Ep. 131: Embracing Consequences

Consequences are all bad things, right? Not necessarily. When training, consequences are merely results, not inherently good or bad. By embracing the concept of consequences, we can make more informed decisions of what we will train, when and how.

We discuss ways we can do just that in this podcast episode.

MENTIONED RESOURCES

Judith Guthrie's Library

Michele Ellertson's Library

Scent Work University Livestreams

Speaker:

Dianna L. Santos

TRANSCRIPT

Dianna L. Santos (00:00):
Welcome to the All About Scent Work Podcast. In this podcast we talk about all things Scent Work. This can include training tips, a behind scenes look of what your instructor or trial official is going through and much more. In this episode, I want to talk about the concept of consequences and what do I train. So before we start diving into the episode itself, let me do a very quick introduction of myself. My name is Dianna Santos. I'm the Owner and Lead Instructor of Scent Work University. This is an online dog training platform where you provide online courses, seminars, webinars, and eBooks that are all centered around set. So regardless of where you are in your sniffing journey, you're just getting started. You're looking to develop some more advanced skills. You're interested in competing or you're already trialing at the upper levels. We likely have a training solution for, you know, a little bit more about me. Let's step into the episode itself.

(00:52):
So in this episode I want to talk about a concept that Judith Guthrie has actually brought up quite a bit in the various presentations that she's done for us and this concept of consequences. And I wanted to tie that into the idea of, well, what do I train? What am I doing in this training session? And I think that both of these things are something that all of us, including myself, can really spend some time to really think about, to determine am I going about this in the most efficient and effective way? Am I avoiding any kind of blind spots or biases that may not be taking into account what the dog's experiences and what it is that I'm actually seeing when I'm doing my training? Santos makes sense. So first and foremost, let's break down this whole consequences thing. So consequences. When we typically hear that word, we think bad, right?

(01:48):
A consequence of my action typically speaking is a very negative thing, but that's not really the way that the word is used in this context. It really means a result I did A and B was a result. It's neither good nor bad, it just is. And every decision that we make when we're training is going to have a consequence. It's going to have a result and there are going to be pros and cons to that result. And I really like the way that Judith talks about it is how we're able to take the emotion out of it and not just go immediately to a preference, but instead really take the time to evaluate, okay, I wanted to end up with this end result, right? I wanted to end up at this goal. How can I do that? Well, I have a couple of different options available to me and all of them are going to have different paths, and those different paths are going to be filled with different consequences or results, and some of them are going to have different columns of pros and cons, and I need to figure out which 1:00 AM I most comfortable with?

(02:54):
What do I have the skillset for? What's going to be the best fit for me and my dog? What do I have the ability to actually deal with those results? That's really what we should be striving for when we're doing anything with our dogs. But that's particularly true with Scent Work because in Scent Work there's a lot that goes into this that we as humans just can't really see or wrap our hands around because we're dealing with the odor that we can't see or experience. Our dogs are figuring out these different odor puzzles in ways that we are just kind of guessing, and we are also responsible for designing the training setup that's supposed to be helping our dogs experience these different things. And we're doing that kind of blind because we can't see the odor plume, we can't see what the odor molecules are doing.

(03:45):
We can do as much learning as we want about different environmental factors and weather and airflow and all that's very important, please do that. But there's still a lot of guesswork and there can be times we set something up and then we're looking at it like that did not go the way that I thought it was going to. So the more that we can be more mindful about our choices, because there are all these variables that are kind of out of our reach, the better that it can be. That's also really important because with Scent Work, there's a lot of lumping that typically goes into how we train this. It's very easy to expect 20 different things to be going on at the very same time because again, we're just not considering like, oh, I'm expecting 20 things to be going on right now instead of just assumed.

(04:35):
And when things kind of go left, well now we have 20 different variables of why that may have happened. So to try to help this make a little bit more sense when you tie this into the whole concept of what is it that I'm supposed to be training maybe right now we have a holiday weekend here in the United States after July 4th. So there's lots of people who may have had extra time off, maybe they're going to have a three day weekend, whatever. You may have a little bit more time on your hands, which is again, a wonderful little reprieve. But because of that, you may say, you know what? I want to do some training with my dog. That's great. What am I going to train Santos lady? What am I setting up for my actual search? Where am I putting my hides? Where is my search area? All these different decisions. If we can combine these two concepts of thinking about consequences or results as well as the different decisions that we make that may help us in determining what it is we want to set up, how we evaluate how it went, so then we know what to follow it up with. Santos, please give me some tangible examples. Don't worry, I will.

(05:49):
So let's say that you and your dog have been doing Scent Work for a while. You are currently competing. Maybe you're in the novice levels, you've finished those up, you've finished your NW1 for NACSW as an example. Things are going grand and now you're moving up, right? You're moving up the levels. And one of the things that you know that yourself and your dog are going to start encountering, particularly a trial or more elevated hides. So you want to work on elevated hides. See, Santos, I'm being so specific, I should get a gold star. So now you need to think about, well, how are you going to do that? You probably have offered some elevated hides already in your training, even if you weren't planning on doing so, because any hide that's off of the ground is for all intents and purposes elevated, there's just different levels of elevation as far as how high.

(06:42):
So you're now trying to figure out, well, how am I going to go about doing this? Most of us would then say, well no problem. I'm going to pick a search area and I'm going to put out some elevated hides. Wasn't that easy? Okay, well what are the consequences of that? What are the potential results of me picking this particular space and putting out however many elevated hides? Well, we would need a little bit more information. What space am I using? Okay, fine. I wanted to do it inside of my living room. Okay, great. How many hides were you going to use? Oh, so many questions. I'm going to put out three hides. Okay. And are all those hides elevated? Yes. Santos, they're all up off the ground. Move along. Alright, we still have a couple questions. Where in the space are these three hides in relation to each other?

(07:35):
I'm going to really spread 'em out. Okay, and when you say that they're elevated, how elevated are they in comparison to your dog? Because you could have a Chihuahua or a Great Dane, those dogs are going to have different opinions as far as elevation is concerned. Say, okay, I don't have a Chihuahua, I don't have a Great Dane, I have a medium-sized dog, some kind of curing breed mixed thing. They're like 45 pounds and that's how tall they are. All right, well that's great. This is good information. Where is the hide going to be set in relation to the height of your dog? Is it going to be in between knees and nose, meaning their carpal joint up to their nose? Is it going to be at nose height or is it going to be above nose height? They're like, oh, well let me think about that.

(08:25):
And you look around where you were planning on placing your hides, like, oh, they all seem to be about nose height. Okay. Again, neither good nor bad. This is just what this is. So your living room, I'm assuming, is going to have your typical types of furniture. You're going to have maybe some couches and chairs, maybe going to have a couple of end tables, maybe a rug, some curtains potentially. Maybe you have some kind of entertainment center or some large wooden or otherwise flat surface pretty smooth. Is that about right? They're like, yeah, thereabouts. Okay, great. And where were you going to be placing the hides in relation to these different items? Well, on the items like Okay, but which ones? Okay, fine. One hide is going to be on an end table. One hide is going to be on a smaller table that's next to a chair in the corner and the other hide is going to be on the corner of my entertainment center.

(09:21):
So they're kind of like in a triangle formation inside this room, but they're really, really spread out. Okay. And what type of odors are you using? Oh, would you please? I don't know. We're trying to prepare for trial and they're going to be using Birch and annis. I'm using Birch and Anise. Okay, which hides are Birch and annis? Again, I know that people are ripping their hair out. They're like, oh my goodness, I don't know. Alright, that's fine. You could just have a different mix. So if we just take a step back, we're trying to work on elevation. We've decided that we're going to be placing three hides inside an interior space that's familiar to our dogs. This is in the middle of summer as far as when we're recording this podcast. So you're going to have your air conditioning on because you would rather not be in a pool of sweat inside your own house.

(10:11):
So your AC is on during the search, you're going to have three total hides and they're all going to be nose height for your dog. There's going to be a mixture of Birch and anis hides. We don't know what the breakdown is. We are not sure yet, but all these hides are going to be placed onto pieces of furniture or items that are wood or wood. And they're also in different orientations with other items that are made up of fabric, whether it is a piece of furniture, whether it's a rug, whether it's a drape. And a lot of these are also kind of towards corners of the room and the three hides themselves create kind of a triangle as far as where they're placed in the space and you're like, is there something wrong with this? Well, my next question is, okay, well has your dog ever seen one of these individual hides by themselves?

(11:02):
And you think for a second you're like, I'm not sure. I think I've done something similar, but I'm not really sure. Okay. Have they ever done a single hide search in this room where there was just one hide for them to find? I think I've done it in boxes. You think like, okay, and did that go well? I think so. I don't remember. It was so long ago. So if we were to tackle this search the way that you're planning on doing it right now, our history is telling us that our dog has not tackled a single hide search inside of this space before. Our history is also telling us that we're not really sure that they found these types of hides before successfully on their own. So now we're combining different puzzles for our dog to work out, and they're also all at nose height.

(11:50):
So let's say best case scenario, best case scenario, a dog comes and goes, I cannot wait to play. Right? And we know that our dog's been working really well on Birch because they have their NW1, they have their novice Birch is awesome, and we're going to say two of the hides are Birch. So they come in and they just bang out those two hides. They are awesome possum pots, and then they're taking a little bit longer to figure out the hide because they haven't spent as much time training that odor, but they do eventually do it and you're like, great. They found all three hides we're good, but you were a very good little handler and you videoed it. So you're watching the video and you notice that after the first hide, your dog is just kind of poking at everything that is at noses height and they find their second height, they're like, ah.

(12:37):
And they almost seem as though they're kind of woodpecker all the way around the search area, and that's when they finally land on the Anna side. You're like, so, well, this is where we get into our consequences. Again, these are just results with this setup. We have to remember that our dogs are making assumptions every single time that we train. They're taking in the different puzzle that we may have set up during our training, and then they're trying to figure out what is it exactly that they have to do in order to earn their cookie. And again, our dogs are brilliant and they're very efficient. So they're trying to basically play a game of raids to figure out, okay, well maybe the game is now about finding hides that are at nose height. Maybe that's what the Sniffy game is all about now. So they may try to guess and say, okay, well maybe I only need to check at noses height in order to find my hide.

(13:35):
And the way that we set this up in this scenario that we're talking about, all make believe is that was true is that was correct. So now the dog is like, aha. See, even when I am finding a hide with an odor that I'm not that familiar with Anis, if I just check things or at nos height for me, I will eventually find it and I'll get my cookie. This is a problem. We don't want our dogs just poking around randomly at different planes. We want them actually searching. We want them actually hunting. So this is what I mean as far as taking into account different results for the decisions that we make so then we can make better informed decisions when we're trying to figure out what to do for our training. So if we take a giant step backwards and say, alright, well that's not exactly the result that I wanted.

(14:26):
Yes, the dog found those three hides, but then if I were to run a blank search inside a different room and I ran the dog, am I now seeing them just poke random items that nose height, that would be bad. That's not what we're looking for. And the information that's giving me as a dog has now made a connection that I wasn't intending. I didn't mean for the dog to think I poke my nose on stuff at nose height for me and eventually I'll get a cookie opportunity instead. I'm trying to show the dog when I'm designing searches with elevated hides. The hides could be elevated, but there's very big span of space that could be, it could be right off the floor. It could be anywhere between the dogs, what we call knees to nose. It could be at nose height or it could be above nose height.

(15:15):
I want them to use the odor information to figure out where the height is. I don't want them to guess. So what can we do? Right? Okay, so now Santos, you're stressing me out thought we had figured this all out and it's not exactly going the way that I had wanted. Not a problem. Again, if we're thinking about this from the perspective of consequences or results, if my goal is for the dog to see an elevated height picture in as many different planes as possible on the ground at nos height above nose height, then I can isolate one singular odor puzzle using the most familiar odor Birch. So we're not getting all into confusion about that, and I can place it inside a familiar location. So a different type of search area that we have practicing the dog is not going to be like, Ooh, Disneyland.

(16:06):
So I'm taking away that variable and I can have it in different planes in this area, in this space, and I can play with the different components. What type of item am I placing it on? What am I placing it next to? Where is the odor going to travel? What is it going to be interacting with? What are my expectations for how the dog is going to work this? What kind of assumptions is my dog going to make as they're working out this search? Because even if I were to use a singular hide, right, so you're like, okay, fine, I get it. You want us to isolate the puzzle? Fine. Okay, so we have three main planes. We have ground at nose height, above nose height, and for elevated, we want it above the ground, off the ground, but we also don't want our dogs to make the assumption that the hides are always going to be elevated.

(16:57):
That's not true. There's plenty of times where the hides may be either very close to the ground or on the ground itself. We don't want our dogs making the wrong connections. So maybe I'm going to have a training session where I'm going to have a singular hide. I'm going to be moving around this space and I'm going to be alternating. We're going up and then we're going back down. We go up again and we go back down. That potentially could be a good idea. What is going to be the result of that? Well, my dog comes up for the first run and I have the hide. Let's say at noses height dog comes in, they work the space and they're able to find their hide. Awesome. Give them big reward. Oh my goodness, you're amazing. But now I know my dog now knows nose height is productive.

(17:43):
I have two options. I can either reaffirm that nose height is indeed by placing that hide in a different, completely different part of that space, or I can show 'em that other areas are productive above nose height or below nose height. If I've already done training, like the scenario that we just talked about where I know the dog is like, Ooh, nose height, we're just going to poke around. I'm probably going to go lower or higher so that my dog is able to figure out actually my height can be anywhere I need to use the odor to figure it out. I'm also going to try to really think about where is the odor traveling too, so I can use that to my advantage so I don't have as much poking randomly in the space. Instead, the dog is able to get a whiff of the odor plume at the start line and be drawn in to really start working that hide right away.

(18:39):
I hope I'm starting to make sense here that by taking a beat and just thinking about if I make this choice, what are the results going to be? And it's not that there are consequences are bad, that's not true. It's just what is the result? What's going to happen and what does my follow-up plan going to consist of? There are certain choices that are going to end you up different paths, and it's not necessarily that some paths are great for everyone and others are not so much. It could be very individualized to you and your dog, your situation where you're searching the day, which again is why dog training is so much fun. There's so many different variables before the fake scenario that we're talking about. If we recognize by watching our video that my dog now has this assumption that hides are always going to be at nose height and they can just kind of poke around, my result is now showing me that I have a dog who's making this assumption and I'm not hitting the goals that I'm looking for.

(19:44):
I want true hunt, I want the dog to seek, but they're not doing that. They're guessing they're just doing woodpecker, poking all around the space, hoping that they're going to fall upon to hide at some point. That's not what I'm looking for. I want them instead to really investigate the space looking for odor. So that may mean that I don't even do anything related to elevated hides at all. I may go back to containers as an example. That could be a choice to really underline this is the game that we're doing. Maybe we do warmup searches with containers, we care about odor and we're trying to make source really important. So maybe I use open containers that are even paired and I reward really heavily inside the container and then I can spread my containers out potentially in other runs. So now we have them working the space to figure out the containers.

(20:36):
Then I use empty containers, but now there's a hide actually set within the space. If I see true hunting behavior, wonderful rewards really heavily at that hide, and then maybe I can start incorporating some elevation as far as a thought process of where I'm going to put this elevator hide. If I start seeing the dog go, well, that poking at nose height really worked before. Well, maybe now I want to have a lower hide as an example. I hope this is making sense that by thinking through what we're doing and truly watching what our dog is telling us, because they're spitting back at us what we've given them, and if we use that information to determine, okay, this isn't exactly what I was looking for, then we can make better decisions as far as what it is that we should be doing. Because again, many of us have lots and lots and lots of ideas when it comes to training, and it can become overwhelming at times.

(21:31):
We're just not really sure, right? We look at a space like, Ooh, that would be cool. Let's do that. And it's not that, Ooh, that's cool. Hides and training are necessarily bad. Again, there's just consequences to doing them. What is a dog going to think once you place that hide? Do you need to follow it up with anything? I'll wrap this up with another example, and this is something that Michelle Ellertson has talked about inside of her presentations. When doing a container search as an example, if you were to just have a straight row of containers and it can be however many, and you start off with, let's say you have 10 containers in a straight row and you start off and there as a hide in container too. Your dog comes up, they find a hide in container too. Awesome pots and pots, we reward, reward, reward, awesome.

(22:17):
They may place a hide in container for dog comes down, they find that container reward, reward, reward. Then we place a high to container six, and we go and we reward, reward, reward. The dog was amazing. At this point, we should start really evaluating what is the assumption the dog is probably making? They're probably making that. The next container that's going to have a cookie is container eight. So they may start flying by containers one through five to head towards container eight. Therefore, our response should be to set a high to container one so that the dog doesn't make an assumption that it's always going to be deep, that sometimes it's going to be really close. We want you to check the containers. We want you to actually search. We don't want you to just assume it's going to be deeper in. So going back and forth and back and forth, reaffirming, we want to check each of these containers.

(23:16):
All of them are potentially productive. None of them should be skipped. That's what we should be looking for. But by potentially following that pattern as far as I'm going to set a hide in two, then four, then six, then eight, then 10. The consequence of that is that the dog is going to assume, okay, my need to work deeper in the space to find my hide. That's not in and of itself a bad thing. It's just a result. But if we then see dog is saying, well, that also means that I don't need to pay attention to boxes one through nine by my however many run. That would be a problem. A, so then a solution to that issue is to bounce back to the front, is to place our hides back in those first couple of containers to make those productive. So then the dog is like, okay, I can't just assume it's going to be deep, but it could be deep, but it could also be right here and I want to make sure I get my cookies.

(24:17):
So I hope that makes sense as far as looking at what we're doing in a way of, if I do this, what is the dog's experience going to be? What are they going to take away from it, and what are the pros and what are the cons? And there's always going to be pros and cons with every single decision that we make, and we then just have to have a plan for how we're going to account for that. To go back to our elevated hide example, even if we picked those singular hides, a con to that is like, okay, well now the dog is just coming in and only seeing one hide puzzle. We eventually want them to be able to work multiple hides and potentially multiple hides all at the same plane. We do want our dogs to be able to figure that out in addition to know how to work on the ground at nose height and above nose height.

(25:12):
So how are we going to ensure that our dogs don't only have the skillset of working when they're different? How can they also solve hides and puzzles where everything is at the same plane? So I hope this is making sense that there isn't a definitive, if you just do this thing all the time with every single dog and every single training you're going to do, great. That's not true. And if it was, it'd be really boring. It wouldn't be very exciting at all. It definitely wouldn't keep our attention. Instead, if we're able to lean into the idea of really recognizing what the consequences or results of our actions are, the different decisions that we make, really analyzing what the dog is telling us, what their experience was, what they took away from this training session today, and also what they take away from trialing. Because to them it's all the same.

(26:08):
The picture very well may have told them something at trial where they're like, oh, I guess this is what the game is about. Now. We need to be mindful of that so that we can maybe clarify things when we're training again. But the more mindful that we can be during the whole process, taking away any biases, taking away any preferences, taking away any blind spots, taking away the emotion, and instead just really analyzing what do I see and what can I do with this? And being honest about the tools that we currently have, which may only offer us a certain number of options, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Choosing the best option based upon what we think the different results are going to be and being very honest of, okay, I'm making this choice. More likely than not, there's going to be these potential results or consequences, and each of those are going to require different decision branches off of that, and I'm prepared to do that, that nothing is linear, nothing is guaranteed.

(27:12):
Our dogs will keep us humble and it should be fun the whole time. So I hope this is something for everyone to think about when they're trying to decide, well, what do I train? There's just lots of decisions to be made, and there's lots and lots and lots of questions that we can ask. Again, I am personally not a big advocate of just throwing hides around and hoping for the best. Are you going to break your dog when you do that? Probably not. But could you have a much more structured way of approaching it in a way that's going to provide more clarity for you and your dog? Yes. So the more that we can ask questions, we can figure out what exactly it is that we're doing, the better it can be. And then I think taking this kind of approach again, can it make you feel a little bit better?

(27:58):
Because you're not just doing what you're comfortable with. Instead you're asking questions and you're trying to figure out, okay, well, if I were to do this, here are some of the potential results. Do I have the knowledge and the skillsets and the tools to do the things I think I need to do? And the answer very well could be no. I have lots of things that I still need to work on. All of us do, and that's a great opportunity to do some continued learning, which is a good thing. The more that we can grow, the better. But again, just something for you guys to think about on this holiday weekend for those of us in the United States. But as always, we want to hear from you. Do you guys have any questions about this? Any comments do you're like, oh, this hurts my head.

(28:43):
We posted this up on our social media as well as our website, so you're more than welcome to post any comments that you have there. We will be starting up some interviews with some outside speakers like you have been saying that for a hot minute. I know we have some old ones that I'm trying to salvage after. Technology just was very, very evil. But we're going to be getting this all together for you. We are also continuing our spotlight series. So if you do have an individual or business that's getting back to this Scent Work community, please feel free to let me know. I want to talk to them. The more positivity that we can share, the better. And we are also going to be starting up something separate from the podcast starting up, restarting, revamping, pick your word. We're going to be doing regularly scheduled live streams.

(29:27):
So these could be either myself or some of my colleagues and some other professionals talking about a wide variety of topics. So it'll be about an hour long each. They're completely free, and they'll be posted up on our Scent Work University Facebook group, as well as our YouTube channel. So keep an eye out for those, and we will be announcing those on social media as well as our newsletters if you're interested. Judith Guthrie just did a really interesting one for us, talking about the realities of being a professional detection dog trainer and some of the ways that it may change what she does as far as the differences between professional detection dog work and what we do in sport. So I really encourage you guys to check that out. It was really interesting. But I want to thank you also very much for listening to this podcast. We really do appreciate all the support. Thank you so very much. Please give a cookie to your puppies for us happy training. We look forward to seeing you soon.