Ep. 137: Does the Dog Truly Understand?

When training our dogs, it is far too easy to assume all is well. We get one good rep and immediately assume, "the dog got it, now we can progress!" However, does the dog truly understand what we want them to do? Do WE really know what we want them to do?! Do we have a concept of WHY we are doing something, HOW it is being perceived by the dog and WHAT to do if they are indeed confused?

In this episode, we delve into how easy it is for there to be breakdown in understanding between what our expectations are and what the dog perceives they should do. 

Speaker: Dianna L. Santos

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

In this episode, Dianna mentioned a few resources you shoud definitely check out:

• Training on an Island: The Art of Working Solo in Canine Nose Work Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Know Your Role: The Handler’s Role in Training Webinar with Tony Gravley
  
• Know Your Role: The Handler’s Role in Trialing Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Zoom consultations

TRANSCRIPT

Dianna L. Santos (00:00):
Welcome to the All About Scent Work Podcast. In this podcast, we talk about all things Scent Work. That includes training tips, a behind scenes look at what your instructor or trial official is going through and much more. In this episode, I want to talk about, does your dog really understand what we're doing? 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. We provide online courses, webinars, seminars, virtual events, ebooks, a regular updated blog, the All About Scent Work Podcast, livestreams, training tips and instructor mentorship program, video reviews, Zoom consultations, so much stuff, all focused around Scent Work. So regardless of where you are in your sniffing journey, whether you're just getting started, trying to develop some more advanced skills, maybe you're interested in competing, or you're trialing even at the highest levels, we likely have a training solution for you.

(00:58):
So now that you know a little bit more about me, let's dive into the episode itself.

(01:06):
So in this episode back, because guess we've been on a bit of a break, I wanted to talk about, does our dog really understand what it is that we're asking them to do? And the reason I wanted to do this episode is I think that this is an important question for us to ask all of the time in everything that we do, because we have to remember that our dogs are always guessing as far as what it is that they think we want them to do. And we may say, "Ah, I want dog to do blah, blah, blah." And then we put together some kind of training plan trying to achieve that goal and the dog internalizes that as meaning that we wanted them to do polka dots. And then we're like, "Oh, what happened? That's not what I wanted you to do at all.

(01:51):
" And it's because there was a breakdown somewhere along the way. So what does this mean when we're talking about Scent Work? Where are some of the ways or some of the places that all of this can break down? Basically everything all the time.

(02:08):
So let me try to give you a non-Scent Work example to try to highlight how things can go kind of haywire when we're talking about Scent Work. So with my little guy, my tiny little terrier, I am currently working on getting him to work with antlers. So he really likes to put stuff in his mouth. He likes to retrieve things. He thinks that's very fun, particularly when he's paid for doing such thing. So I've been trying to break this up into little tiny pieces, trying to be a good little trainer person. So we have a couple of antlers I tested out, make sure that they were terrier appropriate, they were not going to be poking out eyes or anything like that and toss the antler, he goes, he gets the antler, he brings it back and he does a very nice natural hold all on his own.

(02:59):
I haven't had to teach that. It's just something that he does. So I've just been building that bit by bit. And then I went from one antler to then two antlers and he was able to do that, go out, get an antler, come back, get a reward, and then go out and get another antler. And then three antlers kind of blew his mind because was like, ah, just too excited, but that was okay. We took our time. So then I started adding some more things into it that I wanted to be part of this whole picture. Not only do I want you tiny terrier to go out and get antler. I also want you to go and target a Cato board that I have out in the yard. And I want you to wait there while I toss antlers, hold that position and then retrieve antlers.

(03:51):
They don't have to be in any particular order and then I will reward you. And I'm going to reward you every time you bring me an antler. And we didn't jump to that step. Multiple steps should have been put in place in between. But where this can break down is, I mean, there's so many places, but now I've taken something where in my human brain, this is simple, right? You go the Cato board, you stay on that little Cato board, I throw antlers, you are released from Cato board, you run out, you get an antler, you bring it to me, great, I reward you, you go and get more antlers. From his perspective, he has to try to guess. Okay, so I really understand that the Cato board going out and waiting on that thing, because we've worked on that for a long time in all kinds of other contexts.

(04:49):
I also understand separately or I'm really starting to grasp this whole antler retrieving thing because we've been working on that for a bit, but now they're coming together. And also we weren't really super solid on the multiple antlers yet thing anyway. So what is it that this lady wants? So I go out to my board, I wait at my board and she throws antlers and am I supposed to come to her? Am I supposed to come to an antler? Am I supposed to poke each of the antlers and then come to her? Should I come off of the board, go to her, then go to an antler, then go back to the board? It's lots of opportunity for confusion. And it's important sometimes for us to remember just how gray this can all be if we're not careful. And that I know for myself, I'm not going to speak for anybody else.

(05:42):
For me, I have to constantly check myself to say, okay, he, my tiny terrier, is a terrier and he wants to like be very fast. He gets very amped up, he gets very energetic. And my tendency is to try to match that, which is not good. So I have to consistently take a breath. We don't have to be frantic, but that also means in my process where I can see some solid behavior with a single antler. That's great. Stay there for a bit. Really get that solid. Maybe just do then the Cato board plus the singular antler. Why do you have to go to three antlers? That wasn't even solid yet. What are you doing? Of course, this is confusing. What does any of this have to do with Scent Work Santos Lady? It's the same kind of thing where if we aren't careful, we can absolutely inject a bunch of confusion into the process where the dog doesn't really get what we're asking them to do and we never really stop to double check to see whether or not that's true or not.

(06:56):
We just assume we may get one good rep and then like, "Yeah, they totally got it. " And then we do it in another context, oftentimes making it harder and sure enough, they don't have a clue.

(07:09):
So let me give you a Scent Work example. Elevation, right? Elevation, elevated hides are such a huge allure to us humans. "Oh, they're just so sexy. Oh, they're just so much fun. Oh, this is what Scent Work is supposed to be." But at its core, if we really stop to think about it, any hide that is off of the ground is elevated for all intents and purposes. It's just how high is it? And the higher it goes, potentially, the more complicated the puzzle could maybe be, depending on environmental factors. It could also be really confusing for the dog, not as far as how to solve it, but what they perceive they're supposed to do upon solving it. Well, what does that mean? Well, let's say that you wanted to build a trained final response, a TFR, a sit, a nose freeze, a nose poke, a down, whatever it is.

(08:06):
And you're like, " I want that. Give me neon sign please when you find hide because I want to know for certain when you have figured this out." Okay, that's fine. So you hopefully have been building that behavior separately, right? So that's nice and solid, the dog understands, I get to source, I make a determination, I offer behavior, I'm rewarded for behavior. And now you've hopefully been folding that into your Scent Work searches in other contexts, containers and hides that are a head hide and all that other fun stuff. So you've been getting this consistently, but also knowing that we can't just do only behaviors because we also have to work on hunt, it gets all confusing. But in any event, for my example, where can all of this, does the dog actually know what they're supposed to be doing? So if you have an elevated hide that is above the dog's head heide where they quite literally cannot get their nose to the hide, even though if they could potentially like spring wings, they could get their nose to it.

(09:13):
It's not inside a cabinet or something per se, but it's still out of reach. And you've taught them to do a behavior, particularly a behavior that is in contact with that hide. They have to nose freeze, they have to nose poke, whatever it is. Now the dog is suddenly saying, "I don't know what to do because this picture doesn't match up. I thought I'm supposed to make contact with hide, do behavior, and then I get cookie, but I quite literally cannot make contact with hide. Therefore, I cannot do behavior and therefore I'm not going to get cookie." So this is the kind of thing that we have to constantly ask ourselves is that as human beings, it makes sense that we kind of jump ahead and say, "Well, then you would just be trying to get to the hide." And sure, that's enough for me to be able to call that.

(10:10):
Why is this so difficult? Well, because for the dog, if they've really truly thought about this and said, "Okay, let's say my alert behavior is a sit, my butt has got to be on the ground. My butt can't be on the ground and be leaping up in the sky at the same time." Those people literally teach sits to try to undo jumping behavior all the time. They're opposing behaviors. What is it that I'm supposed to do? So we have to think about this stuff all the time. This is just a really simple example of where there's basically a conflict, there's a breakdown in the understanding, the expectations that we have set don't match what the dog is experiencing and they don't know what they're supposed to do, but this can happen across the board. This can happen across with everything. So as an example, let's say for containers, does your dog actually understand what the point of the whole exercise is?

(11:10):
That it's not about offering behavior or that it's not about actually engaging and interacting with the container. We don't want that. Feet plus containers, bad. But does your dog understand that? Or does your dog think every time that I tell them, "I've sniffed the seams, I've determined this is it, nothing happens, but the second I put my foot on this thing, cookies appear. I get it. I have to put my feet on this thing. And if I put my foot on it a little bit, maybe nothing happens. But when I really smash it really hard, then they come and they come and they give me my cookies."

(11:50):
This is a core breakdown in understanding, right? We have a certain human expectation of what it is that we want, but the dog is doing something entirely different and it's not just because, that's happening because there's a breakdown in understanding and often because we haven't thought about it from the dog's perspective. Either the picture that we painted was too murky, there was too many things going on. As Michele Ellertson says, there was too much lumping happening. Maybe we weren't even clear about what it was that we wanted and our timing wasn't what it needed to be where the dog did the sniffing of the seams, perfect, that's what I want and we wait, we wait, we wait. And then all of a sudden we get paw action and now we're like, "Oh no, I got to get in there fast in order to reward." But to the dog, the information is clear.

(12:45):
Sniffing the seams got me nothing, but paw action paid me. Paw action is what the human wants. I hope I'm making sense that all throughout everything that we do with our dogs, we should always be asking, do they really understand? And really what that question should then kind of lead us to asking is, do I understand? Do I know what it is that I'm trying to accomplish here? What is the ultimate picture? Why is it that I'm doing whatever it is that I'm doing? Do I know what I'm looking for? Do I know what I should do if A happens or B happens or C happens? What are my contingency plans? If my dog does show that they're confused, what am I going to do? How am I going to break that down? How am I going to help this make more sense? And then people go, "Ugh, is the worst.

(13:47):
I'm not a professional trainer. I don't do this for a living. Santos lady, you're stressing me out." I get it. However, just know that you may not be doing this professionally, may not be working with other people, you may not be doing this in order to make a living, but you are a trainer. You just are. Everyone involved with Scent Work is a trainer. I would argue everyone who has a dog is a trainer, but particularly when you're doing Scent Work and you're doing any kind of practicing whatsoever, you are training your dog all the time. Even the routine that you have, getting ready to set up your searches, that's training. The dog is learning, the reading cues and body behavior and everything else that you're doing in order to say, "Aha, that is now going to be a predictor that we're going to play the sniffy game." So you're training.

(14:45):
You're training all the time. What we need to do is to have our trainer's hat on all the time and not be really loosey goosey with it because particularly if you are either competing or interested in competing, you want to be the best teammate to your dog possible. And that's not just during the search, that's when you're practicing. That's when you're doing all of these different exercises and things. That's how you can be the best teammate, that you're providing them with the information and the clarity they need to go do the test with you at the trial and have a hope and a prayer of doing well because otherwise the way to think about it is when we're practicing, we're focusing on, let's say, our ABCs and we're doing our ABCs and sometimes we focus on ABC and sometimes we focus on X, Y, Z, but we don't really focus on the stuff in the middle.

(15:42):
You're just like, "Ah, whatever. We don't care about that." And then we go to the test and the test is all about the stuff in the middle and also algebra that we've never done.That would not be great, right? You're not going to do well at that test. You may be able to skate by, you may be able to pick some of the right multiple choice answers and maybe get lucky, but it's not going to be pretty. So what we should be doing instead is always ask ourselves, does the dog really understand? And if they don't, why? And for many of us, just asking that question, does the dog understand? We made them pause, go, "But understand what? What is it exactly that I wanted the dog to do?" Because we can get so caught up in just doing, right? I put out a bunch of hides.

(16:35):
Great. What is it exactly that I wanted the dog to do here? What was the goal? What was the picture I had in my head when I set this up? What kind of hides did I set out? What did I put them on or near? What do I think the odor is going to be doing? What kind of skills does my dog have to either build, maintain, or showcase in order to do this?

(17:00):
What do I need to do as a handler? What am I going to be doing as a handler? Why am I doing those things? Again, if anyone has ever taken any kind of training with me, Santos with her questions. And yes, I do ask lots of those. But those are the things that I think we all should be doing. Just taking a beat and asking a couple of quick questions so that we don't find ourselves kind of racing against ourselves and all of a sudden we're like, "Oh my God, what happened?" I'm in no man's land because I just suddenly got way too excited about whatever it was that I was doing. There was no thought put into any of this. My dog is confused. I'm confused. We're in no man's land. I had no idea how to get back. That's the kind of thing we want to try to avoid.

(17:51):
So by simply asking ourselves, does the dog really understand? That can be immensely helpful. So ask yourself, just think about if you were planning on doing training sometime this week, which I hope you do, summer training is fun. And what was the kind of thing you were going to set up for your training? Why were you going to do that kind of exercise? How many hides are you going to put out? Where were you going to be searching? What kind of skills were you trying to work on? And then what kind of things were you expecting your dog to think about as they were tackling that search? What do you think they were expecting that they were supposed to do while they were tackling that search? What is it that you thought that they should be walking away that search thinking or understanding? And if you're like, "I have no idea about any of that stuff," then you should reach out.

(18:45):
You absolutely should reach out to Scent Work University. I would definitely encourage you to schedule a Zoom consultation with one of our instructors. They are very, very talented people who do offer this through Scent Work University. And the nice thing is that when you work with someone over Zoom is they're able to have this kind of intake with you, figure out where you are, figure out where you are, figure out where your goals are, and they could put together a training plan that's customized to you so that you can then figure out all these things you can do when you're practicing on your own. So that definitely may be something you want to check out. I also would strongly encourage you guys if you are training on your own. Tony Gravley recently put out a whole bunch of webinars. One was titled Training on an Island.

(19:33):
Very, very good. But also the handler's role. There's two webinars. There's one for training and one for trialing. Highly, highly recommend. So I will have links for those inside the description of this podcast episode. But yeah, ask yourself these questions. They really can't help at the end of the day because you may notice, maybe my dog doesn't really understand. And that's okay. That's an opportunity for us to provide some more clarity and that can then ... I think it should put some wind in your sales to say, "Okay, well, maybe we're not getting where we want to go because they don't get it yet." Good. We're not doomed. We just need to provide a little bit more clarity. But as always, I would always love to hear from all of you. What are your thoughts? Do you think that your dog understands everything? All the time.

(20:22):
Again, we'll be posting this episode up on our social media as well as the Scent Work University website. So more than welcome to share your comments there. Yes, we have been on a little bit of a hiatus. There's only one of me, but we will be offering weekly episodes now going forward throughout 2026.

(20:44):
And our next episode, we are featuring Anita Ambani of the Scholarly Scentz, and she's going to be talking all about Project Poodle. Woo, very exciting stuff. I'm very much looking forward to that conversation. We're also going to be interviewing plenty of people throughout the community, all about a variety of different things. So if there's someone in particular you would like for me to talk to, please let me know. I would love to have a conversation with them. Well, pretty much anything. What it has to do with Scent Work, I would love to have a conversation with them. It's always good to share different conversations with our fellow colleagues. Very, very good stuff. But as always, want to thank you all for giving us a listen. Again, I cannot believe the podcast's been going on as long as it has. It's kind of scary, but I do appreciate all of the amazing support you guys have been awesome.

(21:37):
Thank you so very much. Please give a cookie to your puppies for us. Happy training. We look forward to seeing you all soon.