What is that feeling you get when your dog works like the Dickens to find a hide that you swear should be well below his pay grade? Utter despair? It’s like watching a pro football player drop a perfect pass with no defender in sight. Sometimes, shit happens. Well, sure. But, what is that shit? Short of calling in every forensic genius from every serial cop drama ever, you’ll do no better than guess; but, even the Mentalist, Monk, and Dexter had to start somewhere. Maybe that wide receiver dropped the perfect pass because some fan’s watch face bounced sunlight right in his eyes at the exact moment he was timing his catch. Maybe your dog failed to find that “easy” hide, because a return air vent cycled on and Houdini’d it (caused the hide to escape the grasp of your dog’s nostrils). Or maybe your watch face blinded your dog, too. Whatever we learn from this post, get rid of your watches, people!
Truth in Treat Toss Calisthenics – In our household, we’ve had two dogs who love to catch. Deogee could catch food or toys, and his specialty was snagging tennis balls hurled at high speeds. Chowder can catch food, and his specialty is distance. Chowder is like the 4-legged version of Jerry Rice, expertly running a predetermined route to the predictable location of Joe Montana’s perfect pass. Deogee was like Ty Cobb, battling the pitching prowess of Walter Perry Johnson with wicked fast reaction skills. Both dogs’ skills apply within a very narrow set of circumstances. Toss blueberries at Chowder from a distance or hurl them at Deogee at high speed and both dogs look like pros. Sail in a piece of popcorn and both dogs implode like Greg Norman at the 1996 Augusta Masters.
Obviously, blueberries and popcorn are very different projectiles. Blueberries are nature’s baby baseballs. Round and firm, nicely weighted. Popcorn is nature’s wastepaper basketball. Density deficient, geometrically horrid, aerodynamically abysmal. No matter the skill of the shooter, popcorn floats, dives, curves and corkscrews willy-nilly. The fiendish flight of a piece of popcorn reveals a treat-catching truth: blueberry catching “skills” are mostly a myth.
Like the chef at the hibachi grill who flings chopped veggies into your open mouth, the treat tosser does 90% of the work, and the treat catcher just needs to open the hatch and make minor adjustments to his position. Most misses can be blamed on a poor toss. In the game of popcorn catching, there is no controlling for a good toss or a poor toss, and no chance of improving by calling for the tosser to be more consistent. If the popcorn catcher wants to be a success, he must take responsibility for the unpredictability of the toss, have a heightened sensitivity to minute detail, instantaneous pattern recognition, real-time course correction, and a tight-rope walker’s commitment to balance – no extraneous movements, just steady hyper-focus, moving slowly at the speed of light. Popcorn catching “skills” are not a myth.
A Popcorn in Blueberry’s Clothing
Scent work is mostly a popcorn catching game, but humans work very hard to convince themselves and their dogs that it’s a blueberry catching game. Remember, in a blueberry catching game, the treat catcher (searching dog – and, sometimes handler) can rely heavily on predetermined decisions and may only need to make small adjustments to stay on target; and, if things go wrong, the treat catcher can often blame the treat tosser (the search challenge).
Container searches illustrate this nicely. A perfect blueberry toss of a search challenge might involve a predictable location (environment), an arrangement of expected container types, and a placement of the hide that can be sourced by the dog with only minor adjustments to his confident prediction of where the odor trail will lead him to. If this straightforward “popcorn in blueberry’s clothing” search returns a negative result (hey, what’s with only 9 people passing this NW1 container search!), handlers may be inclined to question the quality of the search challenge (that CO can’t accurately toss me an NW1 container search!), rather than to accept that the search challenge is unpredictable and a successful approach may require some popcorn catching skills.
If you want to take your dog to a scent work competition and open your hatches like a couple of patrons at the hibachi grill catching veggies tossed by the chef – relying on the consistency of the search variables and the skill of the hide setter to meet your expectations – don’t be shocked when you get an eyeful of popcorn. If you’re ready, like Saul of Tarsus, to shed that scaly eye popcorn and see the true challenge ahead of you, it all starts with the right mindset.
Don’t Expect. Accept.
Your dog is not simply looking for the strongest concentration of scent, just as your dog is not simply reacting to the speed and trajectory of the projectile when catching a tossed piece of popcorn; otherwise, every piece of popcorn tossed would be expertly caught, and every hide placed would be expertly sourced. Instead, a series of calculations is occurring based on available information – all happening blinding fast. This process drains brain energy like a bitcoin mining farm, leading many dogs (and humans) to work from their expectations rather than their calculations.
Expectations only help us to be unrealistically happy when things go as planned or unrealistically disappointed when things don’t. Either way, the expectations ain’t helping! Whether it be a person with the expectation of a $10 dessert being the size of a football (barely baseball-sized creme brulee? More like creme overpaid!), or a dog with the expectation of the presence of picnic tables and the presence of odor leading to a picnic table hide (that sneaky odor collecting on the underside of this bench seat can’t possibly be coming from the crack in the ground; must. sniff. seat. harder!), expectations prevent actual information from being assessed, acted on, and absorbed for future benefit.
Detox That Sniffer
If your dog has developed expectations that make him nose drunk to what’s really going on in a search, it’s time to send him to the Betty Furr-d clinic! Carefully observe the way he reacts to odor info and the problem-solving approach he uses. Maybe your dog has high expectations of odor being found on objects, such that odor on a tree branch or on a plain flat wall seems to endlessly elude him. Remove the drug of choice from your detoxing dog – get him out to a field, put him in an empty room, get rid of the stuff he gets hung up on.
Once you have a detoxed dog, don’t just put him back in chair/table/trash can land, get him to places with atypical objects, or lots of plain, flat surfaces – playgrounds, splash pads, parking garages, industrial parks, etc. When you place your first few hides, choose placements that result in odor collecting on the atypical objects or the boring flat surfaces, like pillars, half walls, or parking barriers. Use ground hides or elevated/suspended hides that don’t result in the dog sourcing back to an obvious object like a table, chair, garbage can, covered outlet, utility box, step stool, bucket – you get the picture.
When your clean & sober odor hunter is ready to try dabbling in his preferred source of choice, just make sure to appropriately balance his experiences. A dog who never fails to engage and source the odor from a trash can hide doesn’t need many trash can hides in practice.
Learn to Love Telling Snowflakes Apart
They say no two snowflakes are exactly alike. The reason for this endless uniqueness is the infinitely minor differences in conditions present at the formation of the crystals that make the snowflakes. Most of us look at snow falling and just see “snowflakes”. With the right attention to detail, we might be able to connect weather patterns to snowflake type. They (might) also say no two hides are the same. A host of factors affect the presentation of odor from a hide. With a keen sniffer, it may be possible for your dog to recognize details of a search that help him connect odor patterns to hide location.
Your dog needs time to heighten his attention to the details in a wide variety of environmental conditions, search area types, and odor presentation. There’s a concept called “building a foundation”. First, you need building materials. Do not underestimate the time your dog spends learning to become detail-oriented. These detail gathering searches may not appear successful or fast. Speed is not a skill. Speed is the result of efficiency and efficiency comes from skilled pattern recognition and information processing. And, make sure to offer your dog searches with no odor, or with long stretches before contacting odor; as well as searches with various presentations of distractions. None of these experiences are advanced – they are the materials that can be used to build a foundation.
Feel the Algo-Rhythms
While most dogs will naturally synthesize the information and details they gather in their searches into numerous problem-solving approaches to efficiently connect presence of odor to location of source, there comes a time (often marked by repeated working behaviors without progress; or moments of eye contact post a series of working behaviors) when they appreciate feedback, guidance and control to break through a particularly challenging set of variables.
Some helpful choices a human can make include: pausing the search for a “thinking” moment, or maybe a praise/reward/connection moment; rewarding the dog the next time he exhibits clear/strong behavior change (and just letting him keep working); changing your position relative to a physical object, corner, or surface change; going from on leash to off, or from off to on; slowing your dog down as he works through the area; or just taking a break away from the search area. Any of these choices may help your dog in the short-term, but, like jumper cables used to start up a car, your involvement should be a temporary boost to get your dog’s problem-solving engine firing on all cylinders again.
Mastering the Pop-berry, Blue-corn Challenge
Some of the most challenging searches for a dog to work and a human to observe involve the dog exhibiting two very different styles of problem-solving during the same search. Imagine two close together hides – one stuck under the seat of a folding chair and the other stuck at the top of an open door frame connecting two rooms. The chair hide elicits a fast, snappy behavior change and a clear source and indication. The door frame hide is elusive, the dog speeds around the search area, appearing to maybe catch scent in this corner, to excitedly check a table or a filing cabinet, or to climb the wall over there, passing back and forth through the very door frame with the hide, but showing no clear indication. The clues for the presence of a hide are there, but the dog is bringing a blueberry-catching approach to a popcorn toss. A dog who can recognize what he’s dealing with quickly, and begin to change his approach to match the puzzle has part of what it takes to be a master problem-solver.
A master problem-solving dog brings a balanced interest to most all presentations of odor. Think of a dog who appears to be aware of the presence of odor for a particular hide, investing time and effort in the puzzle, then, suddenly disengages from the whole affair. That dog is often showing negative preference for that presentation of odor – it doesn’t fit his expectations, and his approach to solving it isn’t working. This is like the dog who passes on the popcorn tosses he can’t easily track and catch, waiting for the perfect, blueberry-like toss right to his open mouth. A master problem-solver is an egalitarian odor engager, who calls upon his depth of problem-solving approaches to find a solution to any odor puzzle.
Weathering the Popcorn Storm
A 3 hide luggage search on an undulating wood floor in a drafty camp building on a cold, windy day can mesmerize a dog, with creeping tendrils of odor being pushed and pulled along the floor at the whim of the wind, flexing the flimsy building and creating positive and negative pressure for air to flow in or out of every crack and seam in the place. It’s as disorienting as lobbing handfuls of popcorn at your dog’s face in rapid succession. What is the solution? A dog who carefully searches each luggage item should be able to identify all three hides. But the dog is not compelled to search the luggage carefully. Every bit of available info tells him to follow the scent tendrils away from the luggage, along the floor, and up the walls. This is a situation as sticky as a bucket of caramel popcorn. On one hand, there is probably nothing wrong with the dog’s problem-solving abilities, it’s an exceptionally pesky puzzle; on the other hand, being able to own an odor “Twister” like Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt would pretty badass!
In the case of the luggage search, you can pretty successfully work with your dog to search the luggage carefully – even if you point out every item for him to search – but don’t assume you’ve discovered a way to beat the storm. What if the search area were not as obviously defined? What do you search carefully and for how long? What if your dog refuses to work for you in this style? Some situations are just largely about luck – the same way a tornado demolishes every house in a neighborhood, but skips over yours (you ain’t special, just lucky). If your dog faces enough tornadoes of odor, maybe he can begin to build a winning approach; or maybe you’ll find ways to help him to the eye of the storm (that’s how Paxton and Hunt did it, right?!). Either way, remember to stay humble, and respect the universe of challenges you and your dog could face every time you search.
Ding Dong The Wicked Search Is Dead!
During world war II, German scientists found a solution to the challenge of picking favorable weather for launching air raids into Great Britain: use the tone of Big Ben’s Chimes on the BBC’s live hourly news report. The Germans correlated specific tones of Ben’s bells to certain weather patterns. As soon as the British forces realized what was happening, they had the BBC switch to a pre-recorded version of Big Ben for the news reports. Both the Germans and the British were using popcorn catching skills to gain an advantage in war. While you’re no more likely to ring a bell at the start of your search than you are to taste the soil or put an ear to the nearest tree trunk, you should tune yourself to the changing tones of your dog’s behavior; hidden in every posture or pace change, lip lick or ear flick, brief glance or long stare are the keys to a favorable search outcome.
As a handler, you should plan to assist your dog only when you’re confident you can add value – only when you know what kind of help to offer. In practice, give your dog all the time he needs to build and refine his problem-solving skills. Spend that time taking note of your dog’s patterns of behavior when working in challenging conditions. Look for behavior that clues you in to the presence of odor so that you can clearly understand where odor is not coming from and where it is coming from (general direction). See if you can identify behavior that signals a concern with the environment (an impassable fence, an unstable surface, a distressing sound), or behavior that shows interest to keep working, but no clear signs of a hide (is this a sign your dog wants to work elsewhere?). There’s no advantage to “handling” your dog if you’re just guessing at what to do. Put in the work to understand your dog as clear as Big Ben’s bells!
Building a truly exceptional scent work team takes time and focus. Don’t fool your dog or yourself by excelling at “blueberry” style search skills. Lay the foundation for your dog to develop “popcorn” style skills, leading to a rich reservoir of information-gathering and problem-solving skills. Mirror your dog’s skills by developing your understanding of your dog’s behavior, and your ability to help him navigate the stormiest of searches. Every search has the potential to be as unpredictable as a piece of flying popcorn or as twisted as a blockbuster movie tornado, but if you and your dog combine your skills, not even Orville Tornado-bacher can stop you!
Happy Sniffing!
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