My thoughts for this post are deeply influenced by the hours of lectures I have listened to from assistant professor John Vervaeke. My thoughts are, however, weakly formed compared with professor Vervaeke’s lectures. Check out his youtube series Awakening From The Meaning Crisis for a thorough discussion of how we make meaning, prime for insights, and grow more wise.
The other day I walked through my front door after several hours spent coaching scent work teams with only one goal in mind: to eat. I lunged up the stairs and into the kitchen and begin to raid the fridge for any and all foods I figured were too old (meaning 2 days or more) for the rest of the family to want to eat. A severely shriveled tangerine. A tupperware filled with thinly sliced chicken breast spiced with curry. A container holding a handful of roasted chickpeas. A glass dish of rapidly decaying pineapple slices drowning in their own possibly fermented juices. Some wilted, sticky spinach leaves.
I arranged the various questionable consumables into a queue on the kitchen island and began to eat. Halfway through the curry chicken (even microwaved I may have been detecting a subtle film of campylobacter) I noticed a note on top of a stack of mail just beyond the chickpeas. It was written by my 10 year old daughter. It read:
“I was drawing for my dad and I looked at it and it looked like the worst thing I ever drow [sic] and then I looked at it again I added some stuff turned it to the side and it was awsome [sic].”
This note was like fresh food for my soul. I immediately put aside the decomposed spinach leaves and the pungent pineapple and went to find my daughter.
“Hey bean (her name is Mackena, but we call her bean), what’s this note you wrote about a drawing you didn’t like?” I asked her.
“Oh, it was like my best drawing ever, but Miles (our terror-ier mix) chewed it up.” She said with the kind of resignation one has when sharing a dwelling with a tiny hairy – adorable, cute, lovey – dictator. “It was a drawing of the United States. I cried when he ripped it up.”
Wow. I can’t imagine how I would react if my worst ever turned best ever writing was torn to bits, chewed, swallowed and shat out by Miles. Crying might be followed by sealing Miles in a box and sending him into space on an Elon Musk rocket like Garfield getting rid of Nermal.*
I’m not even sure I’d make the shift from worst ever to best ever – at least, not on my own. So, how is my 10 year old capable of such transformational thought and action? It might have to do with perspective.
*while writing this post I reloaded the page and lost what I considered a pretty damn good few closing paragraphs – magical, if I’m being totally objective. If this post lacks a certain clarity and inspiration, it means I couldn’t quite “do” my way to awesome again. Such is life.
Goldilocks And The Three Crates
Earlier in the day when I was coaching scent work teams I noticed a pattern emerge across dogs who searched for two hides in a small/medium room with 3 open wire dog crates along one wall spaced out about a foot and half apart – the third crate in line from left to right had a well-hidden hide in its wire frame on the back right corner.
The pattern I noticed was that nearly every dog experienced a physical and mental barrier to problem-solving this crate hide to it’s source. And nearly every dog went through a process whereby they expressed the ugliness of the search before shifting perspective and transforming into a dog who solved the puzzle and expressed the joy and beauty of the find.
Each dog worked the odor collecting on the middle crate, and the odor collecting on the shelving units to the right of the crate with the hide, then pursued the trail from source by entering the crate with the hide. Once in the crate, the dogs became mildly incensed by the physical limitations imposed on them by the wire cage. Some dogs stopped working altogether and sat in the crate or stood in silent protest. Most dogs left the crate at some point.
These dogs were quite possibly experiencing the search for the crate hide in the same way my daughter experienced the “search” for a great drawing. They were not feeling good about the state of things.
Just as my daughter re-engaged her drawing, adding to it and changing the orientation, these dogs had to shift perspective to succeed. And that is what they all did. Some of the dogs headed back into the crate and changed the way they were following scent to source. Some dogs opted to work the odor present outside of the crate and follow it to the hide. All dogs ended the search as happy dogs.
What Happened To My Dog?
Given the task of searching a medium-sized interior space consisting of a small office and a small part of a crating, seating, and equipment storage area, one student and her dog began their blind search effort. The dog moved forward at the pace of a tortoise on Ambien, her stubby little brown tail hanging sadly between her rear haunches. She went on this way for several minutes, gloomily inching along through the search area, occasionally pausing to lick or nibble at something on the floor. At one point I asked the dog’s human what she thought was going on. She replied, “Something’s not right with my dog. Maybe she’s tired from yesterday. We’re not being very productive.” I asked her, “What would you like to do then?” She decided to stop searching. A look of total defeat hanging on her face. I said to her, “Great job.” She was flummoxed. Speechless. I said, “You did great. There were no hides and it was very obvious to your dog, maybe less obvious to you, but you did a great job letting her communicate her experience of the search area.
As soon as I told the human that there were no hides to be found, everything about the last 4 minutes changed. She was elated to find that her dog hadn’t missed any hides. She was even more excited when I had her come back to search for 1-3 hides and her dog was a bolt of lightning to each of the 2 hides in the search area.
It would be really nice if humans could change perspective when it comes to a search like this. It isn’t the dog’s low energy or lack of indication behavior that distresses the human. It’s the human’s fixation on the “fact” that the dog is failing at finding hides, and that they are living their worst search ever. A shift in perspective can reveal other possibilities.
I Take It Back: The Tale Of The False Call At The Hole In The Wall
A feisty little terrier (I must subconsciously gravitate towards these dogs) and his human were a minute into searching a large picnic shelter and the playground next to it for an unknown number of hides. The dog wasted no time at the start of the search, closing in on odor collecting on a group of trash cans stored against a 5 foot high brick wall at one end of the picnic shelter. He left the cans and the shelter, advancing towards a bench in the grass between the edge of the playground and the edge of the shelter, slowing his pace and turning back towards the shelter like a fish on a line. He started to detail the brick wall, this time from the side without the trash cans. Halfway down the wall he dropped his head to a hole in the brick and shoved his muzzle in as far as it would go. His human was not convinced this was a pursuit the two of them shared an interest in, still, she worried he might be about to eat a hide. She did a little confidence dance (like a rain dance to end a not-finding drought) and sputtered like a prairie settler dying of typhoid fever, “uh uh uh uh, uh-lurt?” Quick on the heels of her declaration she belted out, “No! I take it back!”
Just like that her little terrier pulled his snout from the hole in the wall and took off. He ran across the playground to the edge of the woods and glanced up a tree. He angled away from the playground and the picnic shelter, on course for a bbq patio enclosed on 3 sides by a low brick wall. He jumped onto the top of the wall and scooped his head through the air from high to low. I checked in with his human. “What are you understanding given everything he’s done so far?” She said that the only area of interest was the brick wall and trash cans where she kinda called ‘alert’. I confirmed that she was understanding her dog’s communication and should just let him keep searching.
Right after our human-to-human conversation, her dog leapt off the short wall and headed back to the picnic shelter with purpose. She said, “he thinks there’s a hide to find.” I agreed with her. This time the dog ignored the hole in the wall, swimming his head up and down as he moved along the wall. He was beginning to define an area of importance, but not sourcing and indicating.
As the dog’s search efforts continued, he launched himself up the wall at one end, took a few steps and launched himself again. His human watched carefully as he shifted from plain old launching to focused launching, then to standing with his head tilted up and his nose fixed in space, pointing to the top of the wall at one end. His human called out, “Alert! But where is it?”
The human in this search faced several situations where she needed to flow back and forth from “features to gestalt” as Vervaeke puts it (more on this in another post), or details to big picture. Ideally, features or details (behavior changes/communication) need to arrange into a relevant and meaningful pattern (gestalt or big picture) to prompt a response from the dog’s human. Focus too much on the details and you mistake a flash of behavior for a complete pattern. Focus too much on the big picture and you’ll collect some, but not enough or not the relevant details that would reveal a meaningful pattern of behavior.
The human’s false call at the hole in the wall was a case of mistaking a detail for a big picture pattern. Her communication to her dog (I’m going to pay you, but now I’m not) created a situation where she knew there was an area of importance – likely a hide – but, now she wasn’t getting the details from her dog that would typically support that pattern. She wasn’t seeing her dog search the brick wall anymore – he was avoiding it. Her last challenge was when she was certain her dog was finding a hide, but not certain he had – or would – source and indicate. When she did call it, she wanted immediate confirmation and wanted to know where the hide was. She was stuck in the big picture of locating, sourcing and indicating, when the details did not include sourcing or indicating (at least not a typical indication).
Any one of these instances of perspectival stuckness could and do happen to all of us. It’s not something we try to move past or train our way out of. It’s something we have to learn to flow in and best make sense of by moving our focus from features to gestalt and back so as to see the reality of the situation as clearly as possible. An alert call should come when you have a clear pattern leading to sourcing or indicating, or when you have enough of the relevant details that make up that clear pattern (the inaccessible hide on the brick wall). If you feel like you’re guessing or you feel like you need a 3rd party to confirm what you’re seeing, odds are you need more time switching perspectives.
“Do Or Do Not. There Is No Try.” – Yoda
I first heard Yoda’s famous advice to Luke when I was 6 years old watching The Empire Strikes Back on ABC. After crash-landing on the remote swamp planet Degobah, Luke has only one way to get his x-wing fighter out of the monster-infested swamp at the edge of Yoda’s camp: learn the force. Yoda teaches Luke to unlearn what he has learned, to see a rock and his fighter plane as one and the same – Yoda teaches Luke to stop thinking, stop trying, and just do (he also gets free backpack rides, as any good mentor should).
My daughter was able to just do the “adding of stuff” and “turning it to the side” to recreate her drawing from ugly to awesome. She just did it. But, not in a magical way like a Jedi using the force. She’s been obsessed with art from a very young age, spending most of her time at the art table in our basement. She does art like an adult does driving. She spends far more time in a “doing” state than a “trying” state. Outside of public school art classes and the occasional youtube tutorial my daughter has largely enjoyed a self-guided journey in the development of her artistic expression. Her mom and I often pay her for her art and sometimes even request a specific work, but she has not been placed on a path to become an artist. She exists within and beyond a whole world of art in which she’s free to make her own path.
If you’re interested in developing your dog’s inner Puplo Picasso, start by not trying.
Do provide your dog with fun and joyful experiences of any kind. Do provide your dog with a foundation in scent work. Do provide your dog with exposure to a whole world of novel search environments and a wide variety of hide placements. Do not try to make your dog a paint by numbers searcher. Do not try to prevent your dog from ugly searches or to rig your dog’s searches so they all appear to be easy masterpieces. Do not try to fix your dog’s “problems” from a trial search. Let your dog do searching. Let yourself do learning to read and understand your dog.
My daughter went from an ugly drawing to an awesome drawing all by herself at the art table. Could I have stood by her and supported her process? Could I have improved upon her process? Not unless I was all in to experience her journey with her. Could you be all in to experience your dog’s journey?
A search artist needs the freedom to create, destroy and reinvent his approaches to problem-solving if he is going to grow. Some searches will start off ugly or turn ugly, and not end awesomely. Not every search will be a masterpiece. Can you still support your search artist’s process? You can if you learn to flow with your dog, to bring balance to his experiences by “adding stuff” or by “turning it to the side”. It’s up to you to do or do not. If my 10 year old daughter can do it, you can do it, too – just remember not to try.
Happy Sniffing!
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