Sniffing Around Scent Work

In my last post, I believe I exhorted people to believe that their dogs are purposefully searching, even when it appears to you that they are not.

Several weeks after I wrote that post,  I found that I needed to take my own advice.

Some of you read about Yeti’s first adventure with boxes at an ORT event. We failed the first run (birch), but managed to pass the other two. A few weeks ago, we went to another ORT to try and pass the birch test.

We had been practicing boxes, but Yeti seemed to have gone backwards in his mastery of this element. Not surprising, really, he is a 10 month old adolescent boy who has just started experimenting with lifting his leg. His brain is still forming, and the hormones are flowing; some things are bound to get lost in the shuffle.

So when we went into the ORT, my expectations were low. And when we passed the start line, he wandered around the room, not paying a lot of attention to the boxes, seemingly unfocused. At one point he sat down next to a box, but got up fairly quickly. Finally, he sniffed at a box longer, sat down, and gave a definitive tap with his paw. I called it, and it was the hot box. Celebrations ensued.

The next week, we went to a UKC trial, where we had entered four runs of containers. UKC containers are a lot like ORTs, except the boxes are easier, and they are set up in one line down the middle of the area, instead of two rows of six.

Again Yeti seemed a little unfocused on his first run, falsing on the box next to the hot box before alerting on the correct one. I mentally steeled myself for a long weekend of botched container runs. However, on his second run, I saw his stop and sniff interestedly in a box halfway down the line, then veer off the line, towards the wall, about 8 or ten feet. Then he u-turned back to the line of boxes and alerted on the box next to the one he had sniffed at before. I called the alert, and the judge said the magic YES.

This is when the light turned on in my head. Yeti had not been doing unfocused puppy things. Yeti had been following the odor cloud.

Fortunately, I had been able to get a friend to video the ORT run. I went back and looked at it. Yes, I think he had been following the odor cloud in the ORT. Then, just to be sure, I watched another video of that same ORT, this time of a friend’s dog. The two dogs followed roughly the same patterns. If they had been wondering randomly around the room, they would not have been following the same path.  

Here is the video:

It is harder to see him following odor during this run, because I was keeping him on a short leash, and therefore you can’t see the abrupt turns that mark his reaching the edge of scent cone. BUT if you ASSUME that he is following scent, the patterns become clear. He starts off trying to follow the scent into the alcove on the left, but is foiled by the leash.

He goes to the stage at the front of the room, hits the end of the leash again, and tries to find the edge of the scent cone to the right. I give him more leash this time, and he actually finds the edge, and does a U turn (at about 17 seconds), which you can’t see on the video because the videographer had a technical issue right then.

He tries to go back into the alcove, so he can get a good read on the other edge of the cone, and again, I don’t let him (stoopid human!!!), and in frustration, he goes over to a box (which probably has some odor on it) and sits down. I am sure he was thinking ok, you won’t let me work, but you want me to find a stupid box, well, fine, here is a box. Then he realizes that is probably not the right box, and since he is a very good puppy and wants to make me happy, so he gets up and keeps looking. Now you can see him circling, still trying to get into the alcove so he can figure out that odor ISN”T there, and checking several boxes  in the middle, that odor has drifted onto, but he can tell that those boxes don’t contain SOURCE, so he keeps looking.

At 48 seconds he gets distracted by some person off camera, but only for a second, and goes back to work.

At 1:18, he goes over to the shelf on the left, lifts his head and gets some information – I am guessing that the odor was bouncing off that shelf– because he does an immediate about turn and starts to focus on the boxes on the left side, which he had been ignoring. He is able to rule out the first two in the line, and then sniffs the third one and finds SOURCE. He sits down very nicely, and then paws the box for emphasis, because I am being dense and not giving him his reward.

We humans believe that the odor is contained by those flimsy cardboard boxes, because we are limited to our visual senses, and the boxes are the only things we can see. And therefore we expect the dogs to also focus on the boxes.  

The dogs who really are “obedient” to odor, who know it intimately, and follow its trail, do not pay attention to the visual of the boxes. They are tracing the invisible air flow, the delicate dance of molecules. Oh, stupid humans! We are blind to this particular poetry, and quick to judge our canine friends, labeling them “unfocused.”

However….with repetitions, the dogs do learn that the boxes, particularly the boxes laid out in lines, in the particular patterns we are so fond of in this sport, are the shortcut to finding SOURCE and getting their reward. So they pay attention to the boxes, and stop following the odor trails in the air.

Yeti showed me exactly how quickly this can happen. In the space of four runs of boxes, over two days at the UKC trial, he progressed from wandering around the room, chasing the scent cone, to focused searching on the boxes. Here is the video of his third run:

The lesson I learned here? NEVER STOP LEARNING!