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.

Trailing: Learning From Marble Cake

Today's lesson in scent theory is a little different. If you have never made a marble cake, step one for this lesson is "Buy a cake mix for marble cake" and step two is "Follow the directions until you have one cake pan of pale batter and one bowl of dark." Take up a small ladle and use it to drizzle a trail which starts thin and ends with a good blob. The thin start is your starting point and the blob is your victim.

Now take a knife and draw it across the line you just made. A deer just crossed your trail -- see what it did to the hanging scent? It's been drawn sideways into a point. If your dog were to follow the scent exactly, you might think she was "crittering." How can you check which she's doing? Let her have her head for a minute and see if she comes back to the line you were on. If she doesn't usually pursue deer, then she's probably not going to start now, and she'll have learned something important about how scent is moved. A car or bicycle will draw scent similarly, so work crossings on low-traffic streets where only one vehicle is likely to have passed between the trail's laying and running.

Now take the knife to a different part of your cake trail and pass it back and forth across the same spot several times. This is a higher-traffic street or footpath. If the scent was hanging heavily to start with, the dog would understandably believe that the person had gone three ways at once. Rather than letting her make an arbitrary decision, teach her to cross the thoroughfare first and check the other side, then choose a path after checking down the straight line. Your training partner should show your dog a straightaway first. Once your dog has mastered a straight-line crossing of a traffic-muddled scent, she can learn that the victim may also turn to travel along the road. If she learns the turn first, though, you may have trouble convincing her that the straight line is possible.

Now finish following the directions on the box and enjoy the results!

Scent and the Aging Dog

As your dog gets older, he may lose some of his sensory abilities. You're probably used to thinking of him as getting hard of hearing, or maybe a little blind, but the nose can weaken too. His olfactory powers may not be what they used to be, or, as the Lady and the Tramp line would have it, "You mean you don't smell as good as you used to?"

This morning, we had a little evidence of this. I took the shepherds out to play ball, a perfectly ordinary morning activity. Tasha chased hers; McCoy (pictured in his favorite spot) danced out and looked back at me at exactly the wrong moment as usual. The ball bounced behind him, hit a tussock, and disappeared behind a tree.

And when I say disappeared, I mean disappeared. Half an hour of looking and we still haven't found it, though we all had a bit of exercise from trying. Usually I rely on the dogs' noses at least as much as on my sense of sight, but they couldn't find it either. Part of this is that Dustin and Tasha both figure McCoy's ball is his lookout and they aren't much help. Part of this is that he really doesn't have much sense of smell anymore. It's times like this that I really miss Sunny's help, as she was the only one willing to accept a possessive form in a sentence: she understood that "Find McCoy's ball," meant "I know that your toy is in my hand and you don't have to tell me about that one; look for the missing one."

Dustin, on the other hand, feels that if I have a ball in my hand, there's no need to go questing elsewhere for a different one. Tasha's feelings are less clear, but she's also less bonded to me, so the vibe I usually get from her is that if I can't find it myself I'm not good for much.

My best guess is that when Dustin looped behind the tree he came out the other side with McCoy's ball, then dropped it somewhere when I threw his own. Now, I thought his jaws were empty the whole time, but if they were, the aliens have beamed McCoy's ball away for DNA testing. I would quite sympathize if they want to replicate the German Shepherd on their own planet, and I'd much rather they beamed up the ball than the dog (and since he's neutered, the DNA may as well come from his saliva as anywhere), but since he never actually caught the thing today, those aliens are going to be working with some very stale spittle.

Most likely, though, it'll turn up by zinging across the yard next time we mow.

Animal Intelligence

There are researchers working on what animals know, how intelligent they are, and other such questions that are hard to measure in a laboratory. Some wonderful work has been done on primates. A few gray parrots have proven that linguistic abilities aren't the exclusive property of humans, and that they aren't just "parroting." Dogs -- well, we seem to feel as though we know them well enough. Some of them have bigger comprehended vocabularies than others, but there's remarkably little formal research done on the animal that lies on our feet while we type the reports.

Those of us with dogs, though, all collect our little anecdotes. One of the researches on primates is the ability to use symbols to indicate "same" and "different." I never thought to try to teach my dogs symbols in the sense of something they could use to communicate with me, but "same" and "different" is the basis of all scent work. Sunny and I started with "Find another one." For tracking, that meant finding each article, regardless of material, that smelled like the tracklayer. She was willing to extrapolate, however, and could do "Find another one" to mean a set of cadaver samples, shreds of a dollar bill hit by a lawnmower, and other things, ignoring my scent if it happened to be on the object. Technically, this meant she was willing to work in different conceptual categories: match the human scent or match the object's core scent. This turned out to give us trouble on the utility-dog exercise of retrieving the most recently handled scent article; she wanted to show me all the things that matched instead of bringing back the one that didn't -- the only one of the set I'd handled -- even though she was happy enough to fetch "My stick" in the yard.

I'm still experimenting on my dogs to see just what concepts underlie some of the things they consider perfectly ordinary behavior. Doing scent work with them helps; it means I have a better idea how they see the world, which helps me understand how they make decisions. Knowing roughly how little color vision they have helps too. They're not being foolish when they can't find a red toy in green grass from the windward side. They honestly can't see it. When they waltz off after the invisible, they're probably after something perfectly obvious to them, and they're usually nice enough to keep their thoughts to themselves when we don't realize what that obvious thing is. After watching a puppy trailing a single ant across concrete for several minutes, I've learned how amazing their perceptions and dedications can be if I don't rush to conclude, "Stupid puppy." The same puppy is now working up the food chain to cats and rabbits, though never for very far.

Another way to look at intelligence, of course, is to look at persistance. My husband's childhood dog watched the family opening doors and tried to work the knob himself. His paws and the knob weren't compatible, so he stopped trying. Likewise, Sunny once tried to steal my soda as we picnicked on the tailgate of my car. She'd already had some of my burger, freely given, and a few fries; she had her own cup of water, but the coke smelled more interesting. I looked over and she had her mouth on my straw. Since dogs cannot suck things up straws, of course, she didn't get any, and (sadly, since I didn't have a camera handy at that moment) she never bothered to try again. Things that did work, of course, she was happy to repeat.

Research on Scent Dogs

You may want to research a little of the science on canine perception if you like to know how things work before you start trying to do them. How well should you know the nose?

There are several ordinary-language works on how your dog perceives the world. One of the better ones is Chapter 5 of Stephen Budiansky’s The Truth About Dogs. While other sections of the book, such as the pro-alpha stance and the aggression discussion, may be debatable, he’s done a very nice job of summarizing the science on canine perception, particularly on sight and scent. Too, the illustrations of color perception are worth a thousand words. You will see very soon why your silly dog can fetch his blue toy out of the grass so much faster than his red one! Knowing this, you can make your scent articles easy to see for you and invisible to him or plant your decoy in the woods wearing bright red in summer so you can watch your dog's alert as you get close.

For scent work, Pearsall and Verbruggen have an excellent first four chapters in Scent. Their discussion of skin rafts, the microscopic few-cell bits of our surface which we shed constantly, is coherent and understandable, though it may give clean freaks the heebie-jeebies for a little while. Likewise, the length of time a fingerprint can persist is enlightening when your dog takes off on a trail you were pretty sure couldn’t possibly be there. The training portion contradicts some of the science end of the book. I bought the book used, refer often to the first parts for understanding how human scent is deposited and perceived, and largely ignore the rest.

If you want to get technical, try the “Sources” section of the Budiansky and start Googling. There are some excellent articles out there, though many of them are hidden behind the academic-access filter. Another resource is to accept common-source articles. For instance, through searching one academic article, I found accessible ones which cited it, though I could only reach the abstract of the original. “The Use of Scent Detection Dogs” in the Irish Veterinary Journal is beautifully thorough and relatively recent, published in 2006. I have to agree with the final sentence: the limit on how we can utilize a trained dog’s nose is primarily our own imaginations. Find fire ants? Exterminated mice for safe removal before decomposition? The use of human growth hormone by athletes? First, someone has to think to try it.

Even if you never train your dog to search for a specific thing, knowing how sensitive his nose is may make you more likely to listen when he wants you to know you smell different to him. Untrained dogs can still alert their owners to everything from cancer to pregnancy, whether the children are smoking something they shouldn’t, and household risks. However, the humans of the household still have to be willing to take the “I smell something different” body language seriously.