Sniffing Around Scent Work

I hear  about handlers developing “scent goggles.” This refers to people developing the ability to “see” where the scent is going, or will go, especially when setting hides for our competition dogs.

I have been competing and studying and teaching scent work for about 12 years, and I am just now starting to wear scent goggles from time to time. It takes a long time for us humans to overcome our visual-centric viewpoint and humble ourselves and admit that other creatures in the universe work from different perspectives. And often, my scent goggles are only turned on when I am actually watching a dog work odor.

The other day, during a freakishly cool June day, I took the opportunity to hold class in the local park. I scouted several areas for good exteriors searches, and decided on the bathroom building for one of them. This was a good opportunity to have the dogs search the outside of a structure that looked fairly simple (see below). My other areas had some complications, and I thought I would set one hide on the building, the dogs would catch it on one of the walls, and be able to work it back fairly easily. Here is a picture.

Foolish, foolish human….where were my scent goggles?

When the first dog started searching, I saw how complicated my “simple” search actually was….have I mentioned that this park is in the middle of the city and is very heavily trafficked by dog walkers, parents with small children, joggers, and everyone else within a ten mile radius?

The dogs had to spend a huge amount of time sorting the odors. There quite a bit of various smells from the dogs who had been walked there (pee) and the other animals that had frequented the area, scavenging food from the waste bins, and the people who had walked by,  and who knows what else.

My “simple” search turned into a distractions-palooza search! I am very happy and proud to say that my class did well with this search. Most were able to eventually find source, even though it took them some time. This is a class who had A real struggle a year ago when we first started working grassy areas. All of the dogs would potty in the search area. We did a lot of short, easy quick drills to get them actually thinking about odor when they were outside on grass.

My mistake with this setting this search had been using my eyes only to think about where the scent would move. The piece that I was missing was the history of the area, and the smells that had been left behind in the last several hours. This is the most difficult of skills for people to develop—we can, with a lot of training, think about how our placed odor will move, but actually understanding how it is interacting with the history of the environment? A whole next-level skill.

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