Analysing videos of your searches – and other people’s – is a fantastic way of getting your “eye-in,” or making up part of Steve White’s “Thousand Hour Eyes.”
Watching a vast number of scenting dogs at work – or even spending many hours watching your own dog working – will help to hone your observational skills. Even if you rely on a trained final indication when your dog sources odour, you’ll notice a variety of behaviour changes before the dog is at source.
But it’s no good telling you to “observe your dog” if you don’t know what you’re looking for, right? Sometimes we can only see things when they are pointed out to us, other times we have one of those “ah-ha” moments when we notice something that the dog does in response to odour.
Here’s a video of a 10-hide search done as a combination of indoors/outdoors.
Apart from the fact that the dog is a veritable ninja, there is a lot to see in this video.
The best thing about looking at search videos after the fact is that you notice details that you may not have seen while you were watching your dog work. I always say that the search is to train the dog and the video is what trains the handler!
Before we get into some of the aspects of this search (there are lots!) worth talking about, a few notes on how I work my dogs and how this dog in particular works.
I do not train a final response behavior. My expectation is a communication at source, but not right in the beginning, with a new dog. I also use verbal marker to mark when the dog is “correct” which predicts that reinforcement is incoming.
In the early stages of training, the marker is given as soon as the dog understands in his own mind that he has found the hide. I develop the “communication” aspect to it later on. I mark the moment the dog knows he’s found the source to ensure that the dog is perfectly clear why they are being rewarded – not for a specific behaviour, but for the very fact of finding the source.
This helps to develop the essential understanding of source aspect of the work.
I train independent search dogs. That’s not to say I don’t support them, and that I won’t, on occasion, make a suggestion, but the goal is to develop the dog’s natural talent and instill in him the confidence to take charge of the search himself.
I do not handle him like a metal detector, he decides in what order he sources the hides.
The training of “concepts” is always forefront of my mind when I’m setting puzzles. I try to stay mindful of elements of the search that the dog needs to understand before we move on.
The dog must understand and care about source, the dog must understand the concept of a hide being “done,” and how to manage the mix of odour and discern which plume leads to an already found hide and choose a different one.
Those are two fundamentals that have to be in place before moving on to the complexity of a search like the one in this video.
I don’t train for “odour obedience” I want them to care about odour, not search for it because they are somehow compelled to.
In this search there are a variety of different intentional puzzles set plus a variety of other odour “puzzles” that occurred simply due to the air movement and the set up.
There are high-to-low close hides (hallway), there is a same odour converging, there is high concentration (outdoors) to low concentration of the same odour (indoors near the bed), there is a lot of odour everywhere in the hallway that needs picking apart.
Those are just some of the puzzles the dog needs to figure out.
These hides were aged for about 45 minutes. Let’s have a look at the search and then make some observations.
Let’s look at some observations that we can make about this video. There are many things to see here, but here are some that stand out:
Note how the dog understands source.
Wait! Don’t all dogs understand source? Nope. We often see dogs who understand they are looking for odour, but the Concept of Source is a lot more than just “the highest concentration of odour” (which, hint: may not always be at source ).
See how the dog doesn’t “clear” each different room before moving on.
But wait! Shouldn’t we get them to clear areas? No, the skilled, experienced dog must work the odour puzzle as he sees fit. The greater the skill, the greater the efficiency.
Searching via odourr particles in the air is very different from searching with eyes: the information about the hide may not in fact be terribly close to the hide (or it might be).
Watch how the dog searches in different “layers.”
He searches high, low, and look at how he moves as he separates out the different threads of odour that lead to different hides.
Note, on this point, how he will go past a hide to source a different one. But why? Because just like when you are concentrating on one task, getting distracted by a different task simply interrupts the flow. So when he’s committed to following the threads of one source, he is not sidelined by another.
See how after the terminal marker, the reward comes, but the handler doesn’t encourage any unnecessary movement or change in arousal level.
Nor does the handler suggest where the dog should go next – this is VERY important. The dog makes his own decision about where to go next.
This also speaks to the recovery between hides: how quickly the dog can move from a place of “ooh yummy reward” to working what he was doing.
In a complex puzzle like this, the dog has to remember what hides he has already found. Not just so that he doesn’t re-indicate, but also so he doesn’t waste time on working the odour plume of an already found hide.
How does he know? Because he is magic, a creature of the wind, and because he has been progressively trained to discern the difference and to understand it as a concept.
In a search like this there is odour everywhere, there is no specific point where we can discern that the “dog encounters odour” because it’s simply all around like an “odour soup.”
But you can clearly see his change of behavior when he chooses which molecules to work, the almost-equivalent of “encounters odour.” I like to call it encountering workable odour.
And look! He’s not a robot!
He is distracted by a courier delivering something so he stops and stares intently. I clear my throat and say something, and he chooses to go back to work.
Note that this interruption didn’t affect his memory or his ability to immediately return to what he was working on. Additionally, note the handler memory error! Not paying for the 9th hide – for some odd reason I thought he had re-indicated. I was wrong.
These are just some of the observations we can see. I can see many, many more, which could be the topic for another day.
This is an excellent example of a dog with exceptionally good skills who understands the concepts required to perform a complex search with confidence, independence, and efficiency.
As a handler, it is my privilege to support him and enjoy the front row seat watching the beauty of the scenting dog at work.
Any questions? Thoughts? Put ’em in the comments below