Are you always worried about running out of time? Don’t feel you’ve covered the whole area? What about searches with unknown numbers of hides?
It’s a common question and here in New Zealand, one that’s discussed a lot. Many handlers are quite happy with the allocated times for their searches, but others not so much.
So let’s take a look at what’s important in a trial search and why continually timing out may not be that there’s “not enough time.”
In my opinion, when a dog doesn’t find all the hides, very rarely is the answer “they needed more time” (note I said rarely, not “never”).
There are many reasons why a dog may miss hides, particularly in a multiple-hide search – and if after four minutes your dog has not located the three hides in Dogs New Zealand Excellent level, for example then it’s likely that’s a good time to stop anyway.
There is nothing to be gained by walking your dog around, showing them where you want them to sniff, and overhandling so it becomes just “obedience with targeting.”
There are a number of reasons that folks can time out on a three-hide search, including but not limited to:
- the puzzle was too difficult for that dog on that day
- the hides were wonky as a result of changing environmental conditions
- the dog was simply not “feeling it” that day, they aren’t robots
- overhandling and keeping your dog in unproductive areas too long
- searching from a human perspective rather than from a dog perspective
Excessively long searches will more often than not end up with the dogs looking flat and dejected being shown where to search, leaving the “covering” of the area to the handler, and not actually hunting.
Scentwork or nosework or whatever anyone wants to call it, is at it’s very core a “hunting” game, tapping into all the instincts and joy of the dog hunting for something and finding it – or not.
Is the only definition of success finding all the hides? In my opinion, no.
Ask yourself (yes, novice handlers, too): how often do you finish a search at a hide vs. while the dog is still hunting? How often do you capture the focus and joy of the hunt, regardless of whether they locate the hide or not?
How long does it take your dog to find hides at home? This is a good indication of your dog’s ability to cast out for odour, catch a thread, and work it to source. If you’re doing a three-hide search at a trial (Excellent level, Dogs New Zealand) you have four minutes.
Four minutes is a long time.
If your dog finds none, one, two, or three hides in that time, celebrate! Spend more time in training allowing your dog to cover search areas themselves, hunting for that first thread of odour.
Dogs see a search area as a vibrant watercolor of different levels and depths, they don’t see a table and chairs and a couple of old fridges in the middle.
The usable information for the hide might be on the other side of the room – if you make the dog walk around in a specific way, there’s a good chance the dog will miss a vital piece of information that they could have found themselves, and used that information to find source.
More time in a trial doesn’t equal more success.
And what even IS success? Are we focusing on the piece of cardboard or are we focusing on having a front row seat watching our own Best Scenting Dog in the World doing their thing?
Of course it’s disappointing not to qualify, that’s why we go to trials, right, to test our skills. And one of those skills is knowing when to stop. Stop the search, the dog doesn’t have to find all the hides as the only measure of success.
So for those just moving up to the higher levels and feeling that four minutes is not enough time, I challenge you to consider whether it is in fact too much time!
If the dog is not yet equal to the task of solving the puzzle and finding all three hides, then that’s OK, your dog needs more exposure to the sort of puzzles presented in the trial. Rarely does the dog require more time being moved around the search area by the handler.
So what to do? Focus your training sessions on a variety of different setups. Note your dog’s average “time to first hide” – this is not to be competitive, there is no right or wrong, but if your dog is generally taking more than a minute to find the first hide in training, you may have to rethink your setups.
There are a variety of factors that go into setting up your training hides – note I said “training,” not “practice” – and the first one is ensuring that the dog has a lot of success, especially in the early days.
We want to set hides that are just challenging enough, but rewarding enough to keep the dog in the game. If hides are too hard, too early, then they can feel overwhelmed and become distracted. Sniffing the ground, checking out, looking at the handler for help – you know the drill.
And that’s not the point at which you should step in and help. Your “help” should be rethinking your hide placements. And please don’t show your dog the hide if they can’t find it for themselves!
For these motivational searches, you should be setting hides that your dog can find within 30 to 50 seconds, preferably on the lower end of that scale.
Once you’ve done a lot of motivational, highly rewarding searches, then you can start adding complexity. Make your search areas larger, start downwind of the hide, set hides that encourage the dog to cast out for odour, to really search, or add a second or third hide.
And don’t be afraid to abort a search! Sometimes you can let searches go on a bit longer, but on the whole you want your training setups to be doable in one to two minutes. We build endurance slowly and carefully.
We want to build motivated, confident, skilled scenting dogs.
Have you timed out in a search at a trial? What happened? Let us know about it in the comments section below, and feel free to ask any questions!