Ep. 117: Is the Issue Scent Work Related?

It is interesting how when it comes to Scent Work, everything is seemingly viewed through the lens of the dog's ability to hunt and source their hides. If something doesn't go well, that means we must do more searches, right?

In this episode, we discuss how there are so many skills a dog, handler and team need to be successful in Scent Work, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with hunting or odor! Thus, there are times drilling more searches may be the last thing we want to do.

Speaker:

Dianna L. Santos

There were several resources mentioned in this podcast episode, be certain to check them all out:

• Conquering Competition Stress Webinar by Michael McManus
• Car Crate Crazy Webinar with Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow
• Harnessing Joy Webinar with Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow
• The Floor is Lava Webinar with Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow
• Tackling NW3 Head-On: Conquering the Mind Game Webinar with Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow
• Fitness for the Life of Your Dog Webinar with Donna Morgan Murray
• Fitness Exercises for Your Puppy Webinar with Donna Morgan Murray
• Keeping Your Senior Dog Fit to Work and Play Webinar with Donna Morgan Murray
• Elevation Elation: Build and Use of Body Awareness Webinar with Vicky Lovejoy
• Shrinking Space = Success Webinar with Vicky Lovejoy
• Parkour to Benefit Nose Work Dogs Webinar with Lori Timberlake

TRANSCRIPT

Dianna L. Santos (00:00):
Welcome to the All About Scent Work Podcast. In this podcast, we talk about all things Scent Work that can include training tips, a behind scenes look of what your instructor or trial official may be going through, and much more. In this episode I'm going to be talking about is the issue that you are experiencing really related to Scent Work or is it something else? So before we start diving into the episode itself, let me do a very quick introduction of myself. My name is Dianna Santos. I'm the Owner and Lead Instructor of Scent Work University. This is an online dog training platform where we provide online courses, seminars, webinars, and eBooks that are all centered around Scent Work. So regardless of where you are in your sniffing journey, whether you're just getting started, you're looking to develop some more advanced skills, you're interested in competing or maybe you're already trialing even at the upper levels, we likely have a training solution for you. I should know a little bit more about me. Let's dive into the episode itself.

(00:58):
So in this episode, I wanted to talk about how we may be able to determine, is the issue that I'm having really related to Scent Work or is it something else? And this is a topic I've talked about before on the podcast, and I've been on kind of a, I don't know how to describe it, crusade, it's been a focus of mine in the types of training presentations and things I've been putting together and releasing for the last couple of years is that I think with Scent Work, we become extraordinarily focused on the hide and focused on odor. Everything is about those things. It's seemingly when in actuality it probably doesn't account for much. Let me help this try to make a little bit more sense. When we are tackling a search with our dogs, it's not as though we are working inside of some type of sterile environment, and it is only odor that is out there.

(02:09):
There's only Birch and the dog just has to find the highest concentration of Birch. That's not what's happening. The environments are so rich and there's so many other things going on, not just for other smells, but their sights and movements and sounds and novelty or lack of novelty, all kinds of good stuff. But even on top of that, you have your dog and everything can be in flux with them. How do they feel? Did they wake up on the wrong side of their bed? Do they have an upset tummy? Were they really tired from all the other stuff they did earlier in the day or earlier that week? Maybe they are over the moon. They're like, oh my God, I haven't done this in so long. Maybe they're really ramped. Maybe they're a little bit worried. Maybe they're not. I hope you're kind of seeing what I'm getting at here is that there's so many possible variables on top of does the dog actually have the skill to do the thing I'm asking them to do? Do they understand how to do the thing I'm asking them to do? Do I know what I'm asking my dog to do?

(03:21):
So there's so many things, and then of course there's us, right? Do I know what I'm supposed to be doing when I'm running this search? Do I have an idea of what my handling is saying to my dog, what my handling means to me? Why am I making the decisions I'm making? Do I know what decisions I'm making? It goes on and on and on. All of that to say the reason why Scent Work University exists is that Scent Work as an activity is much more involved than we give it credit. There are so many different variables and they all matter. Now, I think that that is true for almost every single dog sport, but with Scent Work in particular, we have something with the hide that we can really focus in on and just try to build everything around it. And I'm not entirely convinced that that's the best route to take.

(04:19):
Lemme try to help this make a little bit more sense. If we weren't doing Scent Work and we wanted our dog to do a behavior, let's say I wanted to teach my dog how to sit, training routines and knowledge and the way that we like to approach things as far as training is concerned, would dictate that I would be first teaching that inside a very familiar environment. That's not just because it's the way that we do things. There's a thought process behind it. There's a reason we want to reduce the amount of distractions that are possible for our dog to be like, oh, okay. I'm just going to go check out this bunny.

(05:01):
We want to ensure that they have the highest possibility of success. There isn't anything to distract them or worry them or concern them. They can focus on what we're doing, and we also can focus on what we're doing regardless of how silly we may look, we may fumble around or whatever. We can train in our pajamas. It doesn't matter. We're in the middle of our kitchen. We're in the middle of our living room, doesn't matter one bit. There's reasons why we do these things. When we're training, let's say a sit and we have an expectation as far as what that process is going to look like. Even someone who may not have a whole bunch of formal dog training expertise, more often than not, they're going to be pretty impressed when their dog does actually sit. He's like, wow, I made the dog sit. They did it when I asked.

(05:54):
That's amazing, right? I've seen this time and time in my career, whereas in magic, but then it's also an expectation that we're going to have to repeat this a little bit to make sure the dog understands the further and deeper into the dog training stuff you get. Okay, well, now I probably was offering some kind of lore. I'm going to want to fade that. I'm going to want to build in maybe a hand signal. Then I'm going to want to build in a verbal cue to reduce my hand signal. Any body cues I'm giving, then I want to generalize that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? All of that is happening inside of my living room, my kitchen, and once that's solid, I can ask my dog to sit and they can actually do it very quickly, very cleanly. There's no guesswork or anything.

(06:42):
It's really nice and snappy, right? I say, sit and that butt's on the ground and they're happy about it. They're like, this is the best. I put my butt on the ground and the two legged person gives me a cookie. Then I'm going to start doing some other things. Maybe I'm going to ask for them to hold onto their sit a little bit longer. We're building some duration. Maybe I'm going to be doing some other things. Maybe before I say the magical sit word, I'm going to be saying other nonsense to see if they throw the sit at me. No cookies happen. I only want it to happen with a sit. Then I'm going to be practicing in other rooms and I'm going to be practicing it in my front yard, my backyard, and all kinds of good stuff, right? When we're talking about that, we I think would understand that if I had started training my dog how to sit, and I was using a hand signal with my right hand, and my dog was like, yep, totally get it.

(07:39):
And I happened to break my wrist. So now my hand is inside of a cast. Maybe it's even in a sling. Now. I can't give that hand signal. I'm going to be fairly understanding to my dog that now at the very least, there's going to probably be some confusion because the thing that they were relying on for me to tell them, I'd like you to put the butt on the ground. I can't do, or I can't do the same way that I did. So I may want to go back a couple steps, or I may want to see if there's any way I can give them a better idea of what I mean. But there's going to be some understanding or forgiveness there that this isn't going to be as pretty and snappy as it was because something has changed. I slipped and fell on my face, broke my wrist.

(08:27):
What does this have to do with Scent Work? I think that we are able to make those kinds of observations in other contexts, but for some unknown reason, we have a very big difficulty doing that in Scent Work, and I think that's why we may have more issues than we probably should. We seem to think that dog is trained to find hide. Dog will find hide no matter what. And it's like, but why have we actually practiced it to be that way? Or is that just an assumption? And it very well could be that our dog understands what we would like for them to do, find hide, but they're also making calculations as far as, is it worth it for me to find the hide? And this is where people are like, but no, they're supposed to do what I tell them to do. But I'm talking about like, is it worth it?

(09:30):
Am I going to die to find that hide? I don't think that hide is worth me dying, or I'm going to have to work really, really, really, really hard to find that hide. And then nothing really great happens when I do. Maybe I have a cookie that's shoved down my throat that I didn't want to begin with, or my person's like, whatever. Come on, let's find another one. These are the things that I mean is that your dog may actually be really great as far as understanding odor. They may not need more reps to find odor. They may need something else to change, or they may need to work on something else entirely away from searching in order to have a better result in their searches. And that's I think the frustrating part about Scent. Work is the allure and the tendency for all of us to just zero in.

(10:29):
It must be about the hide when it very well may not be. So let me give you some examples. Let's say that my dog is tackling an exterior search. There are four hides and they are blind to me. I don't know where they are. And my dog is going around and we find one. I call Alert. I get a yes. Oh, phew. Great. We going along. Going along. We find another one. Alert. Yes. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Great. This is so exciting. Going along. We find a third Alert. Yes. Oh, we just got one more. We can do this. And we are searching and we are searching, and we are searching, and we are searching over and over and over and over again. Oh, it is painful. My blood pressure is through the roof. The dog is offering me all kinds of just displacement behaviors. It is not pretty.

(11:25):
And then they potty in the search area. Well, that stinks. Right Now I need to go practice on having my dog understand. We don't potty when we search. Okay, let's take 10,000 steps backwards and let's take a better view at this. We have four total hides inside the search area. This is a known number. This isn't as though as some kind of range. My dog successfully found three. We're saying this is training. So I'm working with somebody else who set the hides for me. I don't know where they are. They successfully found those three hides. I was visibly stressed the whole time that we're finding these three hides and relieved that we did barely, oh, thank God, that kind of thing. And then this fourth hide, we just seemed to be in there forever. But in reviewing my video, it actually wasn't that bad. It felt like five hours, but it was like another minute and a half maybe.

(12:30):
But that whole time, I was a stress case and my dog was offering all kinds of displacement behaviors. They were doing displacement sniffing where they weren't hunting for odor. Maybe they were munching on some grass. Maybe they were sitting and looking at me. Maybe they were looking for some shade. They're doing all these other things that are not searching, and then they pottied. And what happened when they pottied, we got out of that really super stressful search, and they got to go back inside of their crate, albeit probably not with a cookie, but still, but no longer in that pressure cooker of, Ugh, does that mean that I now need to do drills where we're working in potty areas? Probably not.

(13:20):
In reviewing that video, I want to see my dog successfully found those three hides, even though I was a stress case as a handler. What was that fourth hide? What was the difficulty level of that hide? Where was it located? Was I potentially keeping us in a certain part of the search area thinking that it must be over there when actually it was somewhere else entirely? Is this more something I have to work on as a handler of mental management, of maybe building up my confidence both in myself, of being able to properly read my dog and also to realize that a no is not the end of the world, particularly when I'm doing training, particularly if I'm working with someone who's not going to sit there and be like, ha, ha, ha, you're so stupid. Who's going to do that? Right? But these are the things we have to really think about is why do we get so upset and so worked up that affects our dogs and it kind of snowballs out of control.

(14:29):
So with that example, I can pretty much guarantee there's nothing really on the dog end from what I'm describing. This is a handler issue. So I need to work on designing searches with known hides that I can then narrate out what I see, and then video it, review the video, and to see what I actually noticed in real time. And is there anything that I missed? Build up my confidence that I can do this trust in my own skills and the skills of my dog and make it so that at the very same time follow some different exercises. Michael McManus has some wonderful ideas in his conquering competition stress webinar. As far as desensitizing, no, and even just for myself for training, it's not that big of a deal. I am never going to be perfect. No matter how hard I dry, I will always be very far from perfect, but no one is perfect.

(15:33):
You're going to get no sometimes, and sometimes they're well earned, like you just made a mistake. Maybe a blurred alerted that happens. Or maybe you know what you and your dog were right, but it just wasn't the kind of answer the judge was looking for in that moment. That's okay too. But what I'm trying to explain with this example is that doing a drill and potty areas probably isn't going to help. Stepping in as a handler and then showing every square inch of the search area, probably not going to help either, even if it was determined that, well, maybe that fourth hide was a little bit outside of the realm of the dog's capability, okay, then why don't we still work on two parallel paths for the dog? We're focusing on that in our training. We're going to have single hide searches working on that type of hide to make sure that we really do allow them to be set up to succeed.

(16:31):
But then I'm going to be working on a parallel path of working on my skills. I hope that makes sense. Another example that we could potentially give is dog is staging outside of a search area waiting to go in. And again, we're talking training. And as they are waiting there happily with their person, there's a big bang and they're kind of unsettled and their person's like, okay, come on, come on, come on, let's go. And then it's their charge of search, and the dog just can't. The dog is just, Nope, nope, nope, nope. And then finally, where the 30 seconds left, and much badgering and begging and pleading by the handler. The dog finds a hide and overboard reward. Reward, great. And then they get the dog out. Does this mean that we need to be doing searches? While there are very loud bangs going on all around the search area, please don't.

(17:33):
I would hope that that training run was videoed so that you would be able to see if the dog did find the hide, how did they find the hide? Did they actually find the hide or did the handler show them where the hide was? Did they trip over the hide and kind of be like, oh yeah, there's odor. God, can I get out of here now? That kind of thing. That's not great. We don't want to be doing that either. So in this situation, I don't think this is a searching problem. I think this is an environment problem. This is a confidence problem that we can work on outside of Scent, Work and should all together. I don't want to poison the dog's opinion about odor ever. If I can avoid it. And I also don't want to conflate for myself what it looks like when my dog is confidently hunting and tackling a search, and they're just kind of like, okay, I think I'm safe in here.

(18:29):
Maybe I'm not sure. Am I safe in here? Those are two different things. So I would completely, outside of Scent Work altogether, work a whole bunch on exposure sessions, confidence building exercises. Again, working incrementally up with sounds. And then once the dog was like, oh, yeah, I don't really care about that anymore, great. Then maybe we can incorporate lower sounds again with the search and then go from there. But I don't think that you can just jump to, oh, the dog just can't search Again. If the dog thought that they were going to die, I don't think it's fair for us to expect them to be searching again. We're playing a game, so it's not a fair expectation for us to have of our dogs. We are their teammate, and we have to determine what's going to be best to keep them safe. So another example is dog is working an interior search, and they're working, working, working.

(19:30):
Clearly they're focused clearly, they understand odor. They're not asking questions for their person. They're going around there. They found a few hides already, rock stars, and then they start working a hide that clearly they believe is up, they believe it's elevated, and they're just kind of doing this back and forth and back and forth. They're kind of bracketing it, and then they just kind of leave. And again, this is training where the hide is, and you're like, excuse you. Do you want to tell me about this? Hide? And so you bring him back, you bring him back over and over and over and over and over again, and they say, no, what? We need to work more in elevation. Clearly we've got to work more in elevation. I would argue the dog knew where the hide was even roughly. They understood odor. They had good odor obedience for the most part, but they were having difficulty with the communication piece.

(20:29):
Why could that have been a body awareness issue? Could that have been a strength issue? Maybe they were weak in their backend. So the whole concept of trying to put all that weight on their backend to potentially lift their front end up to maybe put their up onto something is just out of the question. They're like, I physically can't do that. Or maybe they think they're not supposed to. This example I wanted to bring up, because our dogs aren't required to put their feet up on things in Scent. Work, I have a 24 pound little terrier right now. He finds six and eight foot hides when we're training all the time. He doesn't sprout wings and suddenly fly up. He will have four feet on the ground and look at it, and as I'm walking in, he'll then start bouncing and be like, is up there, is up there.

(21:20):
But that's about it. Your dog never needs to seek kite, but they may feel like they have to, but they don't know how or they may feel conflicted. I'm not supposed to put my paws up on things, but am I supposed to put my paw up on here, but I don't know what I'm supposed to, I don't want to get in trouble. What am I supposed to do? It's not about the odor. They understand the odor piece. They don't know how to do that last part, so we would want to take that out all together. There's a couple of different ways we can do that if it is actually a strength issue. Canine fitness exercises, Donna Morgan Murray put together some really excellent webinars for us. Vicki Lovejoy also did a webinar for us talking specifically about this, of how we can help our dogs understand how they could develop some more strength and confidence with elevation and Lori.

(22:08):
Timberlake just did a webinar for us talking about how we would be able to do canine parkour in order to help benefit our dogs. Those things don't have anything to do with hunting. I hope that makes sense. These are skills the dog needs in order to effectively hunt, but they understand about the odor. They need these other skills to do that. I hope that makes sense. So we could go on and on and on. There's so many different examples, but when I'm trying to urge you to think about is if I'm noticing an issue in my search, whether it's training or trialing, is it really about the odor? Is it really about the search? Is it really about the hunt or could it be something else? Could it be the dog's confidence in the space? Could it be that the dog has never been exposed to that type of space or situation before?

(23:04):
Have they really done a bunch of field trip searches or have they only ever done searches in familiar places and now they're in this new spot and going, wow, this is all a lot, and it doesn't have to be something they're worried about? An example that I had was I was doing a trial with my boy Valor, who was so forgiving of me, and we were doing a buried search outside and within view were people playing soccer. And he was like, oh my God, I want the ball. I had never practiced in places in view of fields of sport fields. Well, there you go. We have not worked on that at all. I don't think. Not only would we didn't do well with our search, I don't think I would've done well with any of the other training I've done with him tricks, healing, anything.

(23:55):
He was so enamored by that soccer ball and those people running around and he wanted to go be in the middle of all of it. I think that if we take it out of Scent Work and we put it into something else, if I were to set up an agility course in the middle of that parking lot and asked him to do jumps, he would've been like, I'm going to go see the ball. Now. If I had suddenly decided I wanted to do an obedience routine, he would've not done any of the things that I asked him to do because he'd be focused on the ball. And I think in those situations when we're not focusing on a hide, we can recognize it easier and then say, I need to do more exposure sessions here. I need to do more training here. I need to do more practice.

(24:39):
Where the dog can just kind of say, oh, you know what? That's not that big of a deal. Or they can say that's going on, but I really want to do whatever my person wants me to do when we do stuff together. That's really fun, that kind of thing. But drilling the search was not going to fix that problem. If anything, I could have ruined searching because he could have gotten very frustrated that he just wanted to get the soccer ball, just let me go get the soccer ball, but there's always this damn hide thing that you're throwing in my face. I hate hides. That will be really bad. So I hope that kind of makes sense. Again, this is not exhaustive by any stretch, and this is why we offer many of the different kinds of presentations and webinars and things that we do.

(25:30):
I'm sure there's lots of times people are like, why on earth are you scheduling that? I don't need to know about slippery floors or harnesses or car crates or environment stuff or whatever. It's because we do, and your dog is more likely than not amazing when it comes to hunting and searching. It's all this other stuff that they may be lacking. And honestly, I think that that's true for almost all dog sports is that they're really good at specific parts, but there are so many parts that go into that activity, and we're just laser focused on individual things, but we're not having a very well-rounded approach, if that makes sense. The next time that you're doing training or trialing, please video, video, video, video and make a list. What went well, what didn't go well, and then just stop and think what is actually related to searching?

(26:34):
That didn't go well, but are there other skills, other things that maybe they were contributing to why I didn't go as well as I would've hoped, and what can I do to build on those things? I'll end with this equipment. Equipment is huge. That's why we had Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow offer their Harnessing Joy Webinar for us. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen teams try to do searches, and the dog is clearly, they understand odor. They are probably a fantastic hunter, but my God, they are fighting against that harness because it's not comfortable. They don't like it, and they haven't been acclimated to it, and it disrupts the whole flow. Their searches are slow and disjointed. There's displacement, sniffing, and displacement behaviors and all kinds of stuff. The handler's really super frustrated, which makes it even worse. So they practice more Scent Work, it's like, no, it's the harness.

(27:40):
So having had dogs who needed to wear harnesses, my valor had very bad arthritis in his neck. He had to wear a harness. We worked on acclimation, and I was watching some older videos recently, and there were times when he would absolutely still do a shake off in the middle of a search, and I can almost guarantee you it was because of the harness, because he didn't do shake offs a whole lot when he was wearing just a collar. So that's something else to keep in mind. The point being is that it's not that harnesses are evil. They're not, is that the harnesses are bad. They're not. But I think skipping over those parts of getting the dog to first of all make certain that the harness is appropriate for our dog, that our dog accepts it, that our dog is okay in it, and then they're able to do other things in it, then we can use it for our searches. That's all important stuff. It's not that. It's not as though this is like, oh, you're just trying to slow us down. No, you're going to need this anyway. You probably should be doing it so that it's not something that's detracting from your ability as a team to tackle these searches. I hope I'm kind of making some sense.

(28:56):
Yes, we do need to show our dogs as many different types of odor puzzles as possible. They do need to do lots of searches, both in familiar locations and field trip locations. There's lots of skills that they can build just for searching. There's a ton of skills that we have to develop as handlers, being able to read our dogs, handle our dogs when we're practicing, being able to design our search areas. It's a lot. We have a lot to learn and a lot of things to improve upon on both ends of the leash, but there's a whole bunch of other things that don't have anything to do with searching that affect searching almost directly, and if you have all that solid, then searching is that much easier. It's just something to chew on.

(29:40):
But as always, we'd love to hear from you. We'll be posting this episode up on our website as well as our social media, so if you have any questions or commas, you're always welcome to post those there. I did mention that Lori Timberlake just did a webinar for us. It's very good. I highly recommend that you guys check it out if you haven't already. It is the Parkour Benefits Nose Work Dogs Webinar. Again, parkour is fantastic. Cannot recommend it enough, so I'll make certain that there are links inside of the replay page for that as well. I'll also include the bunch of different webinars that Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow did for us about harnesses and car crates and getting our dogs acclimated to slippery floors. They also did one talking about the mental management game for NW3. It put together some really great presentations for us.

(30:29):
I'll also include a link from Michael McManus Conquering Competition Stress. It is very, very good. So I encourage everyone to check those out. They're really fantastic resources, but if there's something else in particular that you are interested in, they'd be like, you know what? This podcast got me thinking. I'm wondering what it is outside of the hide or searching that my dog needs to work on. In order for our searches to be better, let me know. Again, you can contact me directly at dianna@scentworku.com, or you can again post a comment on our post for this episode or on our social media. I want to make certain that we're offering through Scent Work University what you guys need. So by all means, please do not hesitate to contact me. I'll then work with our instructors to get that created for you. But thank you very much for listening. We really do appreciate it. Please give a cookie to your puppies for me happy training. We look forward to seeing you soon.