Canine Nose Work

Dog News had an article, and I chased down the website after being prompted by a friend, so here it is: National Association of Canine Scent Work, inventors of the sport of K9 Nose Work.

It's an interesting sort of thing: training scent detection without having to use cadaver, which is icky and often requires some legal reason to have it, or drugs, which require a DEA certificate of some kind (I've asked, and had no answer, how one gets certified). Instead you go to your friendly local holistic-goods store, pick up a vial each of sweet birch and clove and a scattering of aniseeds, and you're good to go.

Of course, all three scents are quite penetrating, and my house now smells of birch beer. Luckily I like birch beer. I have a gauze pad saturated with all three odors sealed in a baggie, inside a box, inside another baggie which also contains the original bottles and seeds. The dogs are enjoying the find-the-pad game.

According to the Dog News article, the organization trainers teach the dogs to hunt for treats first, then pair the treats with the target scent (they start with just birch), then remove the treats. They say "On average, most teams train for at least one year prior to entering their first NACSW sanctioned trial."

I'm doing it differently, teaching my dogs that when they sniff the baggie, and they are curious sorts every one, they should sit. If they find the open baggie, they should sniff and sit. When they do, they get a treat. As I said, the baggie contains all three scents. My logic is, you can train a cadaver dog on as complete a sample as possible, then expect him to figure out that just bone, just fat, or just skin also all count. It may take longer to get the dogs to alert on birch alone than with their method, but they'll be doing aniseed every bit as soon.

So far, all of them, even the old geezer whose nose and ears are both getting iffy, are getting the hang of sniff-and-sit. Bruce even chased the baggie on a fling across the kitchen and poked his nose in, then sat wagging like mad and waiting for his goodie. This is, mind you, after three weeks of erratic training. I think they'll be able to do all three scents separately or together in a fairly short time, and then we can take the show on the road, into the cars, into the sheds, and everywhere else we can think to work. For now we're just working on go, sniff, sit as though this is an obedience combination.

Scentwork for Show Dogs: Stage 2

Two posts ago, I talked about training your dog to associate an open crate door with the idea of going straight to you. Once he has been taught that basic concept, it's time to start the real work: developing his skills.

So far, he's been working in simple settings. He comes to you across grass and in a famliar and low-distraction building. Now you step it up a little at a time. You cross a sidewalk, a driveway, or a ditch. Once he's mastered each, you go along a hedge and duck behind the end. Have a partner put a crosstrail across your intended path before you run it. Later, have that partner do it afterward. Add one scent article, surface, or other new element at a time, and hammer at that one until your dog knows how to get past it -- which may take one try or ten.

Indoors, stop ducking around doorways and start ducking into closets with the door pulled to, and then totally closed. Let him find you in the bathroom, in the basement, in the car in the garage, wherever your house and grounds permit.

When he gets good at using his nose and solving problems, and he's really focused on the game, you can get together with a few kennel-club buddies for Stage 3.

Unequal Partnership, Canines, and

White Collar on USA.I admit it. It’s an addiction.

This past episode, though, was also food for thought as a dog person. I’ve had a canine partner – not just a pet, or a buddy, though she was both, but an actual working partner. The sort of dog who’d consider working with someone else, maybe, if she really liked and respected that person. The sort of dog where I’d have to really like and respect that other person to be comfortable handing over the leash for even a minute.

What does that have to do with a USA show where the Golden Retriever is used only as a family prop, and not even a bearer of listening devices? Well…

In this last episode, Neal the con artist and FBI consultant, out of jail on a sort of work release program, is handed over to a different agent instead of his usual Peter. Peter has caught him twice, and their relationship has its antagonistic moments, but neither much likes the idea. The new agent chooses not to make use of Neal’s talents, sending him to the car when he tries to make himself useful and not terribly happy when Neal manages to learn something regardless. Peter, for his part, is anxious over handing over his partner in a way most people wouldn’t be over a fellow adult human.

On the other hand, it’s exactly like the anxiety when a handler has to let someone else mess with his dog.

Peter and Neal aren’t equals. Peter can put Neal back in jail at any time, and generally reminds him of this once per episode. Neal wears a collar for all practical purposes, an ankle-bracelet tracker which he slips when personal interest and the plot require it (“I came back,” he points out when returning for it.) He works rather better for Peter, who takes an interest in what he has to say and respects that he can sniff out information not available to the average or even the extraordinary FBI employee, than for the new handler.

And “handler” it is. USA has created a show with a great deal of relevance to dog trainers without having a star who sheds, drools (in this case, the fandom does the drooling) or has a sudden lapse on the English language. A good intelligent dog has a lot in common with Neal: he’ll sniff out all sorts of interesting things, and if the leash is too loose and the motivations for hanging around are insufficient, he’ll be off to pursue his own agenda for a bit. If he likes you well enough, or fears the consequences of solitude enough, he’ll be back. He’ll settle in on your couch and cozy up to your spouse without meaning too dreadfully much by it. He’d prefer high-quality accommodations to basic kenneling, and given half a chance he’ll improve them himself if you don’t. (“Off the bed!” “Yeah, right. You want me to work all day after sleeping in that drafty box?” Count yourself lucky if your search dog doesn’t try to insist on Italian roast.) He prefers also to know what’s going on before offering his input, just to be sure you and he are on the same page, and he may give you a good heap of irrelevance if the mood strikes him. After all, what’s your training buddy getting lost again compared to the tantalizing aroma of dead deer?


And yet, if you manage things right and don’t screw up too often, and you can loosen your preconceived notions of your dog as servant or captive, you have an excellent partner. “The smart one is on that end of the leash,” I’d sometimes say, and mean it, and the smart one seemed to get that she was being complimented. Most of the time she respected me enough to take it as such. She also seemed at times to arch her eyebrows with a look that suggested, You don’t know the half of it.

Commands and Communication

"Training your dog's nose" may be an inaccurate title. The average dog knows how to use his nose just fine, just as readily and easily as you use your eyes. The trick is not in teaching his nose; it's teaching him a vocabulary.

My last scenting dog, Sunny, started off with "Search" to find airborne scent and "Find another one." The latter was useful for tracking: find another thing with the tracklayer's scent on it, and another, and another -- surprise! Those footprints in between link them up. From there we developed "Track."

What I didn't specifically train for some time was article search without a connecting track. However, one fine day, I needed to have a key in my car to run the air conditioner and another to lock it while I was not in it. In finally shutting everything down and leaving the car, I lost one of the two keys. Several hours later, returning to the car, I discovered this. Note: gray plastic-and-steel key, gray parking lot, nighttime with depth-perception-destroying sodium lights. I went home and collected Sunny, then went back.

I showed her my keyring and told her "Take scent," a command she already knew. Then I pointed to the ground as though we were tracking and said "Search" as though we were air-scenting. She looked puzzled for a moment, thoughtful for a second moment, then put her nose down and began casting around.

A few sweeps of the nose later, she took a few steps straight ahead, looked back at me to say quite plainly, "Is this what you wanted? You need new glasses," and lay down on my key. Twelve feet from where we'd started, it had been completely invisible to me. To her, it stood out just fine. Since we could communicate pretty well, she had figured out the key was probably what I'd had in mind, and since I use positive training, she was willing to take a chance on guessing.

When evaluating a training system, whether for scentwork or otherwise, it's worth asking, "What else can I get from this?" In this case, by working from a "Find another one" tracking system from Mary Adelman's method and also making sure my dog knew air scent was a useable and viable option, I "bought two, got article search free." Later, when we took up trailing, which relies on air scent deposited along any surface to which skin rafts can stick, it was far less work than it would have been starting from scratch because my dog knew about scent flows and footprints. Extending the metaphor, we took trailing at a discount.