before, choosing it specifically because the underground activity mimics conditions at one of our more challenging future hunting sites.
Real distractions.
Deliberate variables.
A training scenario designed to prepare him for what’s ahead.
He searched, located the dig site, gave me his invitation, and we harvested together. Four times. In 37 degrees and rain.
This is what intentional training looks like.
#truffledog #truffledogtraining #workingdog #dogtraining #detectiondog
What does your dog’s invitation look like?
Something has been weighing on me for a long time, and I finally wrote about it.
There`s a truffle hunting site I used to love. I stopped going when it became widely known. Recently a former student told me the undergrowth is almost entirely gone. Trampled. Bare. Holes left open across the ground.
We talk a lot about what rakers do to truffle sites. But we don`t talk nearly enough about what we do – when we keep returning to the same widely-known location, season after season, and treat it like it has no limit.
The forest doesn`t care whether it was a rake or a boot. The damage has the same name.
Full essay linked in bio.
#truffledog #truffledogtraining #trufflehunting #workingdog #detectiondog
