No big introduction here, I’ll just flip through the Tao Te Ching as I did in an earlier post (click here for that post) and play a little with its relevance to scent work:
Passage 22
Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.
Ok. Those are the opening lines of a longer passage – probably a good place to stop and contemplate.
“Yield And Overcome” – These ancient words are timeless. “Yield and overcome” is supremely important for scent work. Dogs are seriously sensitive to human social cues. You don’t achieve your search goals by being bold and demonstrative (unless you know where hides are), you do it by being subtle and conversational. These words: YIELD and OVERCOME, don’t make sense at first read. Yield sounds like giving up. Overcome sounds like winning. How do you give up and win? If you think of yield in terms of traffic, you yield not to give up on your destination, but to ensure safe travel through transitions. If you think of overcome in the sense of “he was overcome with joy”, he did not win joy, he let joy come over him. So, take care at the transitions and let yourself be overcome with or overcome by your dog’s communication. In scent work we need to be consistent and careful in the way we merge with our dogs during a search. Yielding gives us safe passage – physically and mentally – onto the path the dog is charting for the search. When we allow ourselves to be overcome with or by our dog’s behaviors during a search, we are in a response-able mode, not a fixed-perspective react & reject mode.
So far this summer we are experiencing some really hot trial conditions, affecting dogs and humans in outdoor and indoor searches. If you’re not getting the typical pattern of behavior from your dog in a search, don’t react with disbelief and reject what’s happening, yield and overcome. Merge into the behavior you’re getting from your dog and let yourself be overcome with what needs to happen. This is not a magical fairytale fix to a real problem. This is a real practice with a real possibility of working and a real possibility of not working. It is the practice of how to use the leash, how to adjust your pacing and mindset, how to position your body, how to use verbal communication, how to use reward and praise. It is a finessing of all of these things AND it is a non-logical leap – an insight, a breakthrough – with the hope of sticking the landing and progressing towards mutual understanding. When you watch a human interfere with the dog, impose their will on the dog, refuse to believe the dog – basically, give up on the partnership – you see an absence of finesse and insight, you see a breakdown, not a breakthrough.
If you want to practice finesse in the presence of complexity, start by allowing your dog 2-5 seconds to communicate with you when you are unsure of wether he is working or not. In 2-5 seconds you will either see your dog behave more typically and confirm that he was indeed working or see a more definite dereliction of duty. If you don’t see either display of behaviors, consider that your dog may be experiencing a mental or physical (or both) barrier to advancing on the odor puzzle. That might help you see that your dog is less often distracted or giving up, and more likely caught in a challenge for which he has no clear path forward.
“Bend and be straight” – I think about how often we people want to see our dogs work in straight lines and angles, working objects and environments in relation to their forms rather than working odor in the environment. If you can bend your rules and allow your dog to use arcs, curves and circles you will find that when the dog catches direct odor from source, or solves a complex puzzle and discovers the direction to go to get to a source, the dog will use straight lines, zig zags and sharp turns. Work with your dog’s bendy tendencies in container and vehicle searches and you’ll be amazed at how efficient his moves are. The NW1 vehicle and container searches I judged recently had very vivid examples of dogs who were allowed to bend their way through the environment as they searched for odor edges and direct lines into source. Some of the best container searches began with the dog circling wide around the first four containers, then arcing away from the middle containers, pausing to the right of the containers, zigzagging forward, parallel to the containers, passing the odor container and u-turning dramatically back to it, nosing and sniffing the odor container seams with intense interest. That’s a dog going “straight” to source!
“Empty and be full” – I’m going to focus on a helpful tool you can use when a search is not making sense: empty your mind. Let go of all of your guesses. Control-alt-delete the contents of your frontal lobe. Receive with equanimity whatever your dog communicates to you from that moment forward. Quite often, the meaning that had been eluding you will become clear and your mind will feast on the buffet of relevant behavior from your dog!
I pay careful attention to what humans say when participating in a search with their dogs. Some humans say, “Well, now I’m confused.” Or, “He’s looking around, but he’s not finding anything.” Sometimes a human will say, “He’s just messing around. He’s not even searching.” We humans are filling up our minds with our own answers to problems our dogs are trying to solve and trying to communicate to us, but we no longer have the mental space to receive their communication. It’s so important to remember that when you are blind searching with the potential for complexity (most trial searches) you need to let your dog tell you what is really going on – even if you’re pretty sure you know what’s going on.
“Wear out and be new”– Think of this from a growth perspective. You and your dog cannot be a fixed entity and hope to improve. You have to be willing to grow out of your current image and into a new one. This involves growing pains. It requires letting go of who you think you are as a team and moving towards the team you have yet to become. So many humans want to become this ideal super-searching team with a dog who is fearless and dedicated, fast and intelligent, and a handler who is confident and decisive in all of the ways that enhance the dog’s efforts. It’s possible to be that team, but it doesn’t often unfold as you’d expect.
“Have little and gain”– I liken this to “it’s not win or lose, it’s win or learn.” You might feel like getting very few finds or very few points is not winning by way of “having little”. It is, but you gain from it. You gain by learning. You gain by having more to reach for. You gain by experiencing having little or not winning as mere outcomes – they are not what define you and your dog. Also think of how you might have little knowledge of the number of hides and location of hides in a search until your dog communicates these things to you. It’s very helpful to keep a “have little” mindset so you are optimally positioned to gain. Have little idea of what might be happening in a search area, instead let your dog communicate with you and help you gain understanding. Have little importance placed on who you think your dog is and just react to who he’s being in the search you’re in. Have little to lose and much to gain by resisting the trap of defining yourself and your dog based on the outcomes of your searches.
“Have much and be confused.” – Interesting that having much is linked with being confused. Confusion is at the root of most problems faced by scent work teams. When I judge 30-50 competitors, it becomes clear that hides can be found by luck or as the result of a sound process, or by way of careful navigation through a complex situation. Neither luck nor a sound process will protect you from complexity. And, your performance in a trial – or a handful of trials – gives you very little insight into how you and your dog handle complexity.
I’d like to focus on humans having “much” confidence in their responses and actions during searches. When a human immediately redirects a dog at a boundary or when they move away from a vehicle or container, the human does so with so much confident body language and control over the dog. This sometimes confuses the dog. Especially if the dog was searching for or working in odor. Now, the dog will put his ideas on hold and become curious about the human’s ideas. This will confuse the human. It will give the human a false sense of areas or objects being cleared of the presence of odor or source.
Similarly, if a human has a strong response to a dog who returns to a hide – “YOU GOT THAT ONE GO FIND ANOTHER!!!!”, the level of confidence exuded by the human is staggering. The level of understanding from the human may be almost nonexistent. Imagine a dog returning to a found hide 3 or 4 times and showing unusually intense behavior, and a human who just keeps barking out the order to find more. The human has so much confidence in the cue to find more, but so little understanding of what is really happening. Have much and be confused. If the human just lived the reality that they can’t be sure why the dog is returning to a hide repeatedly, and just observed or subtly questioned the dog’s behavior, the picture might become clearer. Have little and gain.
This is just one passage from the Tao Te Ching, and look how much it provides for discussion! Contained in this passage are some of the building blocks of a mindset and a practice for meeting all search experiences with the optimal grip. A sound practice for partnering with your dog and respectfully navigating complexity will not eliminate struggle and failure from your searches, but it will help guide you through the struggle and failure to growth and understanding.
You can get a copy of the Tao Te Ching here and support the blog.
Happy Sniffing!
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