Sniffing Around Scent Work

Last week I was trialing with Yeti, and I made a handling mistake. This is a mistake that I have made before. In fact, I would say that it’s a mistake I have made a number of times. So we failed the search, and I went back to my car (after apologizing to Yeti) and wondered “why? Why do I do these things when I know better?”

And the answer to this question is very simple: stress.

And this used to puzzle me greatly. Although I know I get nervous at trials, it certainly is not THE most stressful situation I have been in. I consider many, many other situations way more stressful, including things like job interviews, work presentations, moving house, changing jobs, driving around in unfamiliar cities, etc.

 And then I read an article that was about a study that was done sometime in the 1970s (I think it was the 1970s…unfortunately I have not been able to locate a copy of this article. When you are a research librarian, you read a lot, and sometimes stuff gets lost). The study was incorporated into a training exercise that some marines were undergoing, which simulated the men being captured and questioned by an enemy army. The soldiers were on an expedition in the wilderness, and were kidnapped by the simulated enemy soldiers (who were of course, US personnel) and interrogated. After the exercise was over, the soldiers were debriefed, and a psychologist who was interested in the effects of stress on memory asked them a series of very simple questions about the event. Things like how many people were present during the questioning, and what were you doing when you were captured. And most of the soldiers were not able to answer any of the questions with any kind of accuracy at all. Normal details that most of us would remember were totally lost to them, or they mis-remembered the facts.

This psychologist, and many others, started studying memory and stress more extensively, and it turns out that stress has a very bad effect on the part of the brain which encodes short term memories. It interferes with coding into longer-term memory, so we can’t recall things that occurred during a stressful interval.

So, how many of you have trouble remembering where the hides were in a multiple hide search?  Now you know why.

Pretty much every person I talk to just think that it’s age-related or that they just have a bad memory in general. Nope, it’s stress.

Facepalm

There are a few other effects of stress that explain our problems during a trial search. One is that it tends to narrow your focus radically. During a search we are naturally focused on our dog anyway, and then the added stress of being timed and watched and judged tends to narrow that focus even further. So we don’t notice our surroundings as much, and we are not taking in all the information that would help us in the search—the larger context of the environment, things like windows and doors, drafts, wind direction, noticing how many times our dog has searched the same area, or how many times they have tried to tell us they are done with the search.  

Another is that it tends to speed up your reflexes. Adrenaline is pouring through your system. You generally have an elevated heart rate and will move faster. You might be hurrying your dog by moving faster than usual (exacerbating his stress) and you might, just might, over-react to the dog pausing to sniff a non target odor. You might even blurt out “alert” in a situation where you wouldn’t normally call an alert.

Related to the memory impairment, your ability to learn is also inhibited when you reach a certain level of stress. You can’t process information well, or integrate it into other information already in your brain. I think this is why we tend to repeat the same mistakes.

So are we doomed in our searches? No. We can learn, it is just likely to take longer than is optimal. Longer than we want it to.  And there are things that will help, like learning a few tricks to help you remember hide locations (I teach these in my classes for the upper-level competitors) and stress reduction techniques, like breathing exercises and using positive imagery to relax you. Sports psychologists have been teaching these techniques to athletes for decades, because we are not the only ones who suffer from performance nerves, and you can find some very good books on this topic.

Learn! Experiment! Grow! One of the great things about playing this game is that it will push our boundaries.

Also, if you want to read more about trialing, check out these posts:

https://sniffingaroundscentwork.com/2023/04/09/refinding-the-balance/

https://sniffingaroundscentwork.com/2023/09/11/read-this-before-you-go-to-your-next-trial/

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