Our family recently took a trip to Florida to visit my wife’s grandparents in Ocala. On our way there we stopped in Panama City Beach for a few days and fell in love with St. Andrews State Park. The park offers a miles-long stretch of beach with plenty of opportunity for one of our favorite hobbies: shell hunting. The park also offered me a lesson in search styles, motivation, and self-guided learning.
When my family hunts shells, we look for evidence that they’ve been washing up on shore, then we comb an area with great care, collecting those shells that most catch our eye. On the beach at St. Andrews State Park I lost myself in the very satisfying act of raking my fingers through a pile of shells half buried in sugar white sand, patiently searching for a hidden treasure. I must have slipped into a crack in time, an infinite moment, because when I looked up I saw my family had made it a city block down the shore from me. Like a free diver resurfacing for breath, I stood upright and let my eyes inhale the full expanse of beach and ocean around me. I set off to close the gap between me and my family, and I discovered that if I moved at a certain pace parallel to the surf, larger shells like olives, conches, welks and tulips were calling to me like a double Reeses chocolate concrete mixer from Culvers. Happening on these shells in this way caused me to exclaim my finds with a looney tunes-like, “woohoo!” I reached my family with a handful of “keepers” and cruised right on by them like an Olympic speed walker, snatching up shells and woohooing with absurd frequency, while they poked around in the sand sans these super cool shells.
Was I suddenly a shell seeking savant?! No. No, I was not. A string of misfired declarations – broken shells, kelp capsules, driftwood – brought my feet back down to the white sand grounds. I went from “shell-yeah!” confidence to clammin’ up and beach moping, not combing. I considered that my newfound method might just have been a streak of luck. Hesitant to get back in the fast lane and fail at fixing my eyes on Florida Fighting Conches and the like, I tried a slower pace and a more careful examination of interesting shells before hoisting a find overhead like the Lombardi trophy.
Curiously, my return to a slower paced searching style made me a cheerless connoisseur of colorful cockles and clams – even though there were hundreds of them in a patch of beach no bigger than a queen mattress. I’d spend minutes comparing two identical shells and discard one based on an imaginary defect. Lost in a malaise of mulling over mortified miniature mollusk mansions, I wandered over to some seaweed covered in sandflies and poked around as if I’d luck upon a Junonia tucked cozily beneath the rotting brown leaves.
I’d combed and cruised the beaches of St. Andrews State Park and learned that shell hunting can be meditative, it can be thrilling, or it can be the equivalent of that squelching sound a boot makes as it comes unstuck from deep mud. I was surprised that my big shell hunting experience resulted in so much self-consciousness relating to the method and the outcome. Why couldn’t I find my way back to an unabated “woohoo”?!
The Restorative Power Of The Quest
“Dad, come look what I found!” my daughter shouted out as she ran over to me protecting her prize with her hands formed over it like a shell. She slowly lifted one hand from the other to reveal a small, screw-like shell with a purple hue. This was our first auger of the trip, and my daughter hoped it wouldn’t be the last. “Can you help me find another one?!” she implored.
Moments before this tightly twisted shell lit up my eyes I was sulky and leaden. Now, I felt an energy coursing through me, like tiny ocean waves traveling from my torso down my arms and legs. It wasn’t the shell. It was what the shell stood for: a quest! With the auger as my holy grail, I galloped off along the shore, the ocean breeze as my steed. My first find was small and coral pink. I delivered the auger to my daughter, cradling it like the Lindbergh baby. The delight in her eyes was my reward for finding her prize. I checked in with my wife and son to see if they were interested in enlisting a knight of the order of the shell on any quests. Soon, I was off putting all of my pacing and spying and beach combing skills to use to find augers and tulips and lettered olives, woohooing, once again.
Whose Odor Is It?
A day on the beach hunting shells gets me wondering, what is the true motivation behind a dog’s hunt for a target odor? Of course, some dogs are mercenaries and they will do a job for a price – and do it well. Many dogs are like me hunting shells on the beach. They can enjoy a completely self-driven experience, which can be energetic and fruitful or glacial and pensive, or aimless and confusing. Like me, many dogs recognize that the odor we introduce them to is not theirs. It is their human’s odor. The human is in possession of it, until he loses it, and when it is found, he takes possession again. The odor is a human’s prized shell. Most dogs are all too eager to be enlisted on a quest for lost odor, which is why many dogs find the quest – or search for odor itself – to be rewarding. Some dogs find it more rewarding than others. Why might this be?
Do You Really Want Your Lost Odor Back?! Asking For A Friend.
When your dog searches for the hide that you “lost”, do you act like you even care to get it back? When he finds it, are you lavishing praise and thanks upon him? Or, are you playing the draconian master, arms crossed, waiting for your dog to execute a flawless search, because you know he can and it’s your right to demand it of him? Whatever you’re doing, consider that your dog may be motivated by the strength of your connection to your prize, the odor, and your gratitude for it’s safe return.
Just as I increased my desire to find augers on the beach relative to how pleased my daughter was with my finds, your dog might increase his desire to search for odor if you’re pleased with his finds. Similarly, your dog will adjust his criteria if you’re not pleased. If I bring my daughter an auger she thinks is a cerith, and she rejects it, I’ll get confused and be a less effective auger searcher. If my dog finds me a hide, but I think he’s not correct, it will negatively impact his confidence going forward.
Be it shells or odor, if the searcher is on a quest to find someone else’s prize, a huge part of the searcher’s motivation is the other person’s satisfaction when the prize is found. If you don’t want your dog to become a confused and demotivated searcher, then you need to support your dog’s behaviors and indication of a find, even if you have reason to believe the hide is not there (maybe you know you didn’t hide it in that location, or you think it had been in that location recently, but no longer, or maybe it’s very close, but not right on the physical hide). If your dog gives you every reason to believe he’s found your prized hide, be genuinely satisfied!
Searching Just For The Shell Of It
That day on St. Andrews Beach, when I started out on the hunt for shells, I had no quest in mind, I simply noticed that I found a certain size of beautiful shell when I tuned my focus to a particular “frequency”. I thought my beach cruising method was for the larger shells I was finding, but I was able to cruise for the smaller augers just as effectively. Easing in to the quest for someone else’s prize had a very positive effect on my experience.
How might you let your dog ease into the quest for your lost odor? Sometimes, let your dog do his own casual search of the space you want to work in before you place odor. If you notice your dog is in a state of being that looks like he’s interested in taking up a quest, you can sneak a hide out and just let him be surprised by it’s presence. If you decide to formally enlist your dog in the quest for your lost odor and he’s not woohooing for his finds like a beach cruiser putting on the brakes for a scotch bonnet, you need to take a break and make sure you’re sending the right message to your dog with your reward timing, body language and praise. If you have trouble being a grateful recipient of lost odor, maybe have someone hide your wedding ring or your car keys – or your phone – along with the odor and then you might see your dog for the fur-clad knight of the round odor tin that he really is!
Happy Sniffing!
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