Sniffing Around Scent Work

Every so often, someone ask me how I go about setting hides as a judge, so this week I decided to blog about that. Last weekend I was judging interiors, and needed to do a UKC Elite level run. I had a big room to work with, some chairs and a table already set up. I rolled the dice to determine how many hides, and the dice came up with two. I wanted to set a high hide for a little bit of a challenge, and surveying the area, I thought I found the perfect place: at the end of the room there was a long hall, and at the end of that, there was a fire extinguisher hanging about four feet up. Fire extinguishers are everywhere, and are often used for hides in classes, so dogs will very naturally check them out when they see them. All the handler has to do is make sure the dog goes down the hall, and it should be a slam dunk. In addition, this extinguisher was hanging in a corner, so the odor should collect nicely, making it very obvious to the dog and drawing them in.

Now it was time to run the “dog in white” (UKC terminology, in AKC it’s the demo dog. I use these terms interchangeably). I pulled Yeti from his kennel, and sent him into the area to see what he would do.

He did a quick survey of the area, and then ran down the hallway to the area of the extinguisher, where he clearly caught some odor, but instead of working it back to source, he moved on. “Maybe he will go back there,” I thought—he and Astra will often note where hides are, move on, and then go back to alert on them. But he didn’t. He went out and alerted on the low hide I had set. Then he returned to the hall, but didn’t go down to the end, instead he worked one wall around the entrance, and then spent a long time detailing the air vent and the closet door, going up and down and pausing occasionally to blow out the air in his nose. I kept waiting for him to return to the fire extinguisher…was he just messing around? (why, after all these years, do I continue to question my dogs?) And then suddenly my brain kicked in—HE WAS DETAILING THE AIR INTAKE VENT.

I called him off the search, told him he was a very good boy, and went to get my smoke machine. Sure enough, when I set off the smoke, it showed the air in the hallway being rapidly sucked into the air vent. The odor was lingering a bit on the metal vent, and around the closet doorway, but Yeti could tell that wasn’t source. He was doing his job and letting me know where the odor was and where the odor wasn’t.

Sometimes in these situations, you can make an adjustment to make the hide more available to the dog, but I couldn’t see any way of doing that here. I ended up taking the the hide out, and coning off the area so that it was “out of play.”

Many people feel that judges running their own dog as the DIW (demo) is not fair. They point out that even if the dog is off leash, there are many ways that the judge could telegraph the location of the hide to the dog. I have also heard people state that the DIW should be at the same level as the class you are setting up, that it’s unfair if the dog is “too good.”

I understand these objections. But as a judge, what I need most from the demo dog is not to find the hide, I need them to show me where the odor is, and where the odor isn’t, and I pretty much always run them off leash, or at the very least, on a long line. I need to see how long it takes him or her to run into the odor cone, and how long it takes to work it to source. As a rule, if my dog struggles at all, even a tiny bit, I adjust the hide to make it easier.

If I run a dog I don’t know as a DIW, I don’t know that dog’s style, and I don’t know that dog’s training history. I start to second guess what the dog is doing. Sometimes the handler, feeling insecure, feels like they have to help the dog, so they start directing, and it’s harder to tell what the odor is doing. It is still perfectly do-able to use a competitor’s dog as a demo, and when I am far from home and without my dogs, obviously I have to. But my preference is still to use my own dog, or one that I am familiar with. There are endless unforeseen complications in the hide setting process, and I will do anything I can do to make it easier (for everyone).

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