We all use patterning and context cues when working our nosework dogs, and in many cases to great effect. See a line of containers? Yup, it’s a container search. A few vehicles? Yup, that’ll be a vehicle search.
But… do our dogs look at a line of containers and think “containers” and basically work on autopilot?
Well, let’s test that! We never want our dogs to lose sight (that should really be “smell”) that Odour is King!
This drill involves setting out a line of cold containers and placing the hide somewhere other than in a container. It can be a crack hide (as shown in this video example) or off to the side on some furniture, items, or plants in the search area.
In this example, I’m using two crack hides in a line of containers. Make sure your dog understands how to source crack hides before you try this!
Make your start line such that the dog will encounter the containers first.
What does your dog do? Does he diligently check each container or does he work the air? What do you do? Do you handle this search differently from how you would handle a search knowing that there is odour in one of the containers?
Setups like this also challenge us as handlers. Containers and vehicles are the elements where – without fail – I see the most overhandling taking place. If you could never be sure that a line of containers meant that there was odour in one of them, how would you change your handling?
I like to keep consistent handling across all four elements. Containers do provide context to the dog and since we start containers quite early on in our scentwork journey, our dogs often know to check them. But what we don’t want to promote is the dog simply being patterned to check containers without taking note of what the whole odour picture looks like.
After all, if a dog is absolutely committed to finding odour, does he really need to check all the containers before communicating? There are a lot of discussions regarding this and much confusion abounds, especially when comparing sports dogs to professional detection dogs.
As an example: a medical detection dog absolutely needs to check all samples because the handler requires a “positive-negative” – that is to say, a clear indication that the dog has checked the sample as dismissed it as negative. In sports, we only require the dog to find the odour. This is a subtle, but important difference.
What we don’t want to do is create dogs that as soon as they see containers assume that odour can only be within one of those containers. Worse still, that they know there is odour present and end up falsing on a container because it “can’t be anywhere else.”
Start this drill with something relatively simple, and then you can move on and make it a bit harder by setting up a fan so that the odour pools on the containers, or set up your hide as a threshold, before the dog even gets to the containers.
If you are working an inexperienced dog, ensure that the hide is not pooling on the containers and that it is far enough away (not miles away!) that the dog isn’t going to be confused. In the example shown above, this dog is very experienced and so the crack hides were deliberately placed near the containers.
Afterwards, remove the hide and place a hot container out and run it as a container search.
Be sure to start with one hide unless your dog is completely reliable about moving off one hide and sourcing the other one without your input.
Give it a try and feel free to post your video! Questions? Put ’em in the comments section below.