Sniffing Around Scent Work

July 9, 2024

I have been prepping for my runs in Master Buried in a week or so. Although Yeti does have a leg towards his Masters title in this element, his performances have been inconsistent, and I would rather go prepared rather than leave it to chance.

On his last Masters run, he fringed, alerting on a bin near the hide. I suspect that this was because the bins had been arranged in rows, so we have been practicing intensely with bins in that configuration. I think it is working because I am seeing less fringing and he seems to be working closer to the bins. I am cautiously optimistic.

The other thing we are focusing on is the number of water and sand bins. Yeti being Yeti, and wanting to do the easy thing, always finds the water hides first. And then, having found the water hides, he looks for more water hides, and sometimes totally forgets to search the sand bins. Or vice versa.

Since there can be four hides in the Master level, there are potentially fourteen combinations of sand and water bins (?somebody check that math!! I am mathematically challenged!!!).

I don’t need to practice the one hide scenarios and two hide scenarios, as I feel that he is competent there. But the three and four hide combinations….ugh….we need a lot of work there.

Here are the two and three, and four hide combinations. I wrote them out to make sure I got them all.

And…I don’t want to forget the blank searches. This is not a possibility in trial, but in my experience, it tends to sharpen the dog’s focus if you throw them into the mix. You have to be careful how you reward and how often you do them, and in Yeti’s case, I am not using them until I am sure he is searching thoroughly.

In addition making sure I practice different sand-water combinations, I need to be careful about how often I do each combination. Yeti tends to pattern very quickly, that is, if I do three hides on two searches, the next time we search, he assumes there will be three hides. (It’s nice to have a smart dog in theory, but in reality it generally means that he is learning stuff that you don’t want him to learn. )

And I tend to hyperfocus on things—“so we are having trouble with three hides? Great, we are going to drill three hides until one of us is dead!!”

So between the two of us, our learning/teaching tendencies create a potentially  disastrous situation.  Careful recording of training sessions is called for. I use pen and paper for this, as it forces me to process things. If I just use video, I tend to not look at the recordings, or I glance at them and don’t process.

I also need to remember, and balance carefully, practicing the  unknown hides scenario that is, after all the major challenge at this level. This means practicing continuing to search even after I know we have found all the hides. If one doesn’t practice continuing after all the hides have been found, dogs tend to false, because they think that is the only way to end the search.

When I trained Astra on this, I could just watch her and she would pretty much stop searching after finding all the hides. With Yeti, it is much trickier. He likes to take shortcuts, and this often results in  the “one hide left behind” syndrome,  so for now I have to make sure he is searching all the bins.

The last critical piece is recruiting friends to set up practice runs with an unknown number of hides, so we can practice the actual trial scenario.

And now, ugh, my backyard looks like a storage place for plastic bins…and I am dragging them out into the carport every day for practice, because that is the only space I have that is big enough to practice in.  

But…this will be worth it if I can only get this to stick in his brain. Only time will tell.

Want to read more about the Buried element? Check out these posts:

More About the Buried Element

What You Don’t Understand About the Buried Element (part three)

What You Don’t Understand About the Buried Element (part two)

What You Don’t Understand About the Buried Element

Making the Buried Element Easier

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