Sniffing Around Scent Work

Well, here it is at last, the class that has been ten years in the making (click link below to see it):

Seeing Through Your Dog’s Nose

(Apologies to subscribers, this is a duplicate post…I needed to make this post public and couldn’t do it without the duplication)

What the heck is this?

You might well be asking. It is a comprehensive odor theory course, designed specifically for the sports scent work handler, who is working with essential oils as a target odor for their dogs.

I have been obsessed with understanding odor and odor dynamics from the dog’s perspective ever since I started in this sport, over ten years ago.

And although I am a professional researcher, when I started, I found very little information about “odor.” I was able to take seminars here and there, with Search-and-Rescue folks, and the occasional online class, but it was all pretty nebulous. The instructors used smoke bombs and talked about the odor cloud, and wind, and the really big odor dynamics that happened up on the mountains, or in the field, or the stages of decomp for cadavers, but I never found a lot that related to the type of detection work that was happening in the scent work sport.

So I watched and asked questions (of judges and professional handlers, and anyone else who might know something), and used smudge sticks and smoke puffers and baby powder and experimented and made notes.

And I struggled to communicate what I was seeing, what I was finding out, to my students. Every scent work instructor knows this struggle. You are busy trying to get the dogs started, and then get the students to work with the dogs, and then make all the little adjustments and steps to work up the competition levels, and add challenges, and keep everyone interested. And it’s hard to find the time, or get the attention of the students, to listen to what they need to know about odor behavior.

Many students feel that they can just follow the dog’s lead and they don’t need to know anything else.  And really, there is nothing wrong with that. But…I always feel like it’s a better experience for everyone (dog and handler) when the handler understands what is going on. And that requires some effort, because we are dealing with an invisible substance that is actually not well scientifically documented.

A few years ago I started giving half day or one day seminars on odor theory, teaching the bits and pieces that I had figured out.  And at those seminars I started gathering feedback and questions,  which led to more investigation on my part, and I made revisions and got more videos….and on like that, until last year I finally was able to come up with a class that had a structure to it. Because if you teach just bits and pieces, it’s really hard to absorb the information, it just gets scattered in your brain.

But if you have structure, and you start at the basics, build a foundation at the beginning with definitions and logic, then you can actually retain that information much better, because it forms a cohesive picture.

And then, you can maybe look at a search area and see why the dog might be struggling, or fringing. So you could trust your dog when he was wandering around, seemingly randomly. And you could actually understand. And you know what? Our dogs love it when we get it!

And then I decided that I needed to put it online, so I could share this with everyone. Which was a whole side-quest journey to find software and figure out how to best shoehorn content into it, and I will spare you the details of that, except to say it absorbed about all my free time for couple of months.

But this week I finally accomplished it, the class is now LIVE and available for you to buy.

Want to know more? I am happy to tell you!!!

 This is a self-study class, in three parts. It has pictures and videos and examples, and illustrations (oh good heavens, the illustrations! I had to learn more software just to get those illustrations! But they are important). And  some quizzes scattered throughout, just to make sure you are paying attention.

The first class is the WHY you need to know this stuff. But it also talks about the dog’s perceptions and stuff that goes in during a search that never gets talked about and has more to do with how dogs solve problems than it does with odor theory, but it’s really relevant, and I promise you, important.  It’s short, and the cheapest (only $35) , so if you are not sure you want to dive into this, you can just buy that one–just click on the Part One-the Culture Clash, and you can buy it as a stand-alone class.

The second class gets into the meat of the matter, how odor moves. It starts slow, with definitions. Which I hesitated to do, because people are not fond of studying that kind of thing and find it boring, but it’s really, really important to have all of us, as a community,  on the same page when it comes to terminology. I hear people at trials throwing terms around like residual and lingering and pooling odor and not using them consistently, and not necessarily understanding them. And that kind of thing leads to bad handling of odors and potential mistakes and problems.  

So there is a definitions section, but you could skip it, because the software allows you to navigate and skip around if you want to—but I am hoping you won’t.

 After definitions, I have lessons on odor behavior that are pretty universal, things like temperature and air flow, but also the stickiness of odor, and well, a bunch of other things that not many people talk about.

Then, in the third class, I apply all this stuff to the search elements we have a trials. I talk about specific oddities that come up, and stuff I’ve seen at trials, and it’s generally pretty useful to know. These bits will allow you to look at your search areas very differently, analyze some potential problems and adjust your handling.

I am really hoping some of you will decide to invest in this, and am hoping that you will let me know if you like it or not. I am sure I will need to do more revisions in the future, so I am looking for feedback.

Have questions? Just ask!!!