Ep. 134: Break It Down...What Does That Mean?!

You are taking a Scent Work class, attending a workshop or webinar, reading a blog or listening to a podcast and you hear the phrase, "break it down". What does this even mean?! How can go about "breaking it down" when training or practicing Scent Work with your dog?

We delve into the meaning behind this phrase, discuss the various factors we can play with when training Scent Work and highlight why identifying the smallest pieces of any given exercise is not only important, but can be both exciting and inspiring as well.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

• Elevated Hides Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Inaccessible Hides Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Let's Make Thresholds Work Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Zone Training in Nosework Webinar with Michele Ellertson
• Let's Chat: Demystify NW3 Livestream with Lori Timberlake
• Let's Chat: AKC Scent Work with Dr. John Strassner
• Upcoming live virtual events
• Upcoming live webinars

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 including training tips, a behind the scenes look at what your instructor or trial official is going through and much more. In this episode, I want to talk about breaking it down. What does that mean? So before we start diving to 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. We provide online courses, seminars, webinars, and eBooks that are all centered around Scent Work. 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 even trialing at the upper levels, we likely have a training solution for you. So should know a little bit more about me, let's dive into the episode itself.

(00:51):
So in this episode I want to talk about the concept of breaking it down. What does that really mean? But definitely when we're talking about Scent Work, so you probably have heard this term, right? Someone is giving you some training advice. Maybe you're working with an instructor, maybe you're taking a webinar, maybe you're at a seminar, maybe you're at a workshop, maybe you've read a blog, maybe you listened to a podcast and you've heard someone say, okay, we have to make certain that we're breaking things down into the smallest pieces. And you're saying, I don't know what that means and I don't know how to do that. So what I'm hoping to do in this podcast is to just give you a better grasp of the general intention behind that term and then kind of inspire you to think of all the different ways that you could potentially break things down.

(01:46):
Because lots of different possibilities and different searches and different situations may mean that you want to break things down in different ways. So at its core, when we as trainers and instructors are encouraging dog owners to break things down to smaller pieces, what we're trying to get across is that we're trying to ensure that everything is as digestible as possible to the dog. So we're not doing too many things at once. Or as Michelle Ellertson will put it, we're avoiding lumping because the problem when we're doing too many things at once is that inevitably something is going to go wrong. It's not going to be received by the dog the way that we intended. There's going to be some breakdown in communication or understanding. If there's too much going on at once, we're going to have a very hard time as trainers trying to understand where the breakdown was so we could address it.

(02:46):
So ideally instead, we're going to have little tiny digestible pieces so that if it's not digesting the way that we thought, the dog isn't taking in the information the way that we had planned, we can make some kind of adjustment to help them better understand. You're saying, lady, that didn't help at all. Okay, so let's put this squarely in the path of Scent Work, right? Let's say that you were interested in working on a very high elevated hide puzzle, right? You're super excited about it. Maybe you've found a place to practice with your friends, maybe one of them, they just bought a new house and at this new house they have a somewhat, they have an overhang outside their porch and it's wonderful. It's got all these pillars, it's got a nice little roof and you're like, oh, this is perfect. I get to put my hide on the top of these posts and I'm going to wait for my dog to find it and it's going to be awesome.

(03:53):
So you guys will get together and you're like, yeah, we got a plan. We're going to be working on these really super high elevated hides. So snazzy, so fun, so cool. And sure enough, dogs are running and dogs are not finding these hides. They're getting kind of sort of an odor, but they're not really understanding where it is. None of the dogs actually find the hides, all of them in one way or another, they get frustrated, they leave, they ask questions. You guys are stressing out. What was supposed to be really super fun and exciting is now just like, ah, what do I do? This is where an instructor or a trainer may say, okay, well why don't we break this down to smaller pieces? It's like, I don't know how to do that. I want them to find the six, eight foot hide. Why weren't they finding it?

(04:44):
And this is where we have to think about a whole variety of different things. We have to think about first our environment. What is the environment doing? Oh, no, I don't know. I'm not a trainer, I'm not an instructor. I have no idea. But there are things that all of us can kind of observe. What's the temperature outside? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it dry? Is it humid? Is it windy? Is it still, is it raining? Is it snowing? All that stuff matters. It makes a difference as far as what kind of factors are going to be affecting our odor. What time of day are you doing this in? Are you doing it really super early in the morning where there's dew on the grass? Are you doing it at high noon where the sun is the highest part in the sky, it's pretty warm outside, or you're doing it at dusk where it's really kind of cool?

(05:37):
Or are you doing it sometime in between? How long were the hides set out there and what differences are there from when you set it to when you ran it? Just environmentally speaking, what time of day is there sun shining directly on the pole of the pillar that you place the hide on? What part of the pole of the pillar or pole did you place as the hide on? Is it on the top? So let's say you were using a metal tin, so the holes are facing up. Was it on the side? So the holes are facing maybe towards the house. Is it facing towards another side? So it's facing towards the side yard? Are they facing down? Like what's happening?

(06:17):
Is there any standing water nearby? Maybe you have a bird bath, maybe there's a pool that makes a big difference. How close are these poles to the house? Maybe there's poles all the way around. Is this the pole that's directly across from the house? Is it one that's really, really close to the house? Is there anything else near it? Are there other plants? All this stuff matters, right? And we would want to think through what type of environmental stuff is best going to help me and my dog be successful, what I'm trying to do? So that's the first part. The second part is then thinking about, well, what type of hide am I really trying to set? If we think about it, we're trying to set an inaccessible hide because our dogs don't have wings. They're not going to be able to get up to six or eight feet, but we're also working on elevation problem. And Tony Gravley had covered this really nicely inside his Elevated Hides Webinar that he did for us where we then have to think about thermal layers like, oh, this sounds so complicated.

(07:24):
The big thing is we have to think about drop. So odor is going to come out of our odor vessel, it's going to rise a little bit and then it's going to drop ideally. Otherwise, if it doesn't drop, our dogs aren't going to have any access to odor and they're never going to find this hide. But depending on where we place it, the odor may rise quite a bit and then continue rising a far ways before it actually falls. Now for the picture that I'm trying to have you think of in your mind, these poles are all attached to an overhang. So there is kind of a ceiling, kind of a roof that we can play with a little bit, so that's good, but we can do other things too to try to force the odor to come down. But then we had to think a little bit more about our ultimate goal is a six to eight foot hide.

(08:14):
Well, what type of odor are we using? Are we using Birch? Are we using Anise? Are we using Clove, Cypress, Myrrh, Wintergreen, whatever? And what's the dog's familiarity with that odor? How have we seen that odor react in search areas before? Does my dog have a positive association with that odor or are they kind of like, Ugh, it's gross. Maybe they only just started searching for it yesterday. Maybe we don't want to jump right into the six or eight foot hide for that particular odor. But we also want to think about have I ever done anything remotely close to this before ever? Or is this the first time? And that's why it's so exciting. And if that's the case, this is really where we want to break it down into smaller pieces. If we've only ever done hides that maybe at best or two, two and a half feet off the ground, we probably can break this into smaller pieces working our way up incrementally to get up to the point where the hide can be six or eight feet high.

(09:21):
And that does mean incrementally working our way up the pole. But at the same point, we don't want the dog to just assume, if I don't have access to odor, that must mean it's up. That's not a great assumption for our dogs to have, particularly if you're trialing, and this is something that bites people in the butt a lot. A lot dog doesn't have immediate access to odor. They immediately start looking up the handler's like, oh, it's got to be an elevated hide when it's not really. It could actually be a ground hide and all that odor is traveling up a wall or something. They just haven't gotten over there yet. We don't want the dog making assumptions and their assumptions can be played into by our hide placement. We can make it so our dogs think everything must be up and that would be bad. So what are you suggesting trainer lady?

(10:11):
Well, for me, myself personally, I'm going to make a couple of decisions to try to help break down this concept, and I actually did it with my little guy, my little 21 pound Smooth Fox Terrier because I do indeed have what I'm describing. The rental that I'm in has this little overhang area with all these different pillars and we incrementally worked our way up where he's able to find an eight foot hide, right? And it did have to happen over a period of time, so I would make sure that I was setting up my searches and he is searching twice a day. He's searching for food, he's not searching for target odor yet. I just haven't gotten around to put him on odor yet. So we search in the morning and we search in the early evening right before it gets dark. And if we're going to search just once a day, then we'll search in the middle of the day in the afternoon.

(11:07):
But for these really short sessions, we were searching twice a day and the intention was I wanted to make the pillars productive that either he can get older information off the pillar or there may be a hide on the pillar. So that meant that I was going to initially have hides set on items around the pillar and I would take into account where the wind was going. So if he's staged inside my house inside, I close the curtain so we can't see anything, and I would look to see where the wind was going. If the wind was going towards the house, that would put items out towards my yard. So it would hit the pillar and then actually reach towards the house where he's staged. I can open the sliding glass door and then give him his search queue and he'd be like, oh my goodness.

(11:57):
And then he would sniff the pole and go like there's odor information, and then make a beeline to his hide. Great. That's exactly what I want. If the wind is going across the pillar, so it's going left to right or right to left, then I would have items or I'd have hides set again trying to see working with the wind where he would need to investigate the pillars in order to find the items, the items that had the hides on them. Great, so far, so good. Then we're going to start placing hides on the pillars themselves. And this took some time for him because again, the wind and the stuff is really interesting. I do not proclaim to understand all of it, I don't, but it took really a fair amount of time to make sure those hides were set at his knee level to his nose level.

(12:51):
And I need to do that on all sides of the pillar one hide at a time. And at the same point I was trying to generalize, so it only wasn't just one pillar. I think there's, off the top of my head, there's five. I needed to make sure that it was all the pillars and I would randomize which ones we were using. And I also didn't want him just guessing like, Ooh, there's something on a pillar. That must mean that there's my cookie. So I would have empty odor vessels set up on all the pillars so it wasn't just a visual. Once that was going well, then I would make sure to put hides away from the pillars. Again, I don't want him just guessing that everything's going to be about the pillars. I want them to be productive. I want him to think that those are part of the game, but I don't want him assuming anything.

(13:40):
So back and forth and back and forth we went. Then I started increasing some of my elevation and I would up the type of food that I was using. So I would have Stellas and Chewy's treats that I use. I believe they're the beef variety, and I would stick it onto the pillar with peanut butter. And that was a wonderful way of making sure I could put the treat in all different areas of this pillar on the corner really close to the corner on the face, higher, lower all over the place. And again, making sure that I had empty odor vessels that have never had odor in them. They're just empty tins and have those placed all over the pillars as well. Long story short, with lots of breaking it down to these little tiny pieces, he is now able to find hides that are placed anywhere along these pillars no matter where they are.

(14:33):
And additionally, he's not guessing. He will check the pillars to see if there's anything there, if there's any odor information. But he's not obsessing, he's also not guessing. He's not just looking up into the rafters going, I didn't find anything yet. It must be up there, which is good. So this is the kind of progression that we're talking about when we're talking about breaking things down. It's making certain that we have a better understanding about what it is that our goal is and looking to see what are all the little tiny individual elements that make up that goal. And trying to think of the smallest pieces that we can, thinking of breadcrumbs, what are the different steps that I can take to get there? And the more that we can break that down in an incremental way, the better. The real wonderful thing about Scent Work is there's lots of different ways that we can break things down.

(15:27):
It's not just about where we place our hide. It's choosing the type of hide we're going to set whether or not we are going to be using primary like food or toys to maybe introduce the concept and maybe then we move on to using pairing and maybe then we move on to using a target odor. We then have to think about what type of target odor, think about the odor vessel that we're going to be using. We need to think about the aging. All this is exciting. What type of search element are we going to be searching in? Is this a concept that actually can apply across multiple search elements? Is this something that I can actually leverage different tools or elements to help? So as an example with this elevated piece, I may actually want to use some containers in the space so that I can capture some of that odor to give the dolly, Ooh, there's a lot of odor falling here.

(16:16):
Let me pick my head up. There it is, it's up there. That could be something that we could do as well. We want to think about again, the environment. The environment is everything. It's all those things I was listing before as far as the actual weather, the air temperature, air movement, humidity, all that stuff is true, but what is the space composed of what's in that space? All of it really is within our control to move or change or make choices about. Yes, we may be doing a field trip search as an example. They're probably not going to appreciate us moving stuff, but we can design our search taking into account what's there, and that can help break things down, changing the size of our spaces, changing what's in the space, changing our start line, changing how many hides there's no need for every single search to have 50 million hides in it is probably not a good idea.

(17:12):
We may want to break things down by having just one singular puzzle out there as far as a hide is concerned because maybe the environment is offering enough, we can break down an environment by limiting what the dog has access to or taking out certain pieces. Let's say that you are doing a field trip search and it's in this big open area that has lots of interesting novel things that the dog has never seen or experienced toward the far right side, but it has a lot of really familiar stuff that they've seen they don't really seem to care about on the far left side. Why don't just focus on the far left side to begin with? And maybe we're going to encounter the far right side, not during a search at all. Maybe we're going to do an exposure session where we just allow the dog to investigate all that stuff to see if any of it is worrying whether or not we need to do any other work.

(18:07):
Maybe we can do some playing in that session. Maybe we can do some chewing in that session in that section. So the dog is like, yeah, no, this isn't such a big deal, and then you can come back a different day to do your search. That's an example of breaking it down. So yes, I know this is a term that gets thrown around a lot. I do it all of the time, and I'm sure there's plenty of people who say, I don't know how to do that. My biggest piece of advice is to consider what it was that you were trying to do. So with the example that I gave, I want to set a really super snazzy and sexy, super high hide, and I want my dog to find it. There are steps that get to that final goal, and we just want to make sure that we're utilizing all those steps, that we're not skipping anything unnecessarily.

(18:56):
Because again, first of all, we don't want to rush, but we may not just miss out on, well, I didn't do a step, but you may miss out on really important learning, a learning opportunity for the dog, a learning opportunity for yourself. It could have been like, wow, I had no idea that I could do blah, blah, blah, and this would be the result. It can help both you and your dog further grow, and the more chances and opportunities that we have to search to me, the better searching is awesome. So I don't think that we should necessarily be reducing the amount of searching opportunities that we have by trying to eliminate some of these steps that's limiting us. We want to have as many opportunities for seeing these different odor pictures, for having these experiences. It's going to help us grow too, because we can't see the odor.

(19:55):
We can't experience the odor every time that we step up to the line with our dogs. Even when we're training, we are learning too. We're improving ourselves. So we want to make sure we have enough practice so we can actually know what we're looking at. What is my dog telling me here? Why is my dog checking in with me? What is my dog saying? We want to be able to answer those questions, and that also just takes time. That takes reps, but they shouldn't just be aimless. Well, I just tossed hides around and hope for the best. It should be more of this. I have a goal in mind, whatever it is, and here are some steps that I'm going to take in order to get there. And these are the things I'm looking for with each of those reps. It's not, well, Santos lady said like, no, no, no, it should be an excited.

(20:45):
I'm going to be doing A then B. Okay, B didn't go as well as I thought. We're going to break that down into B one, B two, B three, B four, now we're going to move on to C. That type of thing. And to me, that's really super exciting because we can take so much for granted when it comes to Scent Work because again, we can't see or experience the odor. Something can make super great sense to us and then the dog tells us, Nope, that doesn't work. Go okay, no problem. Let me make an adjustment. So I hope this kind of sort of helped to just think of this idea of breaking it down. It shouldn't be something like, oh, after this means that you want me to take longer. I want everything to be clear, and I want both you and your dog to have the skills that you need to be successful and should also be really exciting.

(21:39):
We should be thrilled whenever we have an opportunity to do searching with our dogs and the opportunity to say, okay, I wanted to do that. How can I break that down to the smallest pieces so it makes the most sense to my dog? And so it makes the most sense to me. If I have 1,000,001 things going on at once in this search, how am I going to be able to decipher what's going on? But if I can break down, then I may be able to better grasp each individual piece and then put it all together and make this lovely little picture for myself. So I hope this kind of helped, but as always, if you guys have any questions, always feel free to reach out. Always happy to help. We have an enormous amount of stuff planned on the calendar at Scent Work University. We are very, very, very busy, but we definitely want to make certain that you guys are checking it all out.

(22:33):
We have free live streams coming up with Lori Timberlake who's going to be demystifying the NW3 level. We also have Dr. John Strassner coming to talk to us all about AKC Scent Work. So definitely encourage you to check that out. We also have a lot of virtual events coming up. Sue Sternberg and Dana Zinn are going to be talking to us all about The Dog-Driven Search, the book that they wrote. You definitely want to make certain that you join in for that three hour live event so that you're able to ask them questions and watch all their video reviews. It's going to be excellent. You're then doing additional virtual events with wonderful panelist, speakers. The two next ones are instructor specific, but this is going to be really good for competitors and handlers as well. The first one is focusing on AKC Scent Work, how instructors can better prepare their clients.

(23:25):
And the second one is focused on NACSW, how instructors can better prepare their clients that tackle those NACSW trials. We have lots of live webinars. Oh my goodness, there's so many of them. You definitely want to make certain that you look over our catalog. There is something quite literally for everyone. And we also have our online courses that people thoroughly been enjoying. So I'm going to make certain in the show notes that we have links for all this stuff. So you'll be able to check it all out. But as always, we want to make certain we are offering what you guys are interested in. So make certain that if there is a particular topic, we went through our library, like I'm not seeing this, but I don't want you to talk about blah, blah, blah, please contact me at dianna@scentworku.com. I will then work with our instructors to make that a reality for you. I want to make certain we're offering what you guys need. So again, we'll be posting this up on our website as well as our social media. So we would love to hear from you. So thank you very much for listening. Please give a cookie to your puppies for us and happy training. We look forward to seeing you soon.