Sniffing Around Scent Work

This week’s blog topic comes to you via the mysteries of scent work: the Bermuda triangle in the training facility.

I hold my regular classes at a commercial training facility. Technically, I am supposed to use one of their training areas for running hides, but for variety I like to use other parts of the building. There is one area which looks like a perfect area for some nice hides: small, enclosed by walls, opportunity for both low and high hides. And yet….like most things in scent work, looks are so deceptive.

I have tried to set hides repeatedly in this area, with no success whatsoever. On the first two tries, I thought perhaps it was because the dogs were inexperienced. And after that, I tried a couple of times to set a hide and ran my own dogs on it, but even my own dogs could not find anything in this area.

My first attempt at hide setting was a hide underneath the door at the end of the hallway on the left. I tucked a straw just under the door, in the corner, where the door meets the wall. In theory, the odor should shoot out along the floor and hit the wall on the opposite side, leaving  a nice odor plume for the dogs to follow back to source.

When the dogs made it apparent that wasn’t happening, I got out the smoke machine, and suddenly the problem was made clear. Smoke machines can be very helpful in these situations, as they give us an visual image of how the air is moving. They are not fool proof, but when I run into an odor mystery, the smoke machine will often get me some clues as to what the problem is.

Here is a video of the smoke:

You can see from the smoke that the air is being sucked back directly into the room that the door leads to (which happens to be the men’s bathroom). The air is moving so actively that there is no odor that can linger or spread so the dogs can pick it up and find source. The only way that hide would be findable would be if the handler forced the dog to detail the door area, and even then, it would depend on how fast the dog was going and how sensitive their nose was.

This, my friends, is a demonstration of the culture clash between humans, with their visual acuity, and dogs, with their super noses. We get the information from our eyes, and just don’t understand what is happening, until we can see what the airflow is like, and what the dog is experiencing.

 It’s why judges are required to run demo dogs at trials, and it is why we should never punish dogs for not finding hides.

Have you signed up to get posts delivered directly to email? I am no longer putting all my posts on Facebook. Scroll up to the top (or down to the bottom if you are on a mobile device) and put your email in the black box.