Sniffing Around Scent Work

In general, I have been pretty proud of Yeti’s Handler Discrimination work. I started him early in his scent work career, and he has not had the problem that most dogs have, which is alerting on the distraction cotton ball. And his progression through the levels was very consistent.

Until we got to the Masters level. In Master HD, like most of the other elements, there is a big jump in skills required. In the lower levels, you only work one area (boxes, interiors or exteriors) but in Masters you have to work two different areas. You also need to work an unknown number of hides in the first area (one or two hides), and you need to find a total of three hides, with two distraction cotton balls (which have been scented by the judge and a steward), where in the lower levels you need to find only one hide, with one distraction.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that Masters has been challenging for us.

We have been working on this level for a year, and have had many amusing mistakes, admittedly many of them mine…in a trial in January we passed the first area, and I lost track of what we were doing in area 2 and called finish too early (D’OH!!!). And there was another occasion when I timed out, because I had mis-set my timer (Double D’OH!!)  

We don’t practice HD consistently, so I always practice before a trial, to make sure everything is fresh in his little dog brain. And that usually is no problem, we get by with three or four HD sessions. Until last week. When I got out the cotton balls and set up practice, he had totally forgotten. False alerts everywhere!

Yikes. I couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. I re-scented all of my cotton balls, had other folks refresh the distractions, went out and bought new tape (different colors than the ones I use with oils, so I don’t get confused and put that tape in my oils bag– tape gets contaminated really easily).

And he was still having trouble. What had changed? Then I realized: I had started rewarding with his tennis ball.

Yeti is a “ball dog.” His ultimate, preferred reward to chase a ball. He will actually prioritize a ball over food. And I started rewarding (in practice only, not at trials), with a toss of his ball, in hopes of getting better commitment to the search area.

However, the downside to the ball reward is that Yeti’s excitement goes way up. It activates his prey drive, which I assume raises his adrenaline level, and it shuts down some brain activity. And he needs that brain activity when he is doing an HD cotton ball search, because the cotton ball has less odor and takes more discrimination work than the regular oil search.

The thing is that he doesn’t seem “over the top” when he is searching. He is excited to start searching, but he usually is, and he is not doing anything overtly crazy, like zooming around the area.

But when I look very closely, I can see a certain amount of distracted searching, and frantic, back and forth re-covering of the same area that does not normally happen. I can also see that he is searching by sight more than nose—he was targeting any cotton ball that he could see and alerting on it without using his nose. This makes sense – if he is thinking about the ball, he is in prey drive, which is primarily visual.

So I have stopped using the ball as reward in HD practice. And I make sure that his start is slow—we do a formal heel up to the start line, sit for a moment, get a cookie, and I give the search command in a very quiet tone. It seems to be working, practice has gotten much better. I am seeing a slower, much more considered search, and accurate targeting of my scented cotton ball. AND the proofing sessions have gone well- he is ignoring the distractions.

 As always, we will see what happens at the trial!

Want to see all my posts on training the Handler Discrimination element? You can see them here.

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