Balancing Your Nosework Training

We unpack why nose work teams stall when they overtrain one weakness and stop practicing the full continuum of skills that show up at trials. We lay out a practical way to balance environment, dog skills, hide setup, and handling so your dog stays clear, confident, and efficient from odor to source. 
• defining balanced training across skill continuums 
• familiar versus novel environments and why context changes behavior 
• building strong odor recognition that drives to source 
• keeping odor important around distractions and crittering 
• managing odor availability through hide placement and accessibility 
• balancing blank areas with finding so dogs keep motivation 
• using drills to build skills without chasing one “perfect” hide 
• stick to source versus moving on and creating clear cues 
• how NACSW and AKC odor pictures can feel different 
• handling balance, independence, and the dog’s working bubble 
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email us. And we love to get some ideas on any topics that you might want to hear in the future.

Transcript

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Welcome And Why This Topic

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hey everyone, welcome to our podcast, K9 Scent Fix. This is Jill Kovosevich, and I'm here with Alex Woodruff. Say hello, Alex. Hi guys. So we were, as sometimes as often happens, sometimes we come off of a particular event or whatever, and we're hot to have a topic and we share it with each other and we kind of look at what we want to talk about. Both Alex and I are Alex just finished up her camp in Strawberry, Arizona. And so she's coming off a lot of actually coaching and teaching and training others from that experience. I did a workshop down in the Austin, Texas area for my very good friend Michelle Munson. It was super fun. So I'm Oslo. And then I just did a workshop at Meeker to end our trial that we had there. So I'm coming off of that kind of mindset as well. So this is kind of a hot topic that we feel kind of we need to talk about a little bit more so that everybody can gain an understanding.

What “Balanced Training” Really Means

SPEAKER_01 1:07

We're going to call it balancing training to cover the skill sets. So what we mean by that, it's not a it's not a noun label. It's more looking at the concepts of making your training including all the variables, right? From from point A to point B. So when we think about that, there's a continuum, and we could talk about it as the continuum of any skill. So if we're going to say, I need to work on, or I would like to work on, or I'd like to train my dog to have a better skill set in sourcing. So I might say, my sourcing skill sets are what I want to work on, and I may have on the left side of the continuum. If I'm my continuum is going from left to right, would be the weaker skill, you know, on the left, and then I'm going to get stronger as I move to the right. Or you're also going to hear us talk about where different skill sets may have the opposite. So, and that was my example of stick to source versus moving on. Those can be very much on different parts of that continuum, yet both are very important. So that's so if you're getting a little confused as we're going along, we're going to try to make everything as clear as we can. But really noticing that our teams really need to focus those balancing. We often have a tendency to focus on what we feel we are the weakest at. And then we over train it and to the exclusion of like those other things that we felt we were really good at. And then perhaps our dog now lacks a little clarity on how to put that whole balancing picture together, or we do. So yeah. Yeah. So where would you like to start, Alex? Why don't you pick one and we'll go from there?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Sure, sure. So it's kind of like the yin and yang. Maybe before we dive into specifics, maybe we can even look at like we how we're going to divide those specifics, is we've got like skill-based kind of things that we need to be working for skills and the dog understanding solving problems. But even within there, there's a balance of confidence, whether they have confidence to do the work. And I think sometimes we get caught up maybe on the skill end and we are just building a skill, building a skill, but then we forget that it has to be practiced in novel environments or it has to be worked with different kinds of level of handling in different kinds of situations. So there's that one. So skill versus dog. We also have the handler piece of it. So if we work all independence work, which is mostly just dog skill building and understanding situations, when we put us into it in a trial, we might be unbalanced. So thinking about us within those pictures. And then the last one is environment. And I kind of said it already a little bit, but that I think that environmental piece needs to be considered. It is part of the big picture. This is one of those sports. It's not like so obedience. Maybe you can go to the same obedience trial location every time. And your dog gets pretty competent in a certain environment, or maybe even in agility, you have the same spot that you go and you compete at. In scent work, it's so rare to have something like that. Typically, we are searching in all different kinds of environments, places you've never trained in, and it's not a problem. It shouldn't be a problem, and it shouldn't be something that we expect that they are always the same kind of spaces. So I think that's important too. Okay, so with those kinds of pieces there, the first one that I would love to talk about is environmental, familiar versus novel environments.

Familiar Versus Novel Environments

SPEAKER_00 4:30

So that to me is the balance on both ends. You might want to do familiar environments because we are working on building confidence with a different kind of skill, understanding how to work something independently without getting distracted. Versus we now have to start also adding the same kind of concepts in a novel environment. So like Jill's saying, with the range of competency within the skill. So we are weaker versus stronger and the dog's weaker versus stronger. We can maybe get really strong in a familiar environment. And then you put, if you tried to do the really hard version of that skill in a novel environment, it might all just fall apart because we haven't been applying it all the way across. So we might have to simplify way back down to the easier version of it and then add that difficulty again.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yeah. And I think that the concept of the balancing, a really good example of that, is when all of us worked on the sit stay with our dogs, right? And we had the perfect sit. And so we said, Oh, I'm gonna do just one more. I'm gonna do just one more. And then you get to a point where now the dog in that training session has disengaged or is no longer following, right? The building of the skill set. And now our sit starts to fall apart. So that's a really good just example of how the balancing of your training, you still have to have the mindset of not getting stuck on this repetition that then breaks it, because that's kind of what we think of as consistency. So if I want to get really consistent in that environment that doesn't include a fair grounds with horse manure, then I and I want to work up towards that, then I go into that environment and I just keep doing it and do it and do it until finally the dog becomes multitasking in other odors that may be present. Then I've kind of lost that piece, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:20

So I think that's part of it. And I think maybe thinking about us too and our impact to it. So this weekend I asked Vespa to sit. I she knows how to sit, it's totally fine. Normally that word's no problem. But I was sitting at the table and I said the word sit, and she's like, I no clue. That does not even process. I stand. And she could not sit. She had no clue how to do it. As soon as I stood up, she sat. And she could do a great example. So context matters. And I think sometimes we get lulled into that, especially if you're at the same training facility or you're training always at your house, is they might know how to do it really well, like alert behaviors. I hear that all the time as a judge. Well, my dog doesn't do this at home. They normally do XYZ. Right, right. It's a new space. Did you try doing it in 20 different spaces before you came to a trial?

SPEAKER_01 7:11

And the flip side of that is but my dog didn't give me XYZ. So I didn't call it, right? Exactly. Yeah. So when we were talking about even the in the environment, the familiar to the to the unfamiliar, the novel. Your familiar environment. So say now your familiar environment is the training room that you use, right? Or you go, you're blessed and you can actually go into schools and do workshops and that kind of thing. But on trial day, now the AC unit is either on full blast, yeah, or off. And now, right? And now it's like, oh no, now totally different, right? Yeah. Because it can very well be even a familiar environment, but it's the environment on that day, at that time, at that moment of that search that then can affect the dog. So how do we build that consistency? And then I think a lot of what happens is we go to immediately to, well, that's all fine, Jill and Alex, but I don't have access to those kinds of novel environments. So how do I build these skill sets and get balanced skill sets that I can then bring into novel environments when I don't have access to them? And so I think that both Alex and I feel pretty strongly about working on those foundational, fundamental skill sets so that your dog can start to absorb and learn when they come into those novel environments. So, what would some of those be? Some examples of that.

Odor Recognition, Importance, Availability

SPEAKER_00 8:44

The biggest one for me is recognition of odor. I want my dog to have such a strong value for odor. And that normally means letting go of a lot of other things like alert behaviors and things like that, because I want my dog to be conflict-free and go, hey, I smell the odor. I need to get to it. I need to want it. And we can build that at home. And you brought up a kind of a thought that came to mind is I see this a lot online, is I need to find interior spaces to work. I need it. I need it. And I can say, like my dogs, the only other spaces that they work inside other than my home is at trial sites. I I don't feel the need. I don't feel like that's something that my dogs need or don't need. It does develop through experience. But the skills are what brings them forward. I can teach those skills. I teach outside and it's fine. And they can learn those skills outside because it is the same skills. It's the same desire. But I can now apply it to a park. I can apply it to like a courtyard at a community center. I can find a lot of public access spaces that allow dogs. And I don't even need to, I personally, I don't love to interrupt another business for me to go in and do something with my own dog, but a public space, totally fine. Now you have to be aware. It depends on where you're at, if it's safe or not. But I find that those kinds of situations are good. So drive to source is my primary one, understanding that odor will pay and the rest of it I can build. What about you? What's your main one?

SPEAKER_01 10:12

You hit the nail on the head. It's odor recognition. And I kind of say these are the three, my trifectas. I have a lot of trifectas, meaning just three pieces that make up what I think is really important. But odor recognition is really the start because we want our dog not only to recognize. So we often think of, okay, I've already imprinted my dog on target odor, which is birthnis clove or whatever it is. So of course, my dog has odor recognition. They come into a search area and they search, but you need to make sure that that odor recognition is more than just I'm bathing in the odor, right? It is recognizing odor to source. So the quantification of how do I find source from the odor information I have in the environment, right? So, and I put in here the second piece. I think the handler and the dog are equally responsible for this skill set. So it's not just building my dog's odor recognition, but as a handler, do I have the skill set of recognizing when my dog is odor? Yeah, it is huge. Totally. Am I looking for my dog's response, automatic response to odor? And is that the skill set that we have? Okay. Then it's odor importance. So we go, oh, well, my dog wouldn't be working the available odor to source if it wasn't important. But that can become skewed based on the environment, right? Yeah. So now if my environment includes, you know, the fairgrounds or these or even crittering, we have a term called critering. And I think that is intended to mean when my dog's multitasking between target odor and right. Like, and we can't tell the difference. And it could very well be that odor, our target odor is actually on the ground and our dog is working it. So do we both have an understanding of odor importance? And when my dog is in that kind of odor, will my dog work target odor information to source, right? Totally. And then the third one is odor availability. So dang it, when we're either training with someone else or we're training on our own, both of those first two pieces are dog's odor recognition and the value that they place on odor at that moment in time is dependent upon whether or not odor is available. So, right, and that's our hide placement piece because and this goes to the piece that that Alex wanted to talk about from the beginning, which was if we go in and we say, and then we're, you know, we're kind of coming back around maybe to some fall training, fall trials coming up where we're going, okay, this is going to be my first summit. So I really need to work on pooling and trapping. So how am I going to do that? I'm just going to keep working pooling and trapping and all these inaccessibles, right? Versus those inaccessibles may have a huge variation of the amount of odor that's available. So am I still including in my training the accessible hide? So my dog doesn't have to go in and do this your balance. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yes. So that's what we're suggesting. And then they're not fringing, right? So if we do too many inaccessibles, then the dog is coming to an answer without doing the extra work to figure out if they can get to source. Right. There's that balance.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Yep. Yep. So it's and one of the classic ones that I talk about a lot, especially with, and it this can happen even as you move into the higher levels. All of a sudden your dog is, like we were just talking about with pooling and trapping. Maybe they're being too sticky, if you can call it that, in the pooling and trapping. Yeah. And not moving off the pooling and trapping, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Because in the past, the hide sets have created pooling near source. That is why they're set. That brings them in. It gives a lot of confidence at the source. It's purposely done. Now it's purposely done where odor moves away from source. And that is the skill for both parts of the team to figure out how to get out of.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And that's a really good point again, now about odor recognition. So my dog's working this inaccessible hide. No, it doesn't really matter. Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what level. Even novice or NW1, your dog's working an inaccessible hide in an ORT container, right? We can have the whole conversation about, oh no, it's just one big, big container. It's not really inaccessible, but it the dog will not be able to get nose on source. So let me just define it that way. So can I recognize that bracketing? So here we go. So now does my dog recognize the odor picture from that inaccessible? And do I recognize my dog working it? Because now when we graduate up into elite and into, and by gosh, at one, two, three, novice, advanced master, you're going to run into these same odor pictures for your dog. And so do I recognize when my dog is working that kind of a hide? And if not, then am I like creating the conflict, right? Which is can can you just find it? Can you find it, find it, find it? Okay, you know, just I keep like my I got that repetition in my head of why are we not solving this puzzle? Why are we not solving this puzzle? Versus I'm recognizing the puzzle is more complex. Now what steps do I take, right? And what training do I need to do so that my dog has not just the clarity and the consistency, but the confidence of working that kind of puzzle, right? So boy, that order availability is huge.

Blank Areas And Search Versus Find

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Yeah, and kind of in the same boat is the balance, and I think it's a balancing of the level as well. Blank areas, yes, we need to work them, but understanding how much you're going to see them, understanding the impact on the dog, because if your dog has not learned to work through areas with less odor availability, right? And it's harder to get from point A to point B and they have to hunt more in between, to throw them into a blank space is quite stressful because they don't understand that skill building in between. So then I hear people like, oh, we need to do a ton of blank spaces. I work a lot of blank spaces. My dogs work in between search areas. They've had to clear whole buildings before we start an AKC trial just to make sure there aren't hides left behind. And so, yeah, they work a lot of blank, but at the same time, it's a balance with finding, right? So the dog has to have a good value for hunting, which might happen in absence of odor or very low availability. But then we also have to balance that, and I think that's where we come back to confidence in these spaces of knowing what they're doing with good odor availability, good pathways to source, and potentially even good distance to that pathway. You can create a long distance. I had a student, we're playing around with concentrations in my odor theory class, and she set odor bomb in one room far away. That dog works through, I think, three or four different rooms and hallways, testing doorways, and she drove right into source's single hide. Awesome. It's a summit-level dog. She needs to be able to have that skill. She could probably do the exact same search with no odor, and the dog will be less animated, but still working through the same spaces. But I don't want a novice dog working that. The novice dog doesn't have that skill progression yet. A blank space might be fine, very short balance, very short distance or time, but we have to keep that balancing of the whole concepts of what are we working and when are we working it within the dog's journey? And how often do we go back to them?

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Well, and I think that's a really good point because I think sometimes we often focus on and we talk about it as search work rather than finding work. Right. Yeah. So I think if you introduce that concept, because you know, even at the lower levels, you hear what you just said, and you know, oh, that's really cool. I want to set that up. That'd be really fun to watch my dog to see if my dog could solve that. Yeah, exactly. I want to see if we can do it. Right. And yet now what I'm exposing my dog to, and you got to remember our job is to provide our dogs with an opportunity to experience. So don't even put learn there or train, just put experience. And often we don't know what they're gonna learn from that experience until it's learned. So if we're gonna set that odor bomb for that very lower level that has not yet experienced searching odor availability at a lower level through all the pooling and trapping that dog probably faced, the quantification differences, and we're just gonna see what happens. I mean, you could do it just for you know, giggles on one particular day. What we're saying is we would not want to train that, if you will, to repeat that. Yeah. Because now the dog is doing far more searching and far less finding, far less.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Which then what is the balance that the dog is learning in that moment is move through odor, not pursued to source. Exactly. And we have to manage that balance between all of it. The dog needs to understand when they walk into odor. So I just did a whole bunch of small dog stuff. I think I've got still the workshop open right now, but that is the key. If you have a tiny dog that can't move through a space very quickly, they have to have that very much efficiency to source. That's where you've said it, like the sneaky fast dog. Yeah. So the dog that's not moving super quick, they have to respond to that odor source. And if we balance it off a little and we're doing too many where odor's really far away and they're working all these edges without ever really getting into the middle until they've worked for some time, we might be creating an expectation in the dog that it takes that long to work it. It might not be. It might be a threshold hide 10 feet off the source and it's just blowing a little bit funny.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

And that's where I think our sport kind of changes, right? What we think of when we think of our dog's innate ability to hunt. Because the innate ability to hunt is when the dog is in the wild, if you will, to survive so they can find their food. So then they do have to have much more stamina to continue to hunt before they can get to their food, just in the event that that food is not easily available. In nose work, we're actually asking these dogs to come in and find, at least once you get past uh level one or novice, more than one rabbit in the hole. Yes. Yeah. More than one source, right? So then it's not only can the dog come in and have, I've called it source urgency, which is, and this is these words are not intended to take maybe the more methodical dog or even the shy dog, blah, blah, blah, and turn them into some kind of really fast competitor. They just sufficient. It's using the words just to describe the sequence of what happens, right? So source urgency just means that source then has its own odor recognition, its own odor importance, and by gosh, its own odor availability. So if I continue to set, this goes to my responsibility as a handler, and I'm doing some self-training, and I continue to set hides and then start my dog way, you know, a much greater distance away from it. I'm asking my dog to do more searching and less finding, right? Right, right. Then if I start closer, that might be more finding based on what the environment's gonna do and what that hide is doing. I get that it might be one that is almost going everywhere, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think, but those three pieces are still so important odor recognition, odor importance, and odor availability. So every time I set a hide, I have to ask after you run the dog or start to run the dog, what's the information you're getting back? Is odor available, right? Because we've all set that accessible hide and we swore all the dog had to do, even visually, was literally walk up to the chair and they would see the hide and yet. The dog is working odor over, under, through, side to side, right? And that's the beauty of the old faction, right? That it's yeah, it is based on their acquiring that information.

Drills That Build Real Skill

SPEAKER_01 22:13

So one of the things I think is hugely important for building that skill set are the are the drills. So it's it's adding in the balance of doing a search, like you might see. And this is that that thing we come off a trial, and you know, we're coming out of the Leadville trial, and we had that one hide that we missed in that classroom. And so then we say, Oh, we need to find a school that's at 10,000 feet that has that has not gonna happen yet. And I'm gonna put the hide in the exact same place, and that's what we're gonna train on. And really, if we worked even in our living room or our garage or in our back uh yard and and found a way to do, you know, the running bunny, the multiple hides in a row. That's one example. Maybe it is a one and done. Maybe it's it's even containers that are open with the tins in them, because that I can take to any parking lot, quite frankly. Now I don't even right. So you mix those drills in with the search set hides that are gonna require more of the more searching, right? To get to my source versus source, source, source type.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

Yeah, yeah. So kind of along the same line, and we can talk about balancing within that. I find, and you see this a lot, is a dog with, and we say it like tons of drive, right? They're a high drive dog, and meaning they have strong feelings about source. They need to get it. Okay, so if we have that dog, that dog often actually needs less skills to achieve the same level as a dog with lower level drive to achieve the same kind of success. And so I've seen this a lot. And so it's not to say that that high drive dog doesn't need the skills because they do fall apart and they do end up with a lot of extra work that might not happen. But it's a balance. And so taking the dog in front of you, a dog that might have lower drive, we can do drills like what you're saying, building a lot of value for the odor and just like that high repetition and the expectation they should be fed there. Once you start building that, even with a lower drive dog, you start mimicking that, and which then ends up with this weird one hide off where you get into a lead and you're like, that one hide, how do I replicate it? It's like under the like whiteboard kind of thing, right? That seems to be a hide that expands in a classroom and it's hard and the dogs kind of miss it. You don't need that. But if you had a dog with very good drive to source, really good understanding that they should be paid on source, even if they're lower drive, but they understand that, they can pursue through a not having the skill to understand that, right? And so then it's that balance.

unknown 24:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

That's perfect.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

And I think that what happens sometimes is we see that, whether we see it in training or at trial, and then we say, oh, that was really hard for my dog, rather than think of it as a complex odor puzzle that my dog just needs to gain more experience doing, right? Yeah. And then it becomes, well, but don't I need to set the exact same thing to duplicate that odor puzzle? And the answer is no, we increase the variables under which our dog is able to, not just willing. If we, if I'm gonna use the word willing, now I'm potentially looking at a motivation issue, right? And that may be food, toy, praise, whatever it is that's gonna get our dog to want to do this crazy sport with us. But so then it becomes that whole concept of how do I put that into my training that's beneficial first for the clarity for my dog? Because we always want to be

Stick To Source Versus Move On

SPEAKER_01 25:50

thinking of that. We may have a really good example, and this is the one I use a lot for a lot of explanations, is the concept of stick to source, right? Because the human has to call alert. Yeah, it's an ice problem. Gets to source, yeah. I need, I may need as the handler, more clarity on the dog's communication to me that they have reached source. So I may feel right, I may have great training, my dog gets in there, but my dog maybe has what we could I call a pop and go. The nose just comes right into that source, you know, pin in the haystack and then bounces right off and they take off. Now I've got in in that kind of language that's going to describe that skill set, I've got what I call a pop and go. So I've got the dog who's who's maybe more motivated to go look for the next hide or satiated in in odor versus staying at that hide long enough so that human brain can start to catch up, right? And that's often where some of our alert behaviors come in, right? Which is maybe the dog starts to offer a sit. You know, maybe we start to delay, and I get a paw, I get a biting of the high. I get some of those other things.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

The more behavior.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Yeah. So we have to figure out how do we build that duration at source, sufficient for a handler to be able to comprehend our dog is at source. And one of the best skill sets you can do with that is odor recognition from the time you release your dog in the search. Yeah. Yeah. So you gain, you're not just waiting for that on source communication. Right. It's all getting communication from the whole pursuit of that source, right? Yeah. So it kind of I want to just talk about the and jump right in on this. What are what are the what's the continuum of stick to source versus moving on?

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Right. Yeah. So moving on would be the dog's understanding that they are finished with one and now they can go seek another one. And I think that understanding of finished on one location is the big piece, right? That's the piece that the dog needs to understand. And how do we typically do that really is dependent on the handler. It depends on your system of how you put things together. For me personally, the cue for my dogs to know they are allowed to move on, because they're pretty sticky on source. They have a freeze alert, but not always. They might get a little excited, but they know to move on because I've stood up and turned my body slightly away. And I might say find. I find I don't always have to say it. But I know like Holly Bouchard has a full-on cue. She has a release cue. The dog is done, move on. But she's allowed to keep feeding on source until that release cue happens. That works too, right? Like we've got a lot of different options. But I think it's when we don't have clarity in our own cues and clarity in our own understanding of how to tell our dogs that they're free now to move on. That's where we start getting into this kind of wishy-washy stuff. Because I think not that we need to train alert behavior. That's total like I've seen amazing teams that never even have an alert behavior. They can read the behavior of the dog on source, they call it beautiful. But if we don't have clarity on when the dog's expectation to be fed is, we don't have clarity on when they can move on. Like the dog has to have a belief they should be fed before they move on or a toy, then we should be okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

It's like the termination of pursuit, right? So, yes, we got that rabbit. We had the rabbit stew. Now it's time to go get another rabbit, right? Yeah. So a couple of pieces there that's really good is a skill set that I call immediate acquisition of the next hide. So the dog is actually not just coming off of one hide with whatever termination or cues happen, but we've also built an immediate expectation that there's more out there, right? And the dog comes off. And one of the pieces I want to throw out there really quickly is that this is not intended to say yes or nays about anybody's handling system. You need to acquire that that you feel comfortable and confident with, but also that has clarity for the dog. I think that's the biggest piece. So if we're talking about learning and then training and getting an expectation that develops into a skill set for the dog, moving on needs odor. Standing in a neutral position, not giving your dog the opportunity to have other odor available to acquire for another high to move on. Right. Right. And that's one of the things I find that's really challenging is when I see folks who want to work on those two pieces on the same continuum at the same time. I want to work on stick to source, and then I want to stand up. And yes, I just gave you 10 treats out of my cupped hand at source, right? We stayed there forever because I'm working on stick to source, and then I just stand up, and now neither one of us has clarity as to when we're moving on, how to move on, who's first gonna choose to move on.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Yeah. So then some of those pieces can be if you have a training partner and your dog isn't moving off, get a next hide closer. If you have to reach down, pick up that hide and put it in your pocket. Now it's gone, right? You've made, yeah, you've extinguished the access to the prior hide, if you will, to the rabbit that we already captured, right? Now it's let's go looking for another rabbit. That can, you know, and we and Alex and I probably have a wealth of ways that we would do this. And especially in a workshop, that's what's so fun about a workshop or a seminar, guys. If you guys have any ability to attend one with a reputable person who really loves to, I call it tweak the dogs. Like probably not the, but to shape just to actually shape with odor the dog's expectation. It's really fun to watch. It's really fun to then be able to do that for yourself. And I think we have a tendency to go, oh my gosh, I can't pick up that hide. I'll I'll, you know, break my dog. They may never go back to right. And we really haven't found any one thing that breaks our dogs, if you will. There's a way to like balance that, right? Now, if I have the dog who's already moving off so fast, then maybe what I want to do is start with a single hide that there's nowhere else to go. Yeah, right. And I'm and then we build stick. Yes. And I'm gonna build the expectation of that, right? And then when I get ready to work on moving on, maybe I have two hides accessible on a chair that are 10 feet apart. We do one as soon as I want to say, okay, that's enough on this high, enough reward and everything. I pick up that hide and I put it in my pocket. The dog may go search the entire area and then finally come back to that other one and may get faster and faster. Not faster, let's let more efficient, yeah than going from one source ending and terminating that pursuit to acquisition of the next hide. Because for me, the skill set of acquisition, almost immediate acquisition of source odor. And I'm not talking about just because if you're gonna set at Summit or even at a lead, that many or even at detective, holy buckets, yeah, that many hides in a search area, the dog is bathing in it. So when we're talking about odor availability, there's far more odor availability than clear pathway to source.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

But it's still AKC odor, and the pathway to source in a detective is going to be much clearer than if I had the exact same number of hides in a summit search.

NACSW Versus AKC Odor Pictures

SPEAKER_00 33:53

So let's have Alex explain that.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

Because I this is one of the explanations I love because if you don't haven't done either one, right? Like you've only done one of those two experiences. Yeah, yeah. What does it mean? We don't have that.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Yeah, we're like, what did she just say? So the big one, so I've gone back and forth. Like when Tana won the summit trial, she went around the very next weekend and won a big master high in trial. It doesn't mean that they can't do both, but the pictures are different. So if I have five any CSW hides in a same, like small, like a classroom, even like it's saturated. There's a lot for any CSW mindset, five hides in a classroom feels like a ton, right? It can be done. They can have, but what happens typically is the odor pictures that are coming off of each hide have a little bit of a less dense cloud. And so the filaments helping them come into those sources are going to be less frequent and move pretty easily with just moving around in the space. Versus AKC odors, two drops, one Q-tip, the Q-tips are typically going to be a little more contained and kind of thrown into good spots, but the odor coming off from source is constant. You have way more filaments, way clearer, way stronger filaments. And so even though the dog may pass by, as they turn around, that pathway back to source is still pulling them in. It's almost like a bullseye. I find that the dogs just kind of pull right into it and they can work it. Now we still have pooling. There still is a lot of collection of odor away from source. There's a lot of convergence, but those clouds are going to be a little bit more clearer, like almost if we were envisioning that dispersal. So it's a little bit less, a little bit less, a little bit less as it goes away. That picture is going to be much more dense when we talk about AKC odor or even UKC, it's one drop, versus an ACSW odor. It's going to be a little bit lighter as you go away from source and potentially it's going to collect in similar amounts near source. And so it takes a little longer to solve those hides.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

And just an interesting note here, guys, the, you know, whatever reasons that the there's a differentiation of odor quantification on a particular hide or on a Q-tip per venue could have been developed just based on attempting to have some consistency within that venue. 100%. Right. Totally. It's not necessarily like, oh, NACSW just wants you working for less odor availability or AKC wants you working for so much out there, blah, blah, blah. It really just is how it developed. And it's very interesting because I know even within my training, you know, I will get the what I because actually I'll like when Alex comes, I'll have her bring me some of her pubes, right? And so then I'll even just do that so that my dog just has the experience of that sort of novel and you know, odor picture. Yeah, not necessarily to train it because I I primarily do NACSW. And that's more because I'm just I'm engaged with it. I'm engulfed in the organization. I really don't have AKC going on in anywhere close proximity. Granted, it's down in the front range. I could probably do that. I have done it with Zeke, the novice level. I just have not yet found time to pursue that. Yeah. So now going on to real quickly, so we talked about dog skills and trying to look at the balancing of training in that environment.

Handling Balance And Search Management

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Now let's talk a little bit about the handling, right? So this would be the piece of you know, how do I determine clarity for handling? How do I determine consistency and confidence? And then isn't independence of the dog somewhere on that? Like either my handling promotes independence of my dog or right, or promotes more teamwork. And is should we think of teamwork as being more deep in it? I mean, I hate to say that, but kind of, you know, you supporting the hide or supporting the dog working the hide, those kinds of things. So why don't you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

This one is like my little thing that I love to think about because skill building, so your dog learning how to solve a problem should not really include you. Like how that picture should work, how to move around, it should be very quite independent. Yes, there's probably going to be moments, but we could probably split down behaviors and create even more clarity in the work. And so that's all independent. But the other total spectrum is what I find is what we might do in a trial with a lot of handling. We're present. Depends on your system. Maybe you do a lot more handling versus other people do a lot less handling and much more following, but there's still us present and we always have impact, whether we are there or not, right? So understanding that those are spectrums within the same kind of balancing act. I do think it's important in our training to train handling, but we also have to understand when we are doing it to create that balance so that when we get into a trial setting, my dog isn't balanced towards me being present, but it's also not balanced so far to the independence that they are surprised when I am now present in their search and unleash. Right. So it's creating that balance within the two within our training and understanding. You can train with your handling presence, like what you might do in a trial. And it might be coverage of the space. It might be support to stay in a space when I start seeing changes of behavior that indicate the dog needs to stay in a space to keep working. But that's a choice. And we can make those choices in training so that when we get to trial setting, we both are starting to work together as a team, right? You're saying, like, where's the teamwork? My teamwork normally depends on a dog. And I trust that the dog knows their job. Their job is to find source and find and tell me about it. That's their job. My job, because I know where the boundaries are, I know what the rules are at the level. So my job might be much more about management. And it's not managing my dog necessarily, it's managing the search area and making sure that we've hit everything and that we've done all the areas. And so we work together as a team.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

And one of the things I love to talk about with regard to our job as managing that search area is also to make sure that you are still present with your dog. That that so, so rather, so think of it this way when you go to drive your car, there's times you can drive your car and it becomes so automatic, such an automatic response that you even forget that you drove past, you know, the mailboxes that you drive by every day. Like you don't even remember, oh, I just drove past it, right? Right. Versus when we become distracted when we're driving, like we see something and all of a sudden our head's on a swivel and stuff, and we have to slow down to focus more on turn down the radio. Right. Yes, turn down the radio because I'm trying to follow the GPS or something like that, right? It's those side or you're in the city and you're just trying to make an exit, those kinds of things. So that's kind of what I think what happens, and that's a good visual for that continuum of when our management becomes so much that now we lose focus, right? Of and we are now distracted by the environment. And if we're distracted by the environment, it's pretty likely our dogs are distracted by us. So now we're both kind of moving away from our focus on sourcing, right? Right. So it's really trying to work in those things. And and you know, there's some folks who love to do all those games where that it's just a whole game to try to rock the focus of the handler while they're right. And and I'm one of those who will just like so I've done some things in life, for instance, ski patrol, even where when you go to work on that person who's injured, the whole rest of the world just falls away. Like you're not even aware there's anything else there, you're focused on this job. And that's how I get when I'm running my dog. I get very focused on what's going on right in front of us. And for me, I'm able to really, I don't really, because when I watch some teams and I see the handler with their head on a swivel, what I mean by that is even as the dog is moving right, and to me, direction is one of the biggest changes of behavior, you should be aware of that your dog's direction in the search is being motivated by their re-automatic response to odor, right? That's the old-fashioned system, that's how it works. It's almost like having the automatic car, right? Fighting it in the lane changing thing, going, no, I don't, right? Yeah. So if my head's now on a swivel and I'm busy looking left while my dog is moving right, that now I'm on two opposite ends of that balancing continuum, right? Within the handling. Yeah. Yeah. So I need to find a way that I can feel comfortable of either just short glances. Maybe my glances happen when I'm at my reward, maybe my glances happen when my dog is even, but even straight in front of you, that's pretty important. Because one of the things I love to say is where your dog goes, the first time they enter the search area across your start release. Okay. And I'm not even going to say start line because we get off fixated on where that line is. Yeah. Yeah. But that start release, once you release them, if they go fully to the right in containers and all your containers are lined up to the left, yeah, there's info for odors going.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

So you should go with the dog to the right, right? And then if that turns out to be not efficient but effective, then we can work on the efficiency side, right? Right. Of solving source closer to source, yada, yada, yada, source urgency. So those I think that is just huge about, you know, what how does our handling play in come into there?

Independence, The “Bubble,” And Lead Skills

SPEAKER_01 43:52

Another example of the independence is, and I've got upper level teams who need to become more aware of what they're, I'm going to call it the dog's bubble. Yeah. And that's the space within which the dog is willing to work away from the handler.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

Yeah. Yeah. Before they start pulling back or turning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

Or the handler's so used to being at a shorter distance that now the dog doesn't stretch beyond that that visible bubble. Yeah. Even when they need to. Right. Right. And then because of our close proximity, the dog is moving, is measuring and moving into source, moving into source. But then they need to verify, which means they're going to move beyond that source, turn around and back. We deprive them of the ability to turn around and come back because we're in such close proximity. We now go right on by it. Yeah, exactly. And so you can see some of that when you watch your videos. You can, you know, and part of it is just try to balance it with I'm going to give a little bit longer lead when you start to see that that direction slow a little bit. Exactly. So that my dog, if they're going to arc and turn back into me, they have the ability to do that. And it's so dependent on size.

SPEAKER_00 45:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:08

Oh my gosh, if you've got a really large dog, it's going to take them more room to even turn their head to decide that they've got to come back. Right. And then with the little dogs, they can be moving so quickly that you don't really see this.

SPEAKER_00 45:24

You feel like you have to go there too. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

That you got to keep up. And especially I think with our, well, I'm going to now put in a category of the fast moving dog. It's not when we say fast dog, we don't always mean it's a fast source. We can find her. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, Zeke running the, you know, to the North 40. So that he can tell me very fast. So that he can tell me there's one molecule of odor out there on the tree. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really learning. And boy, it's being able to say, okay, so how would I modify that? You can do that by a lot of these very accessible. And I love to use the open box, meaning that I rip off, I take an ORT or any cardboard box and I rip off the top. So that I don't have any inclination to shut it at all. Yeah. And it's got a tin or tube down in it. Now, granted, be very careful. If you've got a biter of hides, which I had this past weekend, wow, that poses a whole nother problem, right? But it's an open source. And I love it because then that source odor collects in that container and creates this wonderful pooling problem, even at your upper levels, right? So we go, oh, but isn't that visual? The dogs watch the dog work odor. And if the dog's working odor, then you know it wasn't just a visual hide, right?

SPEAKER_00 46:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:41

But it you can really tell with that. You can use that as your stretch away from me, right? So you put it down, you start them close to it, they go in, they get the hide. Then you back up another 10 feet, you do it again, you back up another 20 feet, you do it again. Where's that bubble of where your dog kind of hesitates and goes, Well, where are you? Are you coming? Yeah, yeah, right. And so you can work on stretching that piece if it's needed as a balance to your overall handling. And that's kind of what we're talking about is we're just offering these pieces of look at the balance. Do you have the dog who's able to? I can't even imagine the amount of variables that they're running through, right? On any given search. Yeah. Right. And no wonder we get in there and we're like, I can't do it. Just find it. Well, why are you turning left? Well, I have no idea what we're doing. Because always, why won't you move up, right? Like, yeah. Yeah. Totally. I love it. And I think one last one is you know, trying to get the handler no more addicted to the nine-second hide than you are to the two-minute hide.

Balancing Hide Setups And Expectations

SPEAKER_01 47:50

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Totally. Because I think we overtrain even both of them. And then we develop this expectation that, oh my gosh, my dog is working, it's too hard. Why is my dog not able to find this? There must not be a hide here. But I can see that they're working odor. And then we just kind of spin in our own head. You're frustrated. I'm sorry, you're frustrated. Why can't you find that? Oh, I'm here to help you. I don't know what to do. And yet the dog could just be facing a complex odor problem at that moment, at that time, in that search. Right. Yeah. Versus the other side, we come in and go, hey, let's just lob off these hides in nine seconds per hide. And that'll make me feel better. Right. And then it takes two minutes to solve one, and you're like, oh Lord, I don't know what to do. So and on that same fold is the overtraining the elevated hide.

SPEAKER_00 48:41

Yes, exactly. So like hide sets, we need balance in our hide sets because we can get fixated on a very specific type of thing, which then diminishes, right? I think it's it's funny because I I think the same thing happens with threshold as we were kind of talking about some of those things, is you can purposely set a hide in your threshold part of your search area and you could do a lot of repetition for it, which is great to teach a dog to stay close. Doesn't do great if a dog needs to move into the search area. But the opposite happens true, is if you have a hide close, but you are setting those deep hides too in every single search, you are counteracting things. So your balance isn't actually there. The dog isn't actually learning to work close. It's learning that there's still an opportunity to be rewarded deep. So why not keep going deep because they like it? So it's creating that balance low versus high, inaccessible versus accessible, threshold versus deep, single hide, multiple hide. Those are all hide sets. And that's us. We have control over that, or your instructor. But if your instructor's setting one thing, you may have to be going home to balance something else if you see a weakness in your own dog. Right.

SPEAKER_01 49:46

Exactly. And we really worked on. I used a lot of in Texas, I used a lot of the drills, if you will, right? So I call them running bunny. They're really, that's not the correct name for it because the bunny isn't running. It's more like five bunnies in five holes right in a line is kind of more what it is, right? And it and it's not, I don't go into it with an expectation. We I love to run it off-leash um and then run it on leash after the dog's been exposed to it. Because if we run it on leash to begin with, I think what people do again, they have this expectation that they're supposed to go from hide to hide. And if that's not my objective, it could be, but if that's not my objective for training, and it's really just about sourcing and source acquisition from one hide to another, then maybe I don't care which order they do them in. Yeah, if I do, I spread them further apart. That might work, reduce the number of hides I'm gonna have out there. Yeah. So that's what we mean by balancing. That you go into these, you know, training things and you say, I want to train this. I want to train close proximity hides. I'm going into my elites, I'm going into my summits, I'm gonna have them. So by gosh, I'm gonna put out five hides that are all in close proximity and ask my dog to do them in order. That might not be the best way to provide my dog with that experience. It might be take two of them, put them over here, take two more, put them over there. Exactly. Like pairings, yeah. Right. And that sort of thing. It might be quite frankly, just start with two before you add four, because that could have the other pair could become more compelling than the first pair.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

And you can also teach your dog to stumble through and just find where they're not actually learning how to separate between two odor pictures. They just kind of keep going and put their nose on chairs and eventually they find something.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

By not having that objective.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

Exactly. By just throwing them out there and saying, hey, we're gonna do five, we're gonna do six.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Well, and I think this is often in, you know, it's not not to blame us as instructors, but you got to have kind of the understanding that often this can be what happens because we get a class together and we want you guys to have two, three, four runs in the timeline we've allotted, right? We don't want to spend a lot of time talking and not searching and not sourcing. So we may set, you know, even for the lower levels, you know, four or five hides, and then we just have the dogs run it, get all four or five, right? Exactly. And then it's trying to work on the dog skill sets for each one of those hides can be a little challenging for a lot of classes that have different variations of skill sets within it. So that might be why you might want to say, okay, I noticed in class my dog had blah, blah, blah, you know, challenge with experiencing or learning how to do that kind of hide. Right. Um, can I either train that at home, get some tips on how to do that? So maybe it was the one inaccessible. You had two accessible hides and you had one inaccessible, the dog got the two inaccessibles and then didn't, wasn't able to solve within the timeline that you preferred. The inaccessible or vice versa, which I've seen, right? Where the dog comes in, gets so compelled and pulled into that inaccessible hide, because those often are giving out far more source quantification, right? Right in the whole stack of chairs, in the whole cupboard that's now a big odor bomb inside that cabinet, right? Yeah. And then they can't go from there with a quick expectation of solving what we perceive to be the simpler hide underneath the chair. Exactly. Yeah. So I think providing all of those experiences is really important. But boy, you can do some of those drills and then you end it with the two chairs that are back to back, and you'll be like, I don't have any expectation my dog's going to be able to do this, and watch. They will go in and go from one to the other, right? And they did great. So yeah.

unknown 53:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

So there you go.

Wrap Up, Fall Plans, And Contact

SPEAKER_01 53:45

Cool. So that was a whole session about balancing training to cover the skill sets. So hopefully um, you guys feel like you got some information about training uh your dog's skill sets, uh, your environmental skill sets, right? Because whatever we do with the dog, we want to then carry it into the variables of the environment, and then put in our handler, handler responsibility, handler training, and handling, which can be two entirely different things of how we do our handling versus how we are as a handler. Exactly. But yeah, thanks so much, Alex. That was really fun. Um, Jill, what are you up to this fall? So, wow, this fall. I know it's so yeah, exactly. So, what we got coming up? So, I have a couple of workshops that I have coming up in September because we actually just did the maker trial, it is usually in September, and we actually did it end of August. But my October, holy buckets. Okay, so I'm gonna go and I am teaching at Colorado camp. Really thrilled about that. This will be the first time I'm I'm a little nervous about it, believe it or not. Oh, these are my peeps, right? So I kind of consider them my peeps anyway, right? So I've taught at PA camp and I've taught at some other camps, but this one is the first time I'm I'm gonna be teaching at Colorado camp, so it's gonna be super fun. Then I go from that the first week in October, then we have Zeke's first summit. Woohoo! Okay, so that'll be exciting. Is is I'm really kind of glad that I kind of have, at least right now, we'll see what happens as I get closer. A very I like to think of it as a balanced approach, but I don't have a a real, you know, high expectation of it. I just want to get in and do it. I'm more hoping that I just end up with enough volunteers and a stand-in host so that we can um can run it, right? And then I've got Calhan, then I go to Montrose, and then we've got Delta. So we're gonna have our 100th mountain dog. 100th trial in Delta. It's November 21, 22, and 23. So that's gonna be a celebration of that's hard to believe. 100 trials in 10 years. We've done thousands of searches, 100 trials, uh, 10 years in one community in ACSW. Yay! I love it. I love it. Pretty cool. Give us your list of oh gosh, yes, like click every weekend. Start start with this AKC craziness you got coming up.

SPEAKER_00 56:06

I think I've got uh three trials or four trials coming up that I'm judging for. So Chino Chino in California, and then here in Phoenix. I'm judging my first ORT. I'm kind of excited about that. It's Sunday. Yay! I can't wait to cheer those guys on. I love ORTs. And then I am COing out in Columbus and doing a little workshop for her up in Montana. So I'm very excited about that. That will be fun. And you're heading to Georgia. I am. I'm headed to Georgia to see Jen middle to end of October, and I think working workshop for her as well. She's excited because she's gonna run Vesper. Vesper, yeah. I love it. And then I have also, I think I might be headed out to Oklahoma. So that should be really fun as well. And I think I've got an Oregon seminar as well on the calendar in November. So lots of fun stuff coming up.

SPEAKER_01 56:53

Yeah, and I'm gonna end the year with you. With Summit. Yeah, Karen Phoenix, CEO for yep, CO for Alex in uh in the school.

SPEAKER_00 57:03

Between Christmas and New Year's, uh hopefully nice and quiet at the school, which is what it's a very cool.

SPEAKER_01 57:09

Oh, meaning that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:10

Nobody should be there, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:11

Yeah, it's kind of crazy. You look at these calendars and you go, and why do you guys do that? Yeah, it's just wearing those many hats, right? Wearing the many hats, and it's it's creating a business, right? I mean, because that's ultimately what we both have done is taken this crazy sport, embedded ourselves in the passion, and then created a business from it. So hope you enjoyed our podcast today. Um if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email us. And we love to get some ideas on any topics that you might want to hear in the future. So thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_00 57:41

Thank you.