Alexa, How Do You Say Dumb Dumb Poopy Pants in Chinese?

Ever wonder what it would be like if you left an 8 year old and an 11 year old in charge of teaching themselves Chinese? You’d be on the right track if you guessed there would be a lot of silly sayings and bathroom humor. There’d also be a lot of laughing and excitement. And, interestingly, sprinkled in amongst the poop talk would be attempts to learn the basics of the language, like “hello”, and “thank you”. The kids would not be asking Alexa about sentence structure, past participles, gerunds, formal and informal usage, consonant and vowel sounds, and so on. Unsurprisingly, the last thing a teacher would share with the kids – poop humor – is the first thing they’re interested in. Who is right? The learner or the teacher? Alexa. How do you explain the learning process?!

Doggy Poop Humor

If dogs could play with the learning process (hint: they can) involving a target scent like birch oil, what would they want to learn first? Would they go for the silliest, crudest parts of the scenting lexicon, or would they approach the task studiously, like an ivy league valedictorian? I’m not entirely sure we can answer that question. What we can always do is observe our dogs and look for clues in the way they experience and interact with the world around them.

If there’s a way you can get a dog to intuitively join in on your scenting game, that’s a great way to build an enthusiastic partner. Tossing odor tins is one way to do this, but not all dogs are partial to projectiles. Pretending like you’re hiding something in or around a specific area is fun, too. Combining something the dog already likes with the novel odor (pairing food or toy) can enhance either of these experiences.

I’ve seen odor & food in an open box be dragged across the floor by a string and disappear under a couch like a little mouse, then reappear. For certain dogs, this is highly entertaining. It is like watching youtube videos of the Darwin Awards! World’s dumbest floral-scented meat mouse is about to get eaten!

I have a cherished video of a labrador tossing schoolroom chairs up into the air with his head as he rummages through a rubble pile of objects to get to his source. He loved a pile of miscellany more than most!

Every dog has their go-to feel-good search scenario, their innocent dance with the crude and silly side of the subject of scent. Is it enough to stay in the gallows of scent or do we need to broaden and elevate the dog’s odor horizons?

Practical Practice With Pimpinella Et al

A common refrain from the community of scent workers goes something like this, “but will that be in the trial?” Just as we have to remind our human children that dick and fart jokes won’t be part of dinner at grandma’s house (theoretically), the taboos of target odors won’t be part of your trial experience (theoretically).

The next thought most scent workers have is, “so then I only want to practice what will be in the trial.” Grandma can you pass the gravy?

There is no free lunch in this life (that’s a true justified belief). You won’t increase your chances of succeeding in competition if you take away all the fun stuff from your dog*. You just might increase your dog’s willingness to spend a day doing “grandma” searches if you make your practices match his preferences. It’s all a trade-off.

* note, some dogs are born with an anti-fun-stuff gene, they pair very well with humans who have the stick-up-the-butt gene.

The Loser Becomes The Language Expert

Everyone has one person they graduated high school with whose only ‘A’ grade was in fuck-up-enomics. That “born loser” sometimes becomes surprisingly successful later in life. Dr. Seuss wrote 27 stories that publishers called “pure rubbish”, before a friend helped deliver his wonderfully wonky words to the world. Loser for the win!

If you reverse engineer an expert’s or master’s highly successful career you’ll often find a similar story to Dr. Seuss’s. The mysterious alchemy of experience, personality and what Jim Collin’s calls “who luck” that leads to mastery is rarely distilled into a step by step. We know it when we see it, but we know little of where it originates from, or how.

What gives you and your dog a better chance at success in scent work? Probably jumping into the mystery machine and cultivating your dog’s enthusiasm, joy, and passion for seeking out and communicating the presence of target odor sources. A passionate dog is one who will naturally want to dig deeper into the world of scent and learn more about the rules of effective problem-solving.

A passionate human also gives the dog a better chance at success. The more you enjoy playing in the world of scent, the more likely you are to learn about your dog’s behavior and the “behavior” of the environments in which you search.

Alexa, What Makes My Dog Passionate About Scent?

Few of us can explain why we like what we really like. For example, why do I like Cardi B songs?! I barely know who Cardi B is! But, you might catch me in my truck jammin to ‘Money’ or ‘Bodak Yellow’. You will not catch me playing these songs at grandma’s house (you might tho).

It’s very tricky to know what your dog really likes – the stuff that has no logical explanation – but that’s where the magic is.

You don’t need to involve scent or searching as you try to find what moves your dog like a boosted bass line and some nasty lyrics moves me. You just need to try things and keep a keen eye out for clues in his behavior. Then, you might need to get creative to weave your dog’s passion into the context of scent work.

One of the best games I’ve come up with to increases the chances of a magical melding of scent work and your dog’s unexpected sources of passion is the “what if” game. I introduce a random constraint to the human just before searching for a few hides and see what kind of ideas jump out from the person – or from the observers. You know how some dogs like to do weight pull? I once watched a person hop into a wheelbarrow so she wouldn’t touch the ground during the search (that was the constraint, “floor is lava”). Her dog led the charge, sometimes pulling her along in the wheelbarrow as he searched for odor (her human helper couldn’t push fast enough). We might have witnessed that dogs unexpected secret passion (or not); right or wrong, it was worth the effort to try!

Put Beginner’s Mindset On Repeat

I remember when I was brand new to scent work. When I didn’t have a clue what it was or what it could be. I remember my dog during that time. She was my flashlight, shining into every dark corner of the game, revealing something new and exciting. Together we spent countless hours roaming around Los Angeles setting out hides and finding them, feeling like VOC voyageurs (essential oils are volatile organic compounds).

Every step of my journey through the world of scent work I have been (mostly) relentlessly optimistic about one thing: that we have only scratched the surface of what is possible for dogs and humans to experience in a scent work search. If this is true, then we owe it to our dogs and ourselves to keep looking for things that will moves us beyond today’s erroneously imposed limits.

One way to do this is to always be beginning.

I had the pleasure of working with a young male sable shepherd and his human as they were starting their journey into scent work. We did some searching for the dog’s favorite spiky rubber ball and the human had no trouble trusting his dog’s behavior – even when the ball was completely out of sight and out of reach high up behind a bathroom door.

This duo was just having fun experiencing this new game. No expectations. No hesitations. Just learning and loving their time together.

During a break in the action I learned that what got these two interested in scent work was a game they played in their back yard: find the walnut. The guy would take a specific walnut from among the scores of walnuts littering the ground throughout their back yard, and he’d hide it, then get his dog and let him find the walnut. This was not a planned out endeavor – the guy saw that his dog liked the walnuts in their yard and would sometimes pick one out to possess. He thought it might be fun to have the dog find a specific walnut. He was right. He’d identified his dog’s “Cardi B”.

Shep (this is the German Shepherd’s name) loved searching for a walnut in a sea of walnuts – he loved it so much that it became a passion. That passion fueled curiosity and made it easy for him to go to a completely novel space and search for his toy in a search that a seasoned scent work competitor might call expert level.

I love playing with a beginner dog when we have only one goal: spark an intrinsic love for the game. We’re not trying to get the dog to the hide. We’re not expecting the dog to check boxes. We aren’t thinking about search patterns or short, successful reps. We are providing an environment for the dog to show us what fun means to him. If it means asking Alexa, “how do you say ‘you’re a poop face’ in Chinese?” then that’s awesome (sorry grandma). We know that time spent learning how to tell fart jokes in Mandarin might just lead to a genuine desire to learn Pinyin initials, the four tones of Chinese, and the incorporation of time and place into sentence structure.

You can instantly tell how much of a drag it would be if someone tried to teach you – to make you like learning – the components and rules of Chinese language without you having an intrinsic desire to learn them. Don’t be a drag to your dog.

If you’re contemplating starting scent work or if you think you might need to start over, there’s never a bad time to become a beginner and do the work of finding and cultivating an intrinsic love, joy and passion in your dog and yourself for learning more about scent work.

Happy Sniffing!