The Wheel Of Odor- A Randomizer for Training Odor

In this episode we reveal the  “Wheel Of Odor”, an easily crafted randomizer used to spur a fun discussion focused on ODOR training for the nosework and scentwork dog. We wanted to use some creativity to otherwise break out of training ruts and think OUTSIDE THE ODOR BOX for fresh ideas on how to set hides and build odor training objectives for our dogs and ourselves. The Wheel of Odor uses three categories to describe each odor puzzle or odor scenario in training or trial searches. We included a multitude of factors in each category from big odor, to muddy odor, to accessible hides, to back of search hides and odor in snow. By including  hide placement, odor behavior, and the environment, as our Three Wheels we gained random on the spot training objectives and descirbe how we might train the combination for our novice to advance dogs and elite to summit. 

Our mission is to motivate more creativity in our training and in yours exposing our dogs to an opporutnity to learn a vast array of odor scenarios from simplistic to complex. We enourage all our listeners to build your own Wheel of Odor or use the URL app in the notes below to check out our SPIN on the Wheel of Odor. Enjoy and spin yourself a new odor training idea not yet in your odor training objectives. 

Apps- Daily Decision- https://wheel.page.link/14DA OR 

Wheel of Names https://wheelofnames.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello everybody. Welcome to our podcast for April. We kind of missed a few days getting this out to you, but we're here now to get it all done. So I'm Jill Kavosovich with K9 Scent Fix, and we have with us Alex. Alex Woodruff from Release K9. Say hello.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hello, hello. I'm kind of excited about this week. I think we're gonna have fun with it.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Yeah, so this is gonna be a little crazy, guys, because this isn't like a thought-out manuscript. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Um, looking back at our stats for the for the podcast, what we noticed is that uh folks really like to hear about odor and odor topics. So what we came up with was a game, and it's called On the Spot. So, Alex, why don't you explain a little bit about how we are gonna do game on for on the spot?

The On The Spot Game Rules

unknown 1:02

Perfect.

Stopwatch Lessons And Training With Intent

SPEAKER_00 1:02

So, kind of where the idea came from, yeah, we want to hear about odor, but also I think we get kind of stuck in ruts sometimes on what we're gonna train. I know I do, and and then my next answer is like, okay, well, then what hide did I miss at a trial? And maybe, maybe that isn't where I need to be training. Maybe I don't know where my holes aren't, right? Or are. And so you don't know what you don't know. And I think this is gonna be a fun way that we can kind of pull out, like, oh, I've never thought about that before. So the rules of the game. We've got three wheels. Both Jill has it set up on her phone, and we'll share these kind of resources afterwards so you can set this up at home. Um, so she's got it set up on her home. I've found something online that I can put all these words in. And so we each have three wheels, and one wheel is on hide location, one wheel, and so that's like mirror hides, blind hides, all that kind of stuff. And then the second one is odor attributes. So these are kind of the extra things that odor might be doing, whether it's diffuse or it's really tight or whatever it might be. And then the third element is the environment. So what kind of environment are we in? And sometimes we can control this, sometimes we can't, but it might be something to be curious about and be interested in. So what we'll do is each of us will take turns on spinning. And then what will happen is when a topic comes up, so those three elements in the topic come up, then we'll be able to come up and we've got five minutes maximum to talk about it. And it's going to be one way that we can think about training that piece and how would we work it and work it at different levels. So I'm gonna think of it both at Vespa's, so she's very novice, and maybe George, kind of middle level. And then Jill will be working this with her Zeke, which is moving into the summit level. So I think that should be really fun where we can kind of have all three levels going on, and we can kind of think about how we can do a progression potentially of each one of these topics. So I'm kind of excited about this. I think it should be really fun to be able to kind of play around and expand or push us a little bit. Jill just like walked away. I'm like, where is she going? She went to go get her clock. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah. So we're gonna, you know, when as soon as Alex says we're gonna keep ourselves to five minutes, then I'm like, okay, so how am I gonna do that? Because my phone is already set, the spinner. Oh yeah. And if I yeah, so I didn't want to have to jump from one thing to another, etc., etc. So we're gonna try this, but there's no telling that I can somehow make this thing work either. So we'll see how it goes. Is this gonna be another countdown, count up problem? So that was my goal for the next trial for those of you who didn't hear the story. That I put on my timer, hadn't used it in a while, totally forgot that it's a sailing watch, which means that it counts back up after it hits the bottom. And I turn off all the alarms because I don't like them. So I look at my stopwatch through the search and go, oh, I got plenty of time. And then as I'm coming out, I actually got a timeout, and I'm coming out and I'm looking at it going, well, I show I had 19 seconds. And I realized that I went 19 seconds past the time.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah, it was still counting the other direction now.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

So what I'm trying to do is make sure that I take time to like become more familiar with my stopwatch if I'm gonna use it. Great. You know, I've not been one of those who who's like try I've tried not to be dependent upon it, but use it as a guide while I'm searching, right? So that I don't go into the like, oh Lord, just get out, right? I wanna I wanna focus on my dog. So at least if I have it on my arm, somehow it it lets me just say, and plus getting a timeout, quite frankly, at at Elite isn't the end of the world. No, but it still sucks. Well, yeah, because I kind of missed a really good placement and lots of points a while. Yeah, yeah. That's okay. I'm good.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

All right, and then five minutes combined time?

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't even know if it's gonna take us five minutes, but yeah. And then of course I'm worried. So I've got my spinner, my my stopwatch, and now I got my pencil because I'm gonna have to write down what the three things are to even have a meaningful conversation.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

So let's start with Alex doing the spin. Again, what we've done, guys, is imagine the wheel of fortune or or any kind of carnival wheel that spins around, right? And I'll let you hear it. You can hear it. See, there it is. Oh, there it goes. Yeah. So, oh, yeah. Okay, so those are the spinnings, and when it settles, it gives you one answer. And I think these wheels, Alex's, must hold. She's probably got twifteen to twenty different topics on each wheel. Yeah. So you can make it as basic as you want to, or as you know, extensive as you want to. So for instance, on the hide placement, we've got deep and accessible, we've got close hides, we've got mirror hides, we've got odor choices that we might want to have BAC, Bertanus Clove, uh, we might want to have something else, converging hides. And of course, some of these are you don't know what you've got until the dog runs that search. And you can say, Oh, in fact, I did have converging, because sometimes I think we get caught up that we think we set a converging odor hide, the dog doesn't solve it as converging at all, and then we're like, Oh, my dog doesn't know converging. Well, it might just be in that moment in that environment with those odor attributes, there really wasn't a point of convergence the dog had to use. Exactly. Then we've got like accessible, so we've on the hide placement, we've got all those sorts of things. Then over on the attributes, this is where you know it it gets a little bit challenging.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

This is almost yeah, like extra stuff, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Like it's because one of my favorites on here is big odor, right? And then you go, what does that mean? Well, it just means that somehow we set it with an objective that it would populate a lot of odor in a particular area or maybe directly around source. And then when we ran the dog, guess what? It did. Yay!

SPEAKER_00 7:17

And we recognized it, right? So these are also to start recognizing these different kinds of factors.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yes, that's huge because it's the dog's response to odor that we need as a handler to understand that's your clarity of what your dog is learning or perhaps needs to learn, right? So that's another thing. While this is fun and creative, the idea isn't just to do this without some forethought of what I what might I learn from that, and then what did I learn? And by gosh, it's okay to admit I didn't learn a thing.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

That was great. So crazy. But here's the two it again. It's just hides, right? So then your dog just found hides. Okay, cool. But when you set with intent, I find you're you're running like a science experiment. You have a hypothesis of what you think will happen, and then you either get proven right or wrong, and then you learn from that, and then we can adjust from there. Or go, I don't know how to adjust that, but it didn't work.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

I think that's true for any sport, human sport or anything we we train our dogs with, right? So we come in and we decide, hey, I've got a puppy, my puppy needs to learn to sit. Here's how I'm gonna teach him to sit. And then you walk away from that and you either go, Wow, that was really great, we did a great sit, or if you're me, you went for too many great sits, and yep, and the last one became rather mucky, right? Or the dog was for whatever reason didn't have clarity of what why you wanted to do what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it, and the dog never sat, right? So that's kind of the whole gamut. That's the whole right. We're not saying that that this conversation's gonna make any sense in terms of absolutes. It's all just part of that. If we can be more flexible with our training, we will be surprised what our dogs will learn and what we'll learn. So then in environment, we've got water, sun, meaning water, meaning maybe it's raining, maybe we've got puddles, snow, shade, water. What else you got up there?

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Critter zone, peasant, all those kind of fun things.

Accessible Elevated Hides In Airflow

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Airflow, yep, humidity, high temperatures, freezing temperatures. That's Colorado. All right, Alex, you're up. You just spin it away.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

All right, here we go. Done. Okay, so hide location is accessible. Odor attributes, odor progression. So what are the different versions of accessible? Okay, we're kind of pushing our brain cells a little bit, and then airflow. Okay, we could have kind of progression on that.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

So is it your five minutes or mine? I spun, so it's your five minutes.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Let's hear how you train for a dog moving to the summit level, accessible heights at his level, with odor progressions in mind and airflow. So a lot of airflow.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

Okay, so all right, so the first thing I want to do is oh, let's go ahead if I'm going to the summit level. Yeah. And and we're getting close to this, right? So I'm coming out of elite this year. It's gonna, that's my goal. All right. One of the things that I wanted to work on and have been so fascinated by is the elevated hide, right? So elevated, however, can often end up being what? Inaccessible or even suspended. So I want to do, let's do an odor progression with accessible elevation and airflow. Do I want to say it's strong? Is it yeah, let's say it's strong.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

So like we've got a windy environment.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Okay, so I'm outside. I'm outside, I've got the wind blowing, I've got maybe the side of my porch or the side of my garage, and I want to work on some accessibles, but for purposes of elevation, right? Okay, so I'm gonna start on my garage door just with a a hide that's flat against the door. I don't feel that I need to like use do a pole or anything like that first, right? Because I want to have, uh, you know, we'll see. Because if the wind is blowing and it's coming, depending on where it's coming around the garage, right? Yeah, I could end up being in a total void for odor, right? Or I could end up being in a very good spot. However, what I'm betting, if I give my dog, and granted, not everybody now we didn't really talk about on leash, off leash. I'm gonna suggest at this point that my dog is off leash because I'm gonna set that hide and let the dog move out away from it. And maybe that hide is only two feet off the ground, but it's not a ground hide. That's where I'm gonna start with my progression because I want with the accessible hide for my dog to be able to, for that dog, still get nose on source, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

And I love working elevation this way because then my next one could be two and a half feet, right? It could be 30 inches. The next one can be three feet. And if I have a dog that is willing to go up on their hind legs, then I gotta stretch all the way up, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

But what I want to do is let that airflow influence where that odor's going. The dog's gonna uh venture way out in this massive curve. At least it seems massive because we just placed a hide that was, you know, sometimes we're standing two, three feet away from it. We think it's just an easy, flat, accessible hide. There's no real contour to it because it's flat against a wall. So I don't even have it like on a fence post or something that's at least got some structure that can gather that odor collection.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

And that and the dog will work in if it's especially if it's even on a slope. If it's very flat, then the dog may have to just go even further out to catch where the odor is actually landing. And I don't know where that is. This is where my observation is really going to come in handy. We make all these assumptions that oh, my dog should be able to catch odor directly under the hide.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Well, they can probably catch some odor, right? But how much of that odor availability is sufficient for the dog's olfaction system to make that decision of where source is located, right? Yeah, yeah. So I've got a minute and 24 seconds left, so I can still keep going, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Well, okay, so I just want to add to it because I think it's a cool thing. So she takes some of my time, sorry. You could take some of mine. Because where do you start? Where do you start your dog? Because we could talk about progression there, right? So if I've got Vespa, young dog, on the same exact kind of hide, maybe I start her 10 feet away, but then I can start George or Zeke, we can start 100 feet away and really let the dog start working all that pooling that potentially could be showing up in different locations and then work its way back to that single hide, unaccessible hide.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Oh, that's such a great point because odor progression can mean so many different things, right? It's not just the skill set progression, it's also where odor is progressing for that hide.

SPEAKER_02 14:37

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Right. So 100 feet away could be a lot less odor for that skilled dog, right? Um, and then closer to the hide, depending upon the odor availability. And that's where I gotta trust my dog in terms of what they're showing me, right? Yeah, okay, we're almost out of time. That was it. So we had accessible odor progression, airflow.

Pooling And Trapping With Close Hides

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Love it. All right, that was cool. I like that. I like how your brain went there. Not something I thought of. All right. Why don't you do one? I've got my pen ready so I can write it down. Okay, here we go. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Mine's a little different than Alex's because I'm gonna have to spin it three times.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Oh, yeah, you got three times.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

So you have close, okay, is your first so probably multiple heights.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Okay. I'll take that.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

And now we have odor attribute is pooling and trapping.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Oh, these go together.

unknown 15:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

And your environment is sun. Okay, so you've got sun, pooling and trapping, close highs.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

All right. So, okay, let's start with Festa. So we've got the baby level. It still starts our clock.

unknown 16:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

And her clock is going. Perfect. Okay, so if I'm thinking for kind of baby dog level, she knows odor. She's very confident in odor. Okay, cool. But I want to be building skills and skills that are level appropriate so that I have foundation to keep building on, especially because she's a strong, very odor-obedient dog. But I want to make sure I'm not skipping past some of these foundations in her exploration because I can see answers a little too quickly. So close hides in pooling is kind of a fun element to play with where I'm not getting involved because I really want to build that as an independent understanding. But with her level, that closeness does not necessarily mean that they're converging. So we have pooling and trapping, not necessarily converging. So do I have both hides separated maybe by a barrier of some sort on two corners of a building and both of those are blowing together to the same pooling area. And so I kind of like that little kind of setup where I can let her figure out that there's one. And then as she keeps working, maybe I remove that hide after she finds one and then let her work out that there's a second one going back to that pooling area. I kind of like that as a foundation where she can go back and start learning how to use that pooling information and not just get stuck in it, but also learn that you can go back to receive more information. So I kind of love that. I probably would set it up either with a wall between it or maybe two sides on a corner of a building where they're both blowing the same direction. All right. And then the sun piece of it. Do I have sun for both hides? Do I have sun for one hide? Do I have sun maybe causing where the pooling is happening because it's warming up an area where everything else is cool? I could be playing around with a lot of those things. Or maybe my pooling and trapping is happening where the sun isn't and my hides are in the sun. And so then that could be changing that up. Cool. Okay, so then if I put that to the next level for George, I haven't even said basically like what type of hide. Like, is it on a chair? Is it in a box? Right. We could play around with those kind of pieces to make the same kind of picture. So if I am wanting to play with George, I'm probably going to get more distance for the pooling and trapping and kind of hang out there personally. And maybe as a handler, maybe encourage my dog to be there because I'm not leaving it and let my dog build some confidence to find his line and then I support that line back to a hide. I probably won't have a divider for him. I want him to be able to move from hide one to hide two and connect those two dots together. And maybe pooling and trapping is happening near source then. Maybe we do have some convergence on top of each other.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Okay, I got one. I got one.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yeah, where are you going with this one too?

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Oh, so I love this one. So I want to do the chairs. I want to do the chairs, and it's either indoors or out, either one. So if it's indoors, I want it, you know, next to a window or where the w sun is shining, right? Like through those glass window walls. Yeah. Yeah. Where you can actually feel the heat on the chairs, right? And I love the folding chairs. And if it's outside, I'm going to have more influence, obviously, of ambient air movement. Right. That may change that picture. So, but the concept is I'm going to put a hide, the close proximity hides, I'm going to put them on either both of the chairs very close together, pointed at each other.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Ah.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

So I'm going to take the tubes, right?

unknown 19:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

So it's not just tins that are plopped up underneath. I'm going to get very strategic about this. I'm going to actually put it on two parts of the chair that are closest together with the tube pointed at each other. And granted, this is just a human construct. Who knows what's really happening with odor until my dog comes in and work it. But I should end up with some part of pooling and trapping somewhere else, either on more chairs somewhere else, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Yeah. Yeah. So you need multiple chairs. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

Yeah. So I've got my close. I created pulling and trapping by almost such a convergence that it becomes one odor.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Yeah. Now, are you using different odors or the same odors?

SPEAKER_01 20:19

That so those would be, yes, very definitely number. Yeah. So for summit, I'm going to use the same odor.

unknown 20:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

And I'm even thinking you could be playing around with odor strength too. Right. So if they were both strong hides, that would be hard in some ways because you probably have a little bit more pooling, but you probably have an easier line back to source. Versus if you're doing, and we didn't talk about aging yet, right? So longer it sits there, the more pooling trapping you might get, the more movement of that odor away from source. And the lighter the hides are, you probably are going to have a little bit more of a contrast. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Very good. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

That was fun. I like that one.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

All right. Oh, and I it even went back up two seconds.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

We're learning how to use your watch.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Well, I need to program it differently. It's apparently what I need to do. Okay.

Unusual Muddy Hides On Terrain

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Now let me spin again. Let's see what we got this time. Let's see what we get.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

So, what we have to do, guys, is we got to use my spinner for the sound effect.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

But we're going off Alex's spinners. Okay. All right. Okay. So hide location, unusual hides.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Okay. So something not traditional. Maybe we are using different kind of affixing. Okay, cool. The second piece, odor attributes, muddy hides. So that meaning odor is not easily separable and sourceable at source. Like you know it's there, but you can't get to source. And then the third piece is terrain. So you could probably do this on bleachers, but you could also probably do this in landscaping too, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Oh, okay. I'm going to go to the one that I just did. Okay, go for it. In my driveway, we have a very large pile of gravel. Okay. And in that pile of gravel, well, up on the top. So I did this in the snow actually, because the pile at that time was covered in snow, and I wanted to see the tracks. That's what I really wanted to see. Was not that I was using the snow for purposes of an additional environment. Sorry.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Yeah. Right. But I really liked the idea of being able to see the tracks for the dog to solve that puzzle. So I threw the tin up on the top of the little it's not a rubble pile, it's just a gravel pile, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

Um, and then watched Zeke solve that puzzle. The muddy part was, and sometimes I think we get impatient because we perceive that the time frame that it takes for the we get so trained from ORT up to elite for nine-second hides. My dog should be able to come in and and I should be calling alert yes, alert yes, right? Or yes, yeah, right, and reward every nine seconds. We get so addicted to that very, very short time frame that sometimes it's challenging to just set that one hide and let the dog work and be fascinated the entire time that they're working. This was very cool. And so what this really helped me understand, and granted, elevation wasn't really one of our pieces here, but unusual, right? So to throw throw the hide up on a natural elevation, so it could even be a hillside that you put it on, and you're gonna start the dog from down below, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

So they can still get their nose on it, but yeah, so you could say, oh, that's a ground hide, that's not really unusual. But the odocus. But I think that some sometimes the more we talk about unconventional or unusual, the more those become usual. Right. Yeah. So we're seeing a lot in our trials where like the fence posts and the and the crack hides, and you know, the the pieces of the environment where we can put a hide are becoming more known for us to use at trial and in training. So yeah, so that's kind of cool. But this was very cool because it was a little bit muddy because it took some time where he was even within just inches of the tin, right? And still not making a decision as to source location because cool. Then once you got up on top of it, it became a groundhide.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Right. Versus when he was moving up the slope to get to it, he was within the zone, and then it sort of disappeared as he got right on top of it. So that was really pretty cool. So that was my terrain piece, my muddy piece, and an unusual. Look at it. You just did it recently. I did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

So where my brain goes, like not the terrain piece of it, but you're talking about like an unusual hide that has some elevation that's muddy, is I've been starting to see, and I don't know if this is everywhere, but hides placed on top of tables. So whether it's an object placed on the table, and so I find, especially if you have a shorter dog, but even some of the taller dogs, unless they're like a great dane, they're not getting an odor picture line right to source. They have to solve it from the odor that's kind of dropping on the table, spreading off the edge of the table, and then it's becoming a little bit wider. So I'm finding that that's kind of showing up at the upper levels. So that's kind of where my mind goes when you're talking about that elevation kind of thing and muddy. Like, how does the dog actually understand? And I think we have to train that. It's it's a picture that we have to train.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Well, and the training first comes from just give your dog an opportunity to experience. I think again, we go back to the nine-second hide, right? We set these things and expect this. Oh, just go in there and solve it. And it's like, hey, the dog may actually have to just go in and experience it, right? But I love the objects up on tables because it gives you the ability to do an unusual and a terrain meaning some elevation without having to be particularly creative within that space. Like a keyboard on top of a picnic table totally works.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

Like it doesn't have to be that tall of a table, too. I've done it on like little side tables where I've put like a box or like something less obvious than a box, maybe, but I've put them on a side table. And so then the odor is not accessible from right below it because the dog goes under the table, and then they come out and they're like in this like curtain of odor. And it's kind of a fun thing to work and see the dogs think about it.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Well, and that's what's so so cool about odor observation, in my my opinion, because you're watching the dog move into these very interesting, I don't want to really call them void zones, but where the dog kind of goes, Oh, lost that pathway, get back on the path. And they turn and they make this more distinct, right, move to get back to, and we sometimes think I think our brains go to again, it's the habit of solve it quick. Oh, my dog must be confused. And really, your dog is using your action system the way it should be used.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Okay, time out. Cool. That was a fun one. I like that. Got to the buzzer.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

All right, all right. Let's hear it. Yeah, it's your turn. I'm ready.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Am I spinning or you spinning?

SPEAKER_00 27:23

You're spinning.

Dry Climate Searches And Odor Collection

SPEAKER_01 27:24

Okay. All right, so your environment is dry.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Okay. That's pretty familiar.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Very familiar, right? Like, and Alex and I both will try to tell people when they come into either Colorado or Arizona. Expect no humidity. It's dry. And then it's kind of like, well, what does that mean? And it's been very interesting because when I went into great humidity, right? I thought, oh, my odor's gonna be so heavy. It's gonna leave this wonderful trail. It was so heavy it didn't go anywhere. Yeah, yeah. It just stuck, right? So that was very interesting. Yeah. So, okay, okay. And then hide location. Oh back of search. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. And then your odor attribute. Collection. Oh, that could be interesting. What did we have? So we have collection, back of the search and dry.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

And dry. Okay. So this brings to mind some of those searches where you have an unknown number and the one hides at the back. And or you have a known number, maybe it's an NW2, and your one hide is deeper in your search. And so in those kind of situations, typically we don't have a lot of odor at the start. And so if we're saying dry and some collection, maybe the collection is happening somewhere along the back of the search and not near the front. Or it's collecting in an amount as the dog's coming into the search that they might get a pocket, false alert, right? Potential because the lines are not really there. If it's super dry, it might be lofting a little bit and not really dropping into that space. So how would I set this? I'm looking at an exterior kind of area, probably here in Arizona. Dry happens outside a lot. So I'm probably looking at an exterior space that has a little bit of size to it that I would like to have for the novice dog a little bit less stuff in it, so that my dog's not too drawn to objects and get stuck on just searching the objects in front. But for a more advanced dog, yeah, I do definitely want some objects that might pull my dog in. So maybe if I'm going to a park and there's a bunch of picnic tables and it's at a Romata, that I would like to have my hide. Now airflow, we didn't talk about maybe the odor is blowing across. So if airflow is blowing across my search area, I still have that not much odor at the start. As my dog's coming into those picnic tables and thinking about, oh, is there a hide here? I don't smell anything. As they're going in, now they're going to catch little collections of odor on picnic tables. And then as they get deeper into the search, hopefully now we're getting into more of an odor picture and then they can start solving it. So I'm really asking for my dog to get hunting off the start line, the progression into that. So for a more novice dog, I'm going to start them closer. So the difference between no odor and then coming into that cross breeze is going to be much shorter. So maybe only five steps, six steps, where I'm wanting that independent leaving me to move forward into the search. And then it's basically getting rewarded for going into the search, where then they can change direction, go, oh, there's odor present. And they can start following those breadcrumbs back to the source to try and figure out where that hide is located. We might even want to play for a, so with George, I'm thinking for maybe a little bit of a higher hide to create a little bit more of that collection that could be happening without necessarily this nice clean path back to source, which I'm kind of working on with him a little bit more to keep him thinking instead of just driving into the hide itself. I would like to have a little bit more intellectual. So if I have it higher, meaning like tabletop in that dryness, having much higher, we didn't talk about heat, but I'm thinking heat. We're already getting to the 90s. Luckily, we came down a little. But a tabletop hide could be a good nice height for him to be working that collection without necessarily having it hitting him in the face and having to work those collection areas, those breadcrumbs to get back to source. So that's where my brain goes.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

So one of the things that I think would be interesting to talk about is because sometimes we get these labels, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

And and then it we could have a whole conversation about let's just brainstorm about the labels. So one of the things that comes to mind about collection is I go back to the days when Ron Gaunt was busy trying to teach myself and others to understand odor, right? And he would say, Look at that wonderful odor communication. And I'd just look at him and say, I have no idea what you're talking about. As far as I'm concerned, my dog is confused and isn't finding source, and it's past nine seconds, right? Yeah. Yeah. I need to hide. And then he would say, That's odor information. So I think when we use the term collection, what we have to kind of observe is the areas that our dog purposefully moves to as a response to odor, that that's what collection is, right? Pooling and trapping is kind of maybe another morphed, right? A greater quantification of collection. So this is something less than that, because we use a different word, right? And then for dry, I think it's just people don't realize that. Well, I shouldn't say that because if they live in it, they do. But it's hard sometimes to understand the differences between dry versus humid and what it does in terms of the odor puzzle or the odor picture for the dog. So dry, I like to describe it as it's almost like you got powder snow in your hand and you blow on it, and those crystals just sort of go, right? Yeah. Versus when you have, and and I love the breadcrumbs because I always talk about well, so I'm in a humid area, I have like croutons. These aren't just bread crumbs, these are croutons. They've got substance. So when I blow, you're gonna get these, you know, nuggets that are moving, versus in a dry climate, you might actually have crushed those, yeah, the croutons, and now it is just that dust in the wind.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

It's panko.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

Yeah, exactly. Okay, we're done.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Cool, cool. Um, just a quick thought on dry, because not everybody lives in a dry climate, is if you are in a cold climate and you go inside and the heat's kicking on, that can create a lot of dryness too. So you can work in some of these like fairgrounds and like buildings that are not humid controlled, and they're just cut cooking some heat into that coolness, that can really create that dryness as well. I've seen it with AC too, and it's super hot out. Not always, like if you're sitting in Georgia and it's 100% humidity out there, you're probably not gonna find a lot of dryness. But maybe it's not raining and that would be a good difference, right? Yeah, okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

You're up.

Small Odor In Water And Puddles

SPEAKER_00 34:25

All right, I am up. Let me spin my wheels. Oh, maybe there we go. All right, so we have in the hide locations and it just flipped to single versus multiple. Okay, so that's one element that we could play with. Odor attributes, small odor. So it's not moving very much, or it's just not a very high strong concentration. And environment is airflow. Do you mind if I re-spin? Yeah, re-yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

Yeah, we can free spin on that one because we already did airflow once.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

We did. Okay, I'm just gonna spin. Remember those first two. I have to spin them all.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

So the difference is my wheels spin one at a time and Alex's spin all three at a time. All three at a time.

SPEAKER_00 35:13

Okay, now I got water. Oh.

unknown 35:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Kind of weird to have small odor with water.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

Yeah, maybe figure it out. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Well, maybe it's concentration, right? How about this? Okay, let's hear it. It's a puddle hide. Oh, I like that. Okay. And maybe the puddle, so this actually happened at a oh my gosh, I think it was an NW2. Yeah. In in it was right in like April or something. Chris Bush was actually our CO. And he set a hide at the base of a picnic table, right? It was for yeah. And then lo and behold, what do we get? We get snow. It snowed on top of the hide, right? Great. Then what do we get before my turn to run? It melted.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

So now I had a puddle hide, literally, that extended out two, three feet, and that was Colorado for you, right? Came in, it was it was no weather, then it snowed, then it melted all by the time we got to run. And so the what started out as small odor, then became odor in this puddle, and the extension of that odor attribute, right? Went all the way out through the puddle. But the dog still had to work that. And I think it it really did kind of present itself as small odor because it was sitting on the surface of water. And it was kind of sticking to it.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

And so that makes it very talk about unusual, right? For the dog to have to sort that if they haven't done it before. And in that case, it was a single, a single hide. Yeah. Right. So that that would be kind of a fun one. And I actually did this at camp one year when it was raining. I think it was in Pennsylvania camp. And I wanted to create puddles. And so I got the top of a trash can, the tin trash can tops. Turned it over, uh, let the water let the rain while we were in doing some hides inside, let the rain gather in that in that uh top. And then, and you can do that certainly with your hose, your garden hose, and any kind of right? Any kind of no, I wouldn't go very the idea is to kind of simulate the water collection on the ground surface, not a deep thing of not a not a water hide, per se, right?

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Where you have the hide down in some water depth. This and then odors rate rising to the top. This was more the concept of just creating um a puddle. So that can be kind of fun. And then it would be really fun to do. I mean, if you did, so here's the thing about multiple hides too is that when you go to set multiple hides, you want to make sure that if you're introducing the objective of understanding moving from hide to hide, that you don't place them in such a manner that then the dog is solving them as one hide. Yeah, yeah. Which would happen if I had a puddle, right? If I had two hides and then the puddle kind of connected them, connected, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

That's one picture.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Yeah, that would be like, oh, well, they were distinct, and that would be kind of cool to set, right? Where you actually maybe out this summer when people are living in environments, and Alex could probably do it on her on her deck by her pool. So, right, where you set them just on ground hides and then you get water collection between the two of them to connect them.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Yeah, yeah. So another thing that comes to mind with water and small odor is the timing on when a storm comes in. Because just as it's starting and that downpour kind of hits, your odor gets kind of tight. And often I see, like just as the downpour happens, it's like, oh, I'm so sorry to that team that's running right now, because it's pretty consistent before and pretty consistent once like the rain lets up a little bit and it becomes consistent. That that little moment in there, odor just becomes really tight and it's a smaller picture. So now the dog has to work a little bit harder within the space to detail things. So you could kind of play around with like, oh, a storm's gonna come in at two, not lightning storm, right? Just rainstorm. But I've even seen this inside where the odor picture just changes right, right before the downpour is happening or right at the beginning of that downpour. Yeah, and that can kind of have an effect. It actually showed up in uh Georgia when I was COing out there recently, is just that poor teams that it was like four teams right when that storm was starting to pour. And so I kind of felt bad for them. But it's luck of the draw, right? It's random.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Well, and some of that, not that you and that's the other piece. We can't train everything.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

No, but we can try.

Mirror Hides With Humidity And Skirt

SPEAKER_01 39:55

So that well, again, it's give the dog the opportunity to experience. And sometimes at trial, that is what you get. That's the first time the dog had an opportunity to experience, and that just ends up being, you know, well, hey, that was kind of fun. Um and I think that that's one thing that we got to remind ourselves about is when we come away from trial, because I think trial after trial, I hear, oh, I just need to go set up that exact odor picture that you just had and we just had in that search, and actually there can be so many pieces that contributed to that odor picture on that day in that search at that time, that really this is what's kind of fun about this game is that we're realizing that there are so many factors to every hide that then if we just even expose our dogs to the individual factors, then the combos, right? Hopefully the dog will have experienced, had an opportunity to experience finding that kind of high. There we go. Yeah, cool. All right. It's your turn. Okay, my turn. I'm gonna set my clock first. Okay. Because on that one, I forgot to start I forgot to start my clock. I'll have to admit it. This is kind of one of my problems, guys, with wearing a timer when I compete. There's a lot of times the thing goes I set it or I start it after I'm already in the search 30 seconds or something. And then I just use it again as a reference. Okay, here we go. Yep. All right. Okay, so we got odor attribute. Alex's odor attribute is Skirt. Whatever that means. Okay. Okay. Skirt of a hideous. We'll find out, we'll find out what she feels like that means. Okay, and then her environment is humid. Okay, interesting. We've been playing a lot with this, okay. And then hide location. You get mirror hides.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

Mirror. Oh, that could be fun. Maybe not for a baby dog, but let's figure that out.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Okay, so if I think for so that's another, right? What does mirror mean? Maybe you just modify that for the baby dog.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

Exactly. So mirror in my mind is a lot of a mental game on visually repetition kind of hides. So if they are closer, they could be mirror like opposite ends. Like you're walking into a church and you've got Pew on either side. Like that's a mirror. That's kind of our straightforward thing that a lot of people think about when you have mirror hides. But realistically, I could have room one and room two with mirror hides of threshold hides on the left and on the right of the door as soon as you walk into the room. So I could do for a lower level dog, two threshold hides in two rooms. And so the dog's coming into the search and they're seeing a mirror of what was happening in the other one. So it was right in the one room. So right, maybe three feet into the search. And then in the other one, it's left three feet into the search. So that's asking for the dog to learn how to be a little bit more flexible and not just pattern on the picture. So if I'm gonna go with that, thinking about the skirt and humidity, I think those two things go together. Skirt, what comes to mind is we're gonna play a little bit with an elevated hide where that odor has a picture that's coming down in a con cone kind of fashion, right? So if we imagine like a proper lady's big wide ball ground, right?

SPEAKER_01 43:36

Proper lady, I like that. Um, that was me in fourth grade with my petticoat. With your petticoat.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

You know, this was back in the 60s, guys. 60s, not 18s. Okay, so okay, so we're talking about that really nice skirt that's coming down. Humidity is gonna be my friend in that kind of situation because it's going to encourage that odor to be a little bit. Like closer, a little bit less, like just drifting in the wind. And I can probably get away with a little bit more height. So Vespa's a short dog, Vespa's only 16 inches. So my height, I'm probably going to be playing with a skirt, even at 24 inches for a young dog at that height and playing around with it. It doesn't have to be an elevated hide to create that kind of picture. But then when I'm playing with left and right, maybe I want to play around with hides that are not visually pulling my dog in. So like on a chair. Maybe I'm going to put it flat on a wall, or maybe I'm going to put it, maybe I've got some structure on the wall that I can use, like trim work that I can put the hide on to and just put kind of a tube the same color as the wall. So maybe once I get that skirt coming off, and that can be laterally. And so now I'm asking for my dog to work threshold mirror. So I've got an extra little element in there, but a mirror hide on these two hides that I'm placing. They're separate. I'm not working them as a combined piece, but then I'm allowing for my dog to show that bracketing left and right and learning how to work that bracket back into the source. That is not visually pulling my dog in, but I'm going to be really working on that bracketing and the skirt piece of it, where they might triangulate. So come off the wall a little bit and then come back onto the wall. So for her, she likes to stand on her hind feet. So maybe 24 inches would be a little low for her. Maybe I would play around with 30 inches, which is just barely where she can reach her nose when she's standing on her hind feet. And then I kind of like the same concept, but maybe one room, the exact same hide setup, left and right, of one big room and on the wall, maybe at four feet for George. And he's working kind of into that master level, beginning of elite career. So then I could be working on the same kind of concept, bracketing on either side. And I just need enough distance so those skirts aren't overlapping for him. But maybe for Z going into the summit level, maybe we do want those skirts overlapping and we're going to play around with that.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

I really like that. So one of the things, and this is one of those wordsmithing things, right? Yeah. So often mirror, right? So what's the difference between mirror? And we also already had close hides. Right. And then of course we say convergence. And we already talked about that we can have close hides that when we set them, we have this perception, oh, this is going to be a great converging piece, right? And and then in order for and you may very well have such convergence between those two that the dogs have to get to the outside, if you will, of all of it, to the outside skirt of each of those hides individually, not in the middle, right, right, to then sort to source where source is located.

SPEAKER_00 46:41

So that if you're training that, so that is your goal, and you're like, okay, I think these skirts are going to overlap and it's going to be kind of complex right in the middle, and they're going to have to get to the edge. That's the hope on when you set that. As an observer, as the handler in that search, you better be watching that. And under you better get video. Yes. Yeah. Because that little section in the middle is where people get stuck. It's where people make assumptions. Oh, this is all one hide. But if we can become a little bit more adept at learning and seeing that, like back and forth that might happen, a little test to the right, a little test to the left, showing that there might be multiple hides in that same pool, in that same skirt, right? That will be more willing to stay versus making a quick assumption and leaving once we find the one.

SPEAKER_01 47:30

Right. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

I like it.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

And I really like that too. What I really get excited about is the concept of getting that video, right? So I think often we get kind of shy about it. And it's like, you know, last thing I want to do is look at a video of myself. Well, so stop looking at yourself if that is really offensive to you. And really watch your dog's response to odor. It is so cool. And if you're going to be in the kind of in the the zone of really wanting to work on a lot of blind hides, that is essential because what you really want to learn, your learning of odor observation and your dog's response to odor from video is gonna be so important. Right. Right now, granted, on the known hide side, it can be just as important so that you aren't making assumptions or biases in the moment, right? While you're watching the dog unfold that picture. Right.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:29

So I those are that's just so fun. But I think that we toss around those terms a lot and aren't really sure the difference between potentially a mirror, a close, and a convergence, right? And they can be all three, but they don't have to be.

SPEAKER_00 48:44

Or they could be. We could control that.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

So that's really fun.

SPEAKER_01 48:48

Okay.

unknown 48:49

All right.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

All right, 20 seconds left on that one, but perfect. We nailed it.

unknown 48:54

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 48:55

Time clock. Came out of that search with 23 seconds left.

unknown 49:00

Yes. Yeah.

Threshold Hides With Containment In Snow

SPEAKER_00 49:02

All right. Let's spin. Wait, we gotta spin noise. Okay, here it goes. Spinning.

SPEAKER_01 49:10

Spinning. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

All right. We're starting to get some repetition happening here.

SPEAKER_01 49:15

Okay, so you gotta spin again.

SPEAKER_00 49:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Yeah, because you got up, you got like 25 options on now. Oh no. What's the matter with this? Hey, if this was reliable in Vegas, I'd be winning.

SPEAKER_00 49:26

You would be winning. You should be betting on these things. All right, this one is for you right now.

SPEAKER_01 49:31

Oh, did it?

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Oh, they all turned blue.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

Okay. So she's got one that's right on the line between threshold and blind.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

So this one is threshold. It did turn blue. So it is threshold hides for your hide placement.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 49:44

Which we were just talking about. So okay, cool. Odor attributes, containment. Sort of very nice contained hide. And snow.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

Oh. Okay. And the snow just threw me for a loop. I had this all figured out until now. You want me to do it in snow. Okay, so really quick, what I did.

SPEAKER_00 50:04

I couldn't do. So I want to hear yours.

SPEAKER_01 50:09

Okay, so so threshold. So real quick, what I talk about would be when I'm thinking about threshold, it's that concept that is it within a certain zone of where I'm going to release the dog. Right. Okay. Yep. So it might not necessarily, we often, you know, get kind of swayed by our typical searches, especially at trial, of it being the doorway, the doorway into, right? Or the start line. Right. So and I can adjust that based on where I release the dog, right? Right. Now for containment, what I I mean, there's two different ways to think of this. What I like to think about though is that I've got a pocket of source odor at source. So that I have, right? I have some quantification of odor that is at my source for verification by my dog, right? So and sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean that that pocket is drifting away and leaving these wonderful tendrils. Sometimes it just means, right, that they're just there. Okay. Now if we're gonna add in snow, I'm gonna tell you I've done toss the snow, toss the snow, toss the hide in the snow. Yes. And then typically what happened and then I have to, and then I could release the dog fairly close to that hide.

SPEAKER_00 51:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 51:29

But then often what happens is I don't have any containment. No containment. Right? So, so and if you ever watch, for those of you who do have dogs who who are in snow, if you watch your dog do any kind of crittering or any kind of mousing or anything like that, wow, snow is like this massive conductor of odor. But it's not definitive. It's like it's hard to pull it back. It just hits the surface and just sort of it's I think it's even less quantification than water, right? In water, it might yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:07

So you can get a hard surface and that then it's hard for it to stick. Cool. All right, I want I want to hear yours because my brain first really went somewhere and I'm like, oh, I want to work this up. Okay, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

Okay, so what I would and snow, maybe we can even make that air conditioning. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 52:23

Oh, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 52:25

But anyway, okay.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:26

So I think that that could just be literally what I just described, which is I'm gonna get even you can even get a my gosh, you could even use like like a tin, a bigger tin, right? Because I've done that with tossing my tins where I get the really big tin, and I even then had to tape it shut because then when I fling it out, yeah, it would open, right? So then I would kind of tape it shut and just throw it out into the snow, and then I have some larger amount of containment, however, it's still in the tin. So that doesn't mean I had good source availability, right? Okay, yeah elsewhere. So I'm gonna turn this over to you. I want to hear your brainstorm because you got two minutes.

SPEAKER_00 53:09

All right. So where my brain went is behind the wheel of a vehicle and park the vehicle on a parky, on a snowy lot because I think that would be a really fun different way. Because I never work vehicles in snow, and I'm like, oh, I'd love to work that because it's probably as the dog's trying to cast off the vehicle, they're casting off because they're chasing that odor as it's sliding across the snow. So I would really want to work that. I think that would be kind of a fun place. Now, threshold piece is a little bit harder because does the dog just go to the vehicle and solve the problem? Maybe I need to work on a blank vehicle first.

SPEAKER_01 53:46

I don't know, but so the interesting piece about the wheel well versus the wheel itself inside the spokes. Yeah. Inside the spokes, I'm gonna get what I was describing as a source pocket, a greater source pocket there, versus if I put it in the wheel well, right, which is it like the plastic framing of the right that goes around the wheel. Bigger containment. Yeah, I'm gonna get a lot less containment. And then if I'm dealing with a climate, now granted, I don't know, maybe you have humid snow climates up in Snowboda. You don't have wind with your snow. In Colorado, we have dry snow, if you can imagine that. But then again, in some regards, it's really it is pretty wet, especially March, April, right? So again, it would depend on when. And what would be interesting about that is that I don't think it would you you would probably have more containment without the snow than you would with the snow. Because with the snow, I'm gonna get cooler temperatures as soon as my odor gets cold, right? And I've had to describe that to people who come in to Colorado if it's March and April, and we have had such a mild winter that our March April trials are are 70 degrees, which is crazy, right? Yeah, wow. But in the past, most times, if you came into Colorado to do a trial in March or April, yeah, you're gonna get in the morning when we're setting hides, your hands are freezing. Yeah, right. You've got you know 30 degree weather or or less, and we don't get a lot of containment, yeah, right, because then the odor's gonna stay very close to its source, it's not gonna want to move away. Like it has its own personality, but you get what I mean. Um so yes, that could be very, but I love that scenario that because it would be easy to duplicate, or at least, right? Everybody's got a car if you live in snow zones and just go park it on a parking lot that has snow, and especially in the east coast where you're getting still probably getting feet of snow.

SPEAKER_00 55:50

Jeez, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:51

Right?

Corner Cover Hides And When To Reset

SPEAKER_00 55:51

Yeah, I think it would be a good mix. It'd be a good job. Okay, cool. All right. The last one. You're you're pulling.

SPEAKER_01 56:01

Okay. Hang on. We're gonna we're gonna turn the wheel. Okay. Turn the wheel. I'm ready to write it down. She's got a corner. Okay. That's your hide location. I like that. Okay. Your hide attribute. Cover hide.

SPEAKER_00 56:34

Cover hide.

SPEAKER_01 56:35

That's interesting. So the ones that spin really fast are the ones where I have a whole bunch of things in there. Oh, and you got shade. Shade, cover hide.

SPEAKER_00 56:49

What do you mean by cover hide? Since this is your list. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 56:53

What was the other attribute?

SPEAKER_00 56:55

Shade, corner, cover hide. Corner.

SPEAKER_01 56:57

Cover hide was like not just high low that are separated.

SPEAKER_00 57:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 57:05

But high low on top of each other. Where one is going to cascade onto the other. Side by sides, where one's going to cascade on top of the other.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

I had this at Summit about a year and a half ago, and we were not successful.

SPEAKER_01 57:24

And guys, sometimes, right? So this is when you come in and you go, okay, I want to practice pooling and trapping. You try to set up this whole scenario of pulling and trapping, the dog goes in and nails it, and you go, okay, that really wasn't pooling and trapping, right? Yeah. So you know what it isn't when you see it.

SPEAKER_00 57:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:40

But trying to set it up sometimes ahead of running a dog is nearly impossible. So that's what we're that's part of this flexibility here.

SPEAKER_00 57:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 57:48

You know, kind of fun to take those three things and say, This is what I would do. I wonder if I would get.

SPEAKER_00 57:53

Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to explain because it's where my brain goes because it's exactly what this is. It was the summit. We ended up winning that summit. Okay, yay, awesome. But it was a brutally first hard first day. I think it was first day. And it was in the huge, huge room. And Jason Hang was the CEO, and he had placed one in the corner of this big room, elevated, and then he had a cover hide. So he had that was covering over a lower one, which was on a table. And they were both in the corner of the room and they were expanding outwards. And yeah, I ended up calling a false off of that one. So let me think of the progression lower than that that I would like to work with George so I can build that skill, both in me observing it and understanding and seeing what that looks like, but also so that he develops that skill. So if I'm thinking the corner, I probably want to set the higher hide in a corner, but maybe I don't. Maybe I want to set the cover hide as something a little bit higher and away and blowing into the corner. So this would be the opposite version with a lower hide in the corner itself. And I think this might be a little bit more realistic to the vast majority of searches in a lead or detective that he's running right now, is I might have a tabletop hide, right? It doesn't even have to be high, but a tabletop hide, whether it's sitting on top of the table on an object, right? We're already talking about that a little bit, or maybe it's under the lip of the table. And I would like to set that probably about 15, 10, 15 feet away from the corner. So it's close enough, but it's separable. And then I'm gonna aim for a low hide, literally stuck to the corner of the wall, the inside corner. And so as my dog is working, they're going to probably skim that corner and having that lower hide in the corner when he finds it builds a little bit more expectation. So he should be wanting to pull into the corner in the future because he's had that expectation that a hide could be down there. And then the other hide he has to separate. So for me, I'm trying to observe what does it look like a little bit higher versus a low hide happening in the same environment. And then I'm also looking for is my dog pushing into the corner or are they still scooping around and getting stuck on that higher hide? As my dog is working it, maybe I'm gonna pick up the hide off of the table if he's finding that quickly and getting stuck. So then could I make that even more baby? Yeah, I kind of like that exact setup, but instead of the tabletop, I'd put a chair for Vespa. And then my other hide in the corner, instead of just like on the wall and just stuck a tube on the corner, maybe I'm gonna put a box, right? So then I'm creating the understanding to look in those two locations and understanding that odor picture, but I'm not making each hide difficult. Each hide is actually pretty straightforward. So that's kind of how I would probably set up with the thought process of eventually the corner hide will be high, and then another hide that is moderately high is going to be under that, and I can work that progression.

Tools To Build Your Own Wheels

SPEAKER_01 1:00:45

So Alex just hit nailed this with what I was thinking while I was listening to her, and that was how what do we do to adjust this? We've been we've been talking about these. Oh, this is so fun. I'm gonna go set up the corner cover hide in the shade, and then I have my dog go, and oh Lord, it's going south and it's going south for the side. How do I fix it? So not just fix it, but how do I I mean, there is the point where you might even say, hey, nice try. We're done. We both, you know, I set a terrible scenario there, buddy. Sorry, let's get out, right? And we we just get our dog out. You don't need to leave your dog in there to solve something that your objective missed the target entirely. And so to sit there and leave your dog hanging in that scenario might not be the best um opportunity for your dog to experience what you were trying to experience, right? So so that might be one option, which would be, hey, you just call an end to it and set something else, right? Happy interruption. But I like the fact that Alex said what? Pick up one hide, right? So so that's gonna then that gives you the progression. So rather than asking the dog to understand right out of the box how to solve a corner hide with another hide in in some proximity that is moving odor on top of the corner hide, perhaps you just set one, then you set the other, then you set them both together. Right. Or right, and then you're willing once they're both there, that once the dog solves one puzzle, you pick it up so the dog can finish the other puzzle. Because there's still a huge amount of odor memory that the dog's olfaction system has grabbed. This is we are programming the olfaction data for this dog, right? So the dog just grabbed onto that data and it's in the bank now as to as to that response to odor. That was fabulous. That was fun. Yeah. Okay, guys. Well, we are done with our what we what did we call it? On the spot on the spot? On the spot. And it was turning the wheel of odor.

unknown 1:02:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:56

So we'll have hopefully in the show notes some some options for you guys to find these wheels of odor.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:01

Yeah, and you can make your own.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:03

Yeah, and you can build your own. Because what we did find is that to like share the app, you end up having to kind of rebuild it anyway. So we might as well just share how we got it. I mine was actually it called Daily Decisions. Can you imagine that if you had three wheels? Oh gosh, and everything you needed to do that day, you just kept spinning the wheel. It's like one of those, what was it, the the eight, the ball of eight ball? Oh my gosh. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:28

Just pull around and say, Yeah, and say the one that I pulled from online is called wheelofnames.com. And it actually was super easy because I was able to pull in the lists from Excel and I just copy-pasted it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:42

This one did too.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43

Yeah, it was so easy. So there are a lot of resources out there. I kind of like this. I'm probably gonna fine-tune it a little bit for maybe concepts that I'm thinking about, kind of like obsessing over, and then I can kind of use that to keep spinning for my own training.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:58

Now, so I'm guessing that this is yeah, it's a dot-com. So this is a URL app that Alex used. The one that I used was actually an Apple app. I got it off the Apple store, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:10

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:10

And I think the URL can live on your phone, just like a lot of us are using the running order app. Oh, yeah, right? Yeah. So the URL you would just have, right? You would just save it to your desktop as a tab, and then you could open it on your phone. So either one should be able to function on your phone as you're out training. So yeah. So we have a lot of fun with that, guys. I think that we really wanted to cover the 101 ways to think about odor and how to really use odor to bring some clarity to your for your dog. And any point in time when it becomes less than clear, yeah, then you know, we have fun doing it. So, you know, maybe you note that as, oh, we need to work more on that, or I need to get more ideas on how to train that or set that up or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:00

And probably as you're listening, your brain probably went a different direction than ours to think about how to put these three things together. So if you wanted to like share even in the comments, because we'll have this as a post on our Facebook group, if you want to kind of go where your brain went with maybe some of them, because I'm sure other people would love to hear other creativity um options on how these are kind of put together.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:22

Well, one of the things I really like about this is it the idea of spontaneity was really important, right? So I think sometimes, at least back in the, I hate to say back in the old days when we did walkthroughs. When we walk through the right, we walk through the classroom, we go, oh, I got a bank of windows over there. Oh, the sun's out. Oh, I can feel the air conditioning, oh, I've got airflow, oh look, there's there's a table. Oh, they could have, you know, it was almost like there was too much brain inspection going on about the environment, my odor attributes, and my hide location. And in here, what we're doing is just spinning it. And you could even just make this a fun game. Maybe, maybe it's while you're having dinner, right? And you're having a conversation with your your nose uh work friends or your scent work friends. While you're at a trial that dinner. Yeah, in the parking lot. Yep. And you just spin it and everybody kind of talk about how they might set up that training scenario. So that could be really fun. So hope you enjoyed our our session on spin the wheel of odor.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:25

Yeah. Thank you guys.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:26

Thanks, everybody.