Sniffing Around Scent Work

A while back, I wrote about Handling techniques in scent work (you can read it here: The Swinging Pendulum in Scent Work Handling). It may surprise some of you that “styles” of handling have come in and out in professional detection work: handlers have moved from a strictly controlled presenting the area style to a free-form, stand back and let the dog do all the work mode.

In scent sports, we mostly stand back and let the dog do the work. And this works just fine for the small areas at the lower levels of competition. However, at the upper levels, where hides can be more complex, probably the sweet spot is the “the middle road” of handling, that is, trying to figure out how and when to step in and help the dog. I have been giving this a lot of thought lately.

This is definitely a high level handling skill, because it depends on a lot of observation of how your dog works. If you spend time observing your dog in different situations, then you develop a deep knowledge of your dog’s search language—not just what your dog looks like in odor, but also what patterns your dog uses during a search—does she do an orientation round of the area before settling down to search? How does she handling converging odor? Does she go back to the found hide and “anchor” on it? How much bracketing does she do with an inaccessible hide?

I am trying to develop some guidelines for myself, for each dog, on when to step in and help. The first item on my list is stepping in when the dog is clearly stuck. I call this “thrashing” (which I learned many years ago as a computer term—used when a computer was not actually doing any work, it was just moving items in and out of memory because it was so overloaded. There, that is your bit of geek trivia for the day).

This happens with Astra most often when there is some odor that has accumulated in the area. I remember an Elite trial where she was working in a school library. There was a hide hidden on a stool behind the main desk. Astra was clearly working odor, but she couldn’t pinpoint the hide—she kept going back and forth between the desk, the stool, and a nearby chair. After she had gone back and forth several times, I finally realized that I need to help—so I called her out of the area, and took her to work another section of the room. When we got the 30 second call, I brought her back to the desk area, from a slightly different angle, and she immediately located the hide.

I have to be careful how I do this though, and it doesn’t always work. There was a Detective search a few years ago, where she was working a hide in a school music room. She kept bracketing on a wall, where there was a lot of clutter—some boxes and instrument cases all piled up. I tried to get her closer to the wall, figuring that perhaps it was an inaccessible hide, but she was very resistant. She finally alerted on the hide, a music stand ten feet away, in the middle of the room.

My other guideline is for working corners and shelves, especially in large rooms. I usually try and work Astra from a distance, even when she is on leash, so I can see her body language and get the big picture. But when there are corners that could potentially have hides, I will need to get very close to her so that she moves into that corner. Corners will often trap odor, and the dog will not be able to alert unless their nose is close in –and most dogs don’t do this naturally.

Shelves with a lot of stuff on them are another problem that Astra generally needs my help with. The items on the shelves collect a lot of odor, so dogs really have to slow down and do a lot of discrimination work in order to work out where the source is. Astra tends to skim by the shelves very quickly. If I put her on leash, and get up close behind her, she will slow down and have a better chance of working out the location of the hide.

The last category is the infamous threshold hide. I actually believe in training this, and Astra has taught me how, but my experience has taught me that even if your dog finds thresholds well, it is often worth going back and checking these areas before you finish the search.

There may be other times when I need to step in that I have not yet discovered, and of course, my list for Yeti is totally different. I often tell my students that handling in this sport is one of the most difficult things to master, as there are no hard and fast rules. Observation and cooperation are the keys!

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