Ticks, Chicks, And Programming Tricks: Uncovering Your Ancient Code to Improve Your Scent Work Future

No other animal brain comes close to packing the prodigious pontificating power of a human brain. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, humans have created tools to make fire for warmth and safety, and rocket ships to launch ourselves into outer space. We’ve devised countless drugs to layer on top of our immune system, helping us to thwart everything from tetanus to COVID-19. Yet, for all of the crazy amazing concocting we’ve done across human history, we’re less bipedal genius and more cat walking all over a laptop – much of what we think and do is equivalent to keyboard gibberish. Not too long ago, the prescribed treatment for epilepsy involved cooking a strong man’s hair with a deer leg bone and turning it into a powder to be eaten before a full moon… explain that nonsense! As advanced as we think we’ve become, humans can’t seem to get an important truth through our thick skulls into our giant brains: Thinking power does not just separate us from other animals, it separates us from ourselves.

In their book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan tell the tale of how humans came to be human; cleverly constructing a word mirror with every page, reflecting a self-image back to the reader that’s far more accurate than the one he sees when he ducks into the bathroom to pick spinach from his teeth. From the opening chapters on the formation of the earth and the beginnings of life on the planet, to the chapter on Chimpanzee social structure, Sagan & Druyan’s book is not a celebration of human exceptionalism, it is a humbling reminder that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature.

For this post, we’ll focus in on chapter 9: ‘What Thin Partitions’. Opening with a few lines from Alexander Pope’s 1734 An Essay on Man, this chapter playfully dances with concepts of free will, consciousness, feelings and thoughts, poking holes in Pope’s already thin “partitions” separating man from animals. Despite the book being published in the early 1990’s, Sagan & Druyan’s ideas were well ahead of the times, their weaving of biology and philosophy strikingly relevant today. When they invoke the Darwinian notion that humans differ from other living things by degree not kind, the intended effect is powerful: we co-exist with non-human ancestors whom we have lost connection to, which means we’ve lost connection to ourselves.

In the age of the internet and global connectivity, we’ve increasingly drifted away from who we are, getting lost in a world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In the real world, intelligence is natural, and machines are made of cells and tissue. A wood tick is a simple “machine”, a human a “complex” one. Accepting that we’re all just squishy robots isn’t a let down, it’s a leg up. If we can peer into the code of our ancestors and find that code in ourselves, we might be able to use our amazing brains to upgrade our system – and, of course, improve our scent work performance!

A Bug In The Programming… of The Bug

Sagan & Druyan use part of the ‘Thin Partitions‘ chapter to explore how a “thinking-doing” program develops in a being and what its limitations are in the face of unexpected change. As detailed on pages 160-161: a wood tick climbs a tree or bush, waiting for the presence of butyric acid to waft up from beneath her (many mammals release this molecule), if she smells it, she lets go, hoping to land on the source of the butyric acid cloud. If she scores a hit, she forages around for bare skin and takes a bite, drinking up the host’s blood.

Oddly enough, the tick isn’t selecting for blood-filled hosts, just smelly, warm bodies. A footnote on page 161 describes an experiment where a tick, attracted by the scent of butyric acid, will land on a balloon filled with warm water, puncture it, and, “like an inept Dracula, gorge herself on tap water.” In this case, the tick is running her program, blissfully unaware that anything is wrong. The tick has no mechanism for cross-checking smell and fluid. She’s quite happily deluding and diluting herself.

Is the wood tick just a sucker that sucks at sucking? Or is the tick ticking off it’s programming to-do-list as intended?

Peek in on a mother goose tending to her nest of eggs and you’ll find that she vigilantly scans the area surrounding the nest for any signs of an errant egg. But, it’s not just a runaway egg she’ll roll back to the nest. Put a ping pong ball or a bottle near the nest and she’ll collect those, too! A goose is certainly a grander machine than a tick. Why the cooky childcare?

If we take a gander at humans, we’ll find signs of problematic programming, too. We can be totally fooled by a stick that looks like a snake, by a gps guide who tells us to turn into the ocean, or by a burger that’s not actually made of meat (Impossible Burger – you’d never know if you didn’t know). Tragically, we can’t tell a butt dial from a genuine phone call (hello? Steve? Can you hear me? I can hear you!). Under most conditions, we are the blissfully unaware tick, gorging ourselves on bloodless water, our brains on a problem-solving holiday.

Make Way for Nature’s Way

Why do living machines have such easily corrupted software? It comes down to the evolutionary pressures of natural life. The same goose who tries to hatch beer bottles (OMG! Is that how Goose Island beer is made!) also excels at identifying her goslings (not once mistaking them for a Ryan… Gosling), cross-checking their identities against numerous markers so as not to lose one or take on one from another mother (lest old mother Hubbard try to shake a few extra kids out of her shoe). Sagan & Druyan suggest that natural machines run two kinds of programming, they call the first kind “simple & rigid”. It’s responsible for the whackadoo behaviors we see in other animals, but try to ignore in ourselves (unless we can convince ourselves that only “stupid” people behave that way, and we’re not stupid).

In scent work we can see “simple & rigid” programming everywhere, starting with our desire to build a simple, predictable program with a small collection of objects and a single, nose-touchable odor source. Look at how many of us desperately want a clear, consistent indication on source from our dogs (spoiler alert, nearly everyone gets let down by this rigid programming to the tune of, “he’s never indicated like that before, so I didn’t call it”). Even at the advanced levels of the game, we run programs with major holes in them, evidenced by how often we handlers get it completely backwards and confidently call an area with odor clear, while endlessly searching a clear area, certain there’s odor. We’re like Fred Flintstone in a Tesla with a hole in the floor; we have super new technology (our big brain and capacity for thinking, learning, deciding), but we insist upon foot power, stubbornly proclaiming we’re having a yabba dabba doo old time.

The second kind of programming we meat-machines run is called “flexible and complex”. The goose runs that programming to identify her goslings, otherwise she’d become nature’s free daycare. Lucky for goose mamas, other waterfowl don’t try to sneak their eggs into goose nests, so the flexible and complex programming only runs once the eggs hatch. Some smaller birds aren’t so fortunate, needing to run security on their nests like a hot Vegas dance club on a Saturday night. And it’s all because of Cuckoos. These sultans of subterfuge sneak their eggs into the nests of other birds, hoping they won’t notice. The penalty for letting an egg into the nest that’s not on the guest list? Mom & pop have an extra, very hungry mouth to feed, which can lead to their own brood dying off. While it takes more time, energy, and focus to run flexible and complex programming, the birds who make the effort get to do the happy dance of species survival, the ones who don’t get to do the the extinction shuffle.

Oddly, we humans don’t run a lot of flexible and complex programming in our daily lives – or in our scent work lives. Simple programming persists, because it’s easy, it feels right, and if things do go wrong, you’re none the wiser – until you get a ‘no’ or find out you missed a hide. So, you can stick with what feels good, merely wishing for change each time a search goes south, or you can make a real effort to change. As Burgess Meredith said, “You can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled first.” This might be a good time for a bathroom break. Rewriting your programming is gonna take both hands!

The Cuckoo In The Coal Mine

Every scent work competitor knows someone or has been that someone who was in a trial where a particular hide (or two) did not get found by any dog & handler teams on that day (specifically, it didn’t get called by any handlers). When a hide goes uncalled by a large number of handlers, it’s almost always for lack of complex and flexible programming in the handler’s observational and decision-making scripts. Most handlers are wanting to run a program that involves observing a dog in a narrowly-defined, heightened state of focus, following the dog so long as he moves along objects and doesn’t go too far past boundaries, and waiting for the dog to predictably indicate a reasonably expected location for the hide. Like a goose gathering ping pong balls, or a tick guzzling water, most handlers have opted to ignore any information that does not fit their rigid script. Interestingly, most handlers will obsess over why their dogs didn’t find the hide, thinking mostly about ways to replace their dog’s complex script with a simple one to match their own. Spoiler alert: two simple scripts don’t find a complex hide.

At some point, most scent work folks confront and rationalize the value of “flexible and complex” programming. A dog & handler who can communicate and collaborate in real time can efficiently tackle even the most unusual of puzzles, like a low hide in the seam of a service door on the outside of a large brick building, where the wind is gusting against the building and forcing the odor up and away from the building, depositing it on to a basketball hoop post 20 feet away. In a scenario like this, the dog may pass right over the physical location of the hide and show no change of behavior; yet, he’ll continue along the wall, pause 10 or 15 feet past the hide and head out towards the post, where he exhibits a strong change, but appears unsatisfied or frustrated, ranging out further from the hide. As time goes by, the dog might maintain a vague connection to the area around the post, continuing to pass over the actual location of the hide with no changes, never showing sustained strong changes of behavior, or indicating. All the while, the handler is absorbing the dog’s behavior, patiently maintaining focus on the present moment. She knows not to try to make sense of what’s going on, but to continue to sense what’s going on. Together, dog and handler work to arrange seemingly random puzzle pieces of information, looking for what fits and what’s missing. Much more than a waiting game, this kind of challenge demands of the handler a mindset, energy, and body language that communicate what she believes her dog is telling her.

Watching a team operate with so much flexibility and complexity is either awe inspiring or awfully painful. Experiencing this kind of search as a handler tends to be just as polarizing. Our tendency to stick to a rigid and simple script and to ignore or reject dissonant data is deeply rooted in our dna. Take this example from page 165: A mother hen has a program to protect her chicks, but only if she hears their distressed cries. Put a crying chick in a soundproof jar and the hen can look right at her bawling brood without batting a beady eye. If you’re not immediately imagining a handler festooned with feathers, staring blankly at his wildly animated dog doing everything but “indicating” source, please imagine it now. Position the handler’s fists at his hips, his arms shaped like wings. Allow the handler’s head to twitch, bob and cock to one side. Marvel at the handler’s inability to see what his dog is doing. Wonder how on earth a hen can’t see her chick is distressed, or a handler can’t see his dog is communicating the location of source.

Moth-er F$@^%r! That Smarts!

Put a pane of glass somewhere unexpected and both moths and humans will smack right into it. Moths will immediately and compulsively repeat the behavior, battling quixotically with the glass to no avail. Humans (most of them) will forego the spastic glass dance-off, opting to think their way through – or around – the problem. Hooray for humans. We’re less spazzy than a moth…

What is it about glass that mystifies the creatures of earth? Glass is new. No hen ever encountered a scenario where nature just hit the mute button on her chick. So, most every hen wastes no time even considering the possibility that she will see her chick in distress, but not hear her chick. No moth ever encountered a scenario where nature just erected a perfectly transparent, perfectly invisible, solid barrier in it’s path.

When a human scent work handler is faced with a pen on the ground in a search area, and a dog who moves to the pen to investigate it, sniffing it and picking it up in his teeth, dropping it at his human’s feet, that human might as well be a clueless hen, or a flailing moth, repeatedly pulling his dog away from the pen, maybe saying “leave it”, then “find it” in the same breath, none the wiser that the pen is the hide. What ancient script makes the pen hide as invisible as a glass-encased chick? What causes the human to flail about like a moth smacking into an invisible barrier?

When a human short-circuits in the pen hide search, some ancient part of us is running a script that prioritizes avoidance over investigation, and so, we continue to get our moth on like Slipknot fans in a mosh pit. When the same human handler sees a curiously placed trailer in the same search area – even though his dog shows no interest in investigating the trailer – the handler will dance his dog around the trailer like a moth pinging off of a porch light on a summer evening. Sapped from the physical and psychic pummeling, both moth and human will eventually come to rest on their respective objects of interest, their navigation systems having been thoroughly bamboozled. The moth may think he’s found the source of the sun or the moon, the handler may think (and may convince his dog to think) he’s found the source of the odor.

As mega-brained humans, why don’t we just think our way past the pen hide or the trailer trap? The British human behavioral anthropologists, The Rolling Stones, have an answer: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you just might find… you still don’t get what you want because free will is often an illusion (that second part was in the original studio cut).

Indulge Me While I Pull My Own Strings

Philosophers are debating the question of free will at this very moment: Do we humans really control our own thoughts and actions or are we just puppets, reacting to environmental stimuli according to a preprogrammed script and acting out our evolutionary priorities to procreate like spazzy moths?

We don’t choose to be “thirsty”, it’s an observable fact that our bodies are programmed to trigger the feeling of thirst based on a host of internal markers. We can’t choose to ignore thirst – for long – without dire consequences. Do we choose to wear that Stevie Nicks t-shirt instead of the Grateful Dead hoodie? Does it even matter!? While fashion won’t kill us faster than dehydration (although, wearing Zubas or Hammer pants is an instant metaphorical death), our fashion choices are clearly driven by processes we are not aware of, compelling us towards goals we didn’t know we cared about.

In this sense, the degree to which we have free will is a result of:

a) the consequences of the action – choosing not to hydrate is certain death and very few of us could freely choose death in this way; choosing a moo-moo over a Marchesa might kill your chances of ever walking the red carpet, but it’s not hard to find people out there who would actually suffer less in a bed sheet than a high fashion dress. The consequences of a fashion action allow for a lot of “free will”.

b) our awareness of the stimuli influencing the action – having little knowledge and understanding of why you’re drawn to a particular watch – or to watches at all – makes it hard to say you freely chose that watch. Being hyperaware of stimuli – through sensors, monitors, biofeedback – can lead to a sense of control over ones actions. The simple act of sensing the feeling of “anger” arising through physical changes in the body can allow you to opt out of an angry action.

In the world of scent work, free will most certainly seems elusive when observing teams search. Why would a handler not say ‘alert’ when the dog sniffs to a particular point on a car bumper, exhibiting behavior changes commonly linked to sourcing? But, instead say it 30 seconds later when the clearly exasperated dog is clearly not alerting, but just standing next to an odorless car wheel? Consequences and awareness. No one is going to die if the handler comes to the trial in a moo-moo and blurts out a false alert; and most handlers are unaware of the stimuli they are taking in during a search, and the influence those stimuli have over their thoughts and actions.

(Knowledge) Bacon And (Awareness) Eggs: The (Mind) Breakfast of Champions

If (Francis, not Kevin) Bacon was right, and knowledge is power; then, awareness is the outlet you plug yourself into to access that power. Hone in on awareness, and you will find it missing from most failed scent work searches. Think of the handler who, awash with worry over time pressure and area coverage, makes the decision to change course at the same time as her dog is trying to take her to the hide; or the handler who mindlessly waits to call ‘alert’ while her dog searches the same area, over and over, in a futile attempt to get her handler to turn around so he can show her where the hide is. When you do spot an aware handler, she’s like a Zen Master, connected to her dog, knowing what her dog knows. She is the handler who is ready to be taken to the hide, the handler who turns around with her dog to find the source.

To get a sense of what awareness is like, just notice what you see, hear, smell, feel, think – and do so without judgement, just take everything in. You can do this anywhere, anytime. If you notice your mind’s voice kick into gear (typically thinking about the past or the future), simply focus on your breath and the sound and sensation of it, and experience your awareness of the present moment. Practicing awareness won’t suddenly make you the Zen Master of scent work, but it will help you plug into the knowledge present in your dog’s behavior and in the environment, making you a powerful partner for your dog before, during and after the search.

Rage (Calmly and Effectively) Against The Machine

If your daily life includes more awareness, you will begin to notice that the big difference between a rigid script and a flexible script is: cross-checking your routine against the available data. Many habits depend on the past repeating itself infinitely into the future. Warm bodies smelling of butyric acid always have blood, chicks always cry in distress, transparency always means an obstruction-free flight path. A slight change to the script – an ‘if, and or but’ – can be like a super power.

Think of a start-line routine. Instead of assuming that it’s always best to walk your dog on a short lead up to some cones or tape or a doorway and to put him between your legs pointing into the search area, take a moment to cross-check the available data. Is your dog already able to pick up odor? Does your dog need something from you (extra engagement, support, or just more acclimation time) to be able to do his best work? Imagine you’re like trapeze artists about to do a mid-air toss & catch. You’re prepared to execute a rigid & simple script, but you’re taking some time to check the energy of the situation – to feel if anything is off – to listen to the data.

Mindlessly following your scent work start-line routine carries no real risk (unlike a botched trapeze toss), but that’s what makes it so hard not to mindlessly follow your routine! There are no actual consequences. You need to be extra conscious of focusing on your dog, taking in the situation, and adjusting your routine if necessary. This might feel like a slow and unnecessary process at first, but it pays off over time.

Your start-line routine is just the beginning; you and your dog are likely to run many programmed actions throughout a search. It can be overwhelming when you begin to think about how little awareness you have of what you and your dog are doing during a search, and how much of your programming might need to be debugged! Not to worry, just start by committing to watch your dog.

For example, that interest your dog showed on that chair 30 seconds ago – stop thinking about it. Start focusing on what your dog is doing right now. Those cars your dog isn’t remotely interested in searching – don’t fret over them, watch your dog. Pay attention to the data available to you in real-time and you will begin to see why flexible & complex scripts are so helpful. You will see that the chair never had the hide, but the dog is in the process of showing you the source on the AV cart right now. You will see that the cars had no odor, and the dog continues to show no signs of odor, even when you subtly suggest he search the cars.

The most fertile ground for flexible & complex programming is communication of inaccessible/hard to source hides. Instead of looking only for your dog’s typical behavior and typical indication – which makes you more likely to confidently call a false alert – you’d consciously take in far more data to cross-check against the expected behaviors (most handlers consciously discard data that doesn’t fit the expected behavior/outcome). This process can be a bit messy as you develop the script for assigning meaning to the ‘ifs, ands and buts’ that you’ll encounter observing your dog’s problem-solving efforts. It can also be immensely rewarding – like learning a foreign language.

On page 170 of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Sagan & Druyan mention how a spider on LSD will spin a web that is “less symmetrical, more erratic, or, we might say, less obsessive, more freeform – but also less effective in catching insects.” Opening your mind and welcoming flexible and complex programming is not about becoming carefree, sloppy and mediocre. It’s also not about eliminating rigid and simple programming from your system. It’s about consciously taking in more data from the world around us and waking up to the programming within us that ignores that data; and, when we have the power to choose, it’s about choosing to improve that programming.

System Update Available

If both dog and handler suffer from mindless, counterproductive behavior patterns, it sometimes seems like the blind leading the blind, but it’s more like the squinty-eyed leading the backwards-walking. Your dog exceeds your abilities in some areas (hearing, smelling, forgiving transgressions, flexible self-grooming), but he can’t outdo you when it comes to reflecting on past experiences, using awareness to affect decision-making, and creating wholly new, flexible and complex programming. So, there’s a great opportunity to learn from each other and to optimize your team’s operating system.

Try noting your dog’s individual tendencies and arranging his experiences to help him be able to “see” his “blind spots” – situations that trigger unhelpful programming – and to rewrite his code. A dog who endlessly canvasses a search area looking for a hide placed in a knit winter beanie lying under a park bench may interpret the situation as presence of odor with no source, accepting an “impostor burger” of information instead of sniffing out the “all-beef patty” of a hide in his midst. Very often, if a dog is engaged in an “endless” behavior, it’s communication for “something’s not working, I’m open to feedback”. You have many options, including switching from off-leash to on-leash (or vice versa), pausing the search, shifting your position, or simply verbalizing a rhetorical question to your dog like, “what do you want me to see?” or “do you need to keep working here?” which may help you to stay focused on your dog and choose a helpful course of action. You always have the option of doing nothing if you think your dog is in a position to learn his way through the challenge.

Be open to the possibility that the “blind spot” problem actually belongs to you. Maybe your dog is exhibiting behavior that you’re not noticing or valuing before you even think he’s actively searching for this beanie odor. Maybe you need to switch the way you do things before and during the search, to free your dog from your cues that are highly correlated to his decisions and actions that prevent this beanie hide from being found. You might be expecting to reinforce your dog for the same reasons and at the same time as you do for other types of hides, not recognizing that this situation is different. Always turn your sleuthing sensitivity up in these situations, and be prepared to be flexible. You’ll get the most out of your dog if you prioritize his drive and confidence to take in complex information and communicate with you over and above him being “right” or keeping it “simple” (the KISS acronym, isn’t doing anyone any favors, unless you enjoy being stupid and simple… trade it for KICK: Keep It Complex Kgenius (the ‘K’ is silent)).

Make Peace With And Transcend Your Inner Mothgoosehumatickendog

We share upwards of 60% of our dna with insects (not far off to call ourselves spazzy moths), and over 80% with our dogs. We owe it to our “forgotten ancestors” to learn to humble ourselves, to connect with the parts of ourselves hidden behind the curtain of modern life, to live up to the power of our big (old) new brains, and to be remembered as the humans who would identify the dog’s communication of the pen hide. The humans who would not be mindlessly drawn to the blank vehicles like a moth to a porch light. The humans who would rewrite our code to become more than the sum of our ancestral parts. The humans who would elevate ourselves into flexibility and complexity so we could elevate with our dogs. The teams that would become soaring trapeze artists of scent work.

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Happy Sniffing!