A Trial Is Not Your Odor Playlist, It’s Search Radio

I recently judged an Elite trial in Eden Prairie, MN on a hot weekend at an arts school. When I judge I make every effort to record some of what I see and hear during the search on the competitor’s score sheet. I find that when you are the competitor, you will often totally misremember details of the search, such as things you said or did. Video is helpful to get an objective record of what occurred during the search, however, you might watch the video and not pay attention to certain parts because you don’t find them relevant. What I record on your score sheet are often the details that people overlook, the details I think are most relevant in times of complexity.

I don’t get copies of the score sheets, so I have to try and remember what I wrote. Mostly, it’s one particular aspect of a search that creates problems for teams, so I’m writing slight variations on the same theme. I can recall with great accuracy the searches where I write very little on the score sheets and the searches where I write paragraphs. At this particular Elite trial, both searches I judged had themes to their complexity: the first search had the dreaded “in odor, lacking progress” complexity; the second search had the “keep calling false alerts, losing my confidence” complexity.

Here are some thoughts from my perspective as judge…

There’s Nothing On The Radio

Remember the old days when you had to listen to the radio sometimes? You had no other options – no cassette player, no CDs, no 8-track, no Sirius XM. You might scroll through the FM dial and complain, “there’s nothing to listen to!” Obviously, every station is playing a song or an advertisement – or at least hissing with static. What you really meant is what you want to listen to isn’t playing.

The first Elite search I judged at this trial was a known number (5 hides) interior search with 6 minutes. The area consisted of 4 rooms of various sizes, the hallway connecting all of the rooms was out of play.

What I knew as the judge was that the closest room to the start line was blank, the second closest room had a deep inaccessible, the third room had two hides, a difficult to source high hide and a straightforward hide on a chair, and the fourth and final room had two elevated close hides (3.5ft high and within 6-10ft of each other) and a lot of swirling, collecting odor.

What many competitors came to express as they experienced this search was: there’s nothing on the radio.

Room 1: Static – The blank room quickly took on odor from the other rooms and tended to draw the attention of some dogs, but for most dogs they reached the doorway and knew that room 1 was the collection point not the origination of the odor. That would be helpful if the humans saw it that way, but the majority of humans wanted to see the dogs search room 1 before moving on…

Once in room 1, most dogs pushed all the way to the back, showed mild interest in a few odor collection points, then headed to the door. Most humans were uncomfortable with a portion of the room right by the door not being physically searched, so they would use various confident tactics to control the dog to search that area. In response to the confident command of the human, a handful of dogs got really involved in a filing cabinet, a cubicle wall, and a desk.

The humans seemed to be fishing for clarity in room 1, convincing the dog that a radio station playing static isn’t right and a fair amount of tuning should occur before accepting dead air. Most dogs were incapable of finding a song of source in the static in room 1, even the dogs whose humans called false alerts. I guess you could say the most the dog could find was a jingle advertising the local heating and air specialists (Blue Ox Heating and Aaaaiiiir… for you Minnesota folks), but no actual song.

Room 2: Punk Rock – After some amount of time spent twisting the tuning knob in room 1, room 2 was definitely a station playing the sounds of scent. The hide was deep in a collection of tables pushed tightly together against one wall. Nearly every human saw their dog come into the room, pass the tables and have a change of behavior. Many dogs disappeared under the tables and did a tight bracket, casting left to right and narrowing to a specific table. Some dogs stopped deep under the tables and stared back out at their humans.

A number of humans recognized this behavior and called alert. Then there were the humans that seemed to know this behavior was important, but they left. It was as if they said, “oh, this sounds like Green Day, but I only like that one song they play – you know, that one? Whatever it’s called?… I hate Green Day except for the one song that’s not playing so let’s change the station.”

Some people tried to come back to Room 2 late in the search, but just didn’t have the time. Ironically, that is the one Green Day song most people know…

Do you have the time to listen to me whine

about everything and nothing all at once

I am one of those

Melodramatic fools

Neurotic to the bone

No doubt about it

Opening Lines of Basket Case by Green Day

So, room 2 really just felt like humans who wanted to change the station because the song that was playing wasn’t “that one song” that they know & like, it was just “a song” from the same band. Put in scent work terms, a human might say: “My dog never sourced. He never told me about a hide. He never did what he always does when he finds it.” Same band, different song…

It’s probably a good idea to learn as many of your dog’s songs of source as you can – the chart topping patterns of behavior and the “b-side” behaviors. Your dog is the kind of lead searcher that can improvise a new song of source when he gets inspired (presence of odor from the deep inaccessible), so you want to be the kind of partner who can spot a new hit single (change of behavior, bracket, intense sniffing, fixating in one location, persisting) and give it a catchy title: Alert!

Two rooms in and I think we can gather that the dogs understand what’s going on before the humans. And, the humans are often lurching between concern that if they don’t make a commitment to a call they’ll be leaving one behind and concern that if they do make a commitment to a call they might be wrong. I wonder if most humans come to these searches hoping to hear their favorite odor playlist, the one with quick finds, fun hide locations, clear energetic behaviors from the dog, and no complexity to become concerned about…

A few humans actually seemed pretty happy to tune into whatever was playing on search radio. These teams bypassed room 1 in favor of room 2 (only a couple teams decided room 1 did not need to be entered at all). In room 2 a good number of the humans recognized the tune of the dog bracketing under the tables and confidently called alert. Some humans got intense interest from their dogs throughout room 2, and really enjoyed their dogs’ problem-solving efforts until the ticking clock and the remaining two rooms cut the song short; much like one experiences when a radio station plays American Pie, but cuts it 4 minutes short. And they were singing, bye bye inaccessible hide…

Room 3: College Radio – This room had a chair hide which was often the first (and sometimes the only) alert call made for teams. It also had the high inaccessible hide that only a handful of teams called alert to.

I love listening to my local “college radio” station (it’s really Minnesota Public Radio’s all music station), The Current. They play an eclectic mix of music, and often drop gems into my ears, like Monkberry Moon Delight by Paul McCartney. On holiday weekends they will sometimes do a “block rocking weekend” and play 3 songs in a row from the same artist. When that’s not happening, I sometimes wish it were. When I hear one Big Thief song, I tend to want two more.

In room 3 when a human witnessed his dog have a snappy head turn and dip his muzzle under a chair, settling just so where the frame of the chair meets the edge of the seat, that human would call alert, get a ‘yes!’ and then hope for 2 (or 4) more songs just like that. What they got instead was something like a Bjork song (everyone says you’ll like it, but you find it unlistenable) or a Johnny Greenwood instrumental from There Will Be Blood (moody, unnerving, no happy ending).

The high hide was on the opposite wall from the chair hide, and was probably 6ft high behind a laminated 8x12in sheet clipped to the top corner of a white board. Many humans appeared to have reactions to their dogs’ behavior changes along the white board marker ledge, up the white board and wall at various points to the left, right and beneath the location of the hide, and along a collection of folded up desks opposite the white boards, and to the left of the chair hide.

Obviously, for the humans I’m describing, their perspective was not one of confidence in the behavior that they were seeing or they’d have called alert. Most humans made the decision to leave the room while the dog was still working. Some made false calls where odor collected at the folded up desks.

For the small number of humans who called alert to the high hide, only one or two showed signs of concern that the call would be regretted. The others appeared confident and pleasantly surprised.

Being able to accept whatever song is playing next – especially when you’ve just jammed out to a personal favorite – is a huge help in this type of search.

Room 4: 80s Rock Dueling Guitars – Room 4 was a science classroom with high top work stations and by far the most labyrinthine of all the rooms. If you were really hoping for Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, you were very unhappy when you stepped into room 4 and got blasted with Foreigner and Rush.

Some teams had less than a minute to wade through the soaring vocals, insane guitar riffs and complex drum rhythms of the two elevated, somewhat close together hides.

Many people found 1 of the 2 hides, then became erratic and pushed and pulled the dog through the room in an attempt to avoid the found hide and find another (or 4).

Either people were desperate to get closer to 5 hides found or they were convinced there was more than 1 hide in the room (or both), because most humans showed confidence in the dog’s choice to stay in the room.

Some people really wanted to see a positive conclusion to all of the dog’s behavior, but they were battling the clock and the dogs were not done riffing with the hides, so the humans would take a chance and call a false alert on the work station between the two hides.

I’d like to think room 4 was different than rooms 2 and 3 simply by the energy the dogs displayed and the commitment the people displayed. In room 2, people were not pressed for time, but many still couldn’t make the commitment to the dog’s behavior under the tables. In room 3 most people fun, flashy pop song hide and didn’t stick around for the experimental avant garde trip hop electro pop hide. Had room 4 been at the start of the search, it would have been an arena rock experience with a high energy finish.

For a number of dogs, the 2 hides in room 4 were not a Foreign(er) concept, and they searched for them with an Urgent Emergency. These dogs would work the first hide to source (which one would vary) and then chase down the second hide, circling work stations, sniffing the corners of table tops intensely, shredding notes of odor all around the found hide until they hit an extended note and power slid into the second hide, bringing cheers from their fans (their human, me, timer, videographer)!

Overall, this 5 hide, 4 room search was an exercise in accepting what’s playing on search radio, even if it’s static, even if it’s weird, even if you don’t like it or you don’t have enough time to jam out to it.

Most dogs were willing to share what was playing on search radio in this search – and they were being honest. Some dogs really loved the search and some were bummed by it. Interestingly, even if a dog seemed to love the search, the human might not have felt the same vibes, in which case opportunities for alert calls came and went. It helps to remember that trials are not your odor playlists. You might turn the dial on search radio and discover none of your favorite hides or search areas. You can either be sad mad frustrated, or you can let go of wishing for your favorite songs of odor and try grooving to whatever’s playing.

Cover Band At The Mirrored Hides Ball

I don’t meet too many scent work people who aren’t familiar with “mirrored hides” – hides that appear to be the mirror image of each other. In fact, many people practice this type of hide placement and presumably feel good about their practice sessions. Yet, when these setups appear in competition, they are rarely as simple and clear as in practice.

This was the case for the art room search with its concrete floors and high ceilings, art tables and stools for seating, and it’s 4 mirrored hides. This search was a range or unknown and had about 3:30-4 minutes search time. Two art tables next to each other and close to the start of the search each had two hides, all on stools. If you were facing the tables from the start, each table’s stool hides were on the left side of the table, roughly 6 feet apart.

The searchable area was medium/large, and the odor was moving throughout the area and collecting in the out of bounds portion of the room (as odor is want to do) deep into the area and furthest away from the start line and the hides.

I had to say ‘no, sorry’ (sometimes the sorry is conveyed in the delivery of the ‘no’) a fair number of times in this search. I’m not sure if some people were hide hungry (this was late in the day and competitors get pretty good at calculating expected number of hides vs number currently found) or what, but something was going on.

I think of false alerts like cover bands – they play a familiar band’s songs and maybe even sound pretty good, but can they ever sound like the original*. Probably not – at least in theory. Could I believe a cover band is the original band under the right circumstances? You bet. What are those circumstances? If someone cues up a song on their phone and tells me this is a new Imagine Dragons song, I’d be less likely to expect it’s the cover band, Imaginary Dragons (I think I made that name up). If I go to a concert and everything points to the real Imagine Dragons performing, but my seats are so far back from the stage I can’t even see the jumbotron clearly, I might believe a cover band was the real thing. Realistically, I should either be able to tell Dan Reynolds voice from an impostor, or recognize the physical appearance of Dan and his bandmates versus impostors. If I can see and hear the band members, I should rarely be fooled.

*when I think false alert, I am thinking about a human’s choice to make a call, not a dog’s behavior that we might label true or false. I don’t think a dog with a solid imprint on odor has false behavior, he has behaviors along a spectrum from high confidence sourcing to low confidence area of importance. We are the ones responsible to discern the meaning behind the behavior.

So, when it comes to false alerts in this search, what separates the actual hides from the cover band hides? Actual hides reliably produce a set of behaviors in the dog that progresses towards a specific location and resolves to an indication with persistence. Cover band hides don’t have a specific location and there is nothing to persist at. Some actual hides can be unsourceable and have no resolution. Some cover band hides can have an area of interest that includes a place or places that the dog targets (although rarely with persistence in a very compressed time frame). So, it’s not realistic to expect you will always be able to detect the presence or absence of a hide based on your dog’s behavior – we’re not talking perfection, we’re talking most probable outcome.

There was one opening act cover band hide performance and one headliner cover band hide performance in the art room search.

The stage for the headliner cover band hide was just beyond the 4 stool hides (maybe 10ft) there was an AV desk with some small wastebaskets gathered around one end. Numerous dogs showed energetic behaviors around the desk and the wastebaskets, some dogs sniffed into one of the wastebaskets and pulled their heads out with a curious look to their humans. Some dogs left the desk and returned later on with the same interest and behaviors.

Of the dogs who elicited false calls from their humans, a small subset genuinely exhibited intense behaviors, numerous behaviors, progression towards a place, fixation, indication and persistence. You gotta respect a great performance, cover band hide or not. I would never suggest to a competitor that they should spot a fake when there’s no evidence other than me knowing where the hides are.

Other than that subset of dogs, most of the others lacked progression towards a place, fixation, indication and persistence. These dogs were interested in the cover band hide, but it didn’t fool them. Still, the humans made false calls.

The opening act cover band hide only lured a couple humans into false calls, but it drew the attention of a number of teams. The stage for this performance was an empty shelving unit just to the left of the start and maybe 3 feet ahead of the tables with the stool hides. Dogs searched the shelving unit from low to high and “paint brushed” their heads across its surfaces, pulling up and away from the shelving unit. No dog showed intense bracketing or darting, twirling head movements, or rapid scenting to a specific location. I could see why a human might take a chance and call a potentially unsourceable hide, but this cover band hide was not even fooling those humans who got the ‘no’.

What makes an actual hide from a human’s perspective? I think human’s use more than the dog’s behavior. I think it is the area the dog is behaving in. For example, very few humans will call alert if a dog is showing convincing behavior on a solid concrete floor or solid flat painted wall with no outlets, light switches, or other places to conceal a hide. Most humans become very comfortable to call alert if the dog is showing convincing behavior around a chair, desk, trash can, AV cart, license plate, wheel, etc.

I think once a human defines a hide, not just based on the dog’s behavior, but based on where the behavior is occurring, it becomes easier to mistake a cover band hide for a real hide.

What about the group of competitors whose dogs gave a good long listen to the cover band hides and walked away? Some of these teams were lucky. The same reluctance that saved some of them from the Reet Hot Chili Peppers of cover band hides may have also prevented them from calls on real hides in the 4 room search. From my perspective, a good deal of the humans who decided not to buy a ticket to the cover band hides were just doing a nice job of recognizing their dogs were not finding a real hide. This doesn’t mean the humans were confident about their assessment, but they knew it was the most probable outcome.

One More Song!

A handful of humans had to experience the odor mosh pit, being pushed around through the search area with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ calls, alternating between joy and terror. For some humans, a ‘no’ translates to “I can’t trust my dog or myself for the rest of this search”. For others, a ‘no’ call is not about trust, the human already trusts the dog to communicate, both dog and human are giving their best listen to the song of odor, and best doesn’t mean perfect.

One team I watched had 1 hide to find with time ticking away and ended up buying a ticket to the cover band hide performing at the shelving unit. The dog did not show sourcing or indicating behavior, the human called alert and got the ‘no’, she paid her dog and let the dog lead her, and this time her dog led her to the remaining stool hide and she immediately saw the behaviors of sourcing and called alert and finish!

While I really don’t like to say ‘no’ in these trials, I feel confident that everyone will get fooled by a cover band hide at some point. That said, if you’re consistently paying for a show to The Faux Fighters or Deft Leppard, brush up on your dog’s behavior patterns. I really find it useful to watch for lots of head movement and/or persistence on a short time scale. For example, if there would have been a source in one of the trash cans it’s more believable if you watch the dog stick his head in the can and keep it in there while sniffing rapidly and intensely and moving his head and nose in tight darting circles; or, if your dog pulls his head out of the can and very quickly drops his head back into the can – not the top rim of the can or the outside of the can or the side of the desk, it’s got to be a rapid return to the same place.

If your dog believes you are consistent in your response to his behavior patterns, then it becomes quite helpful to your dog when you don’t respond to potential cover band hides, but instead give your dog a chance to show a pattern of behavior that demands you call alert or a pattern of behavior that makes it clear there is no source to indicate to and no alert call to be made. This does not mean you’ll always make the perfect call, it means you’ll consistently make the most likely call while also feeling better about the process you use to make your decisions.

Your Scent Work Team’s Greatest Hits

It’s not uncommon for a human to have one trial where all or most of the searches feel like they came right off the team’s odor playlist, and then have another trial where most of the searches made their ears bleed like the shower scene music from the movie Psycho. In part, I think this is because trials are not curated to your team’s likes – no official is using an algorithm to track your team’s strengths and practice searches to come up with a trial that perfectly fits your playlist. The trial really is the radio of searches. It plays the tunes it plays. No playlists, no favorite stations, no skipping songs.

By all means, play your scent work greatest hits as often as you like, but remember to subject yourself to search radio – to your least favorite stations, your most feared or hated songs of scent, the static of blank areas, the jingles of collecting odor, the cover band hides… Learn to accept whatever is playing when you and your dog tune into search radio and you might just find your odor playlist starts growing.

Happy Sniffing!