Ep. 142: Finding the Balance

In Scent Work, there are two players at work: the dog and the handler. Who is taking a leading role and who is supporting? Who is making the decisions, when, why and how? What are these players communicating and are they listening to one another?

The roles within the search exist on a shared spectrum of extremes. On one polar extreme, the dog is doing everything and on the other, the handler is directing the entire time. All of us have our preferences for how we want our searches to look and feel or where we will fall on this spectrum. This is where finding the balance comes into play.

Reaching the ideal equilibrium for our specific team is a continual endeavor that will never end. Furthermore, our approach should be fluid and malleable, changing and adjusting depending on the given circumstances.

Our dog tackling a search they can competently and confidently knock out of the park may have a starkly different approach or game plan to when they are tasked with something brand new or if they demonstrate they are unsure, worried or even concerned.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of not only finding the balance but embracing the journey to discover it. This path will almost certainly have a fair amount of bumps, switchbacks and unexpected turns, but can be exciting and thrilling if we allow it.

Speaker: Dianna L. Santos

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

• Single Hides v. Multi-Hides Livestream with Michael McManus
• Vehicle Search Mechanics: The Handler's Role Webinar with Michele Ellertson
• 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
• The Handler's Role: Managing Behavioral Challenges Webinar with Nancy Reyes

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 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 finding the balance. 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 we provide online courses, webinars, seminars, virtual events, ebooks, Zoom consultations, video reviews, free training tips, free live streams, and instructive mentorship program and so much more. Our library is very large and we offer things that can help you no matter where you are in your sniffing journey. So whether you're just getting started, you're looking to develop some more advanced skills, you're interested in trialing, or you're competing even at the upper levels, we likely have a training solution for you.

(00:56):
So now that you know a little bit more about me, let's dive into the episode itself.

(01:03):
So in this episode, I wanted to talk about the art of finding the balance. What does that even mean? So it's the balance between what are we trying to do as handlers and what are we asking our dogs to do? You're like, 'Oh God, it's one of these." So what I wanted to talk about with this is thinking about the journey that you have when you're training and how you may want to make certain adjustments depending on what you're seeing. And you're like, "Oh, you're not going to give me a definitive do this than that?" And the answer is no. And the reason being is that I don't think that you can. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this, is everyone has their preference when it comes to trainings that work. Different training methodologies, different schools of thought, and all of them work.

(01:59):
Let me just put that out there. They all work. But everyone has different preferences for whatever reasons and I am no exception. But I do think that there's something that we should be mindful of when it comes to what am I expecting the handler to do and what am I expecting the dog to do? And are there ways that we can help teams better understand and appreciate where they are on that spectrum and what kind of adjustments they may want to make in either way, in either direction. I go, "What do you mean?" So for my purposes, I want a dog who is able to come into a search area and understands what the whole premise of the game is. I go into a space, says dog, and I want to seek out odor, whatever that may be. That could be a food hide, could be a toy hide, could be a target odor hide, could be an antler, could be a sentence article, whatever.

(02:57):
I go into said space. I am working said space looking for odor and I'm going to trust what my nose tells me. I'm going to feel confident enough to work in that space to do that. I'm independent enough where I can trust what my nose is telling me. I'm going to be making choices and decisions based upon all this wonderful odor information I'm able to decipher and I'm going to make a choice about whether or not I found the thing or not, or I got as close as I could. That's what I want for the dog. For the handler, what I want is for them to be able to support their dog, to allow the dog to take that lead role, but not just simply let the dog do all the work because that's not really what we're looking for. "Well, what does that mean?

(03:43):
"You're always saying, "We can't find anything as people because our sense of smell." I get it, right? Yes. Humans do not have the sense of smell of our dogs. We cannot see odor. We cannot experience odor. This is all very true, but there are things that we can do. Number one, we can listen to our dogs. So as an example, if I'm working a space with my dog and they are trying to do all the things I just talked about, but they come upon something where now they're not quite so confident. Well, now that's my job as a handler, as a teammate to my dog, to listen to that communication of, "Ooh, odor information is telling me that I should maybe go around and into that really tight, scary corner. That's a little worrying for me." Okay, so that's my job as a handler to now react in some way to first of all, let the dog know I heard you.

(04:36):
And second of all, to be like, "Okay, are we going to do this together? Are we just going to leave that alone? Am I taking the information like, okay, we could break this down in different training sessions. What am I doing with that? How am I best supporting my dog?" Not just standing there and be like, "All right, well, good luck to you." That's not what this is. And you're going to say, "Well, wait a minute, hold the phone, Santos. Are you saying that I never just sit and wait my dog out?" And that's not what I'm trying to say, but that's still, that should be a conscious choice on your part, that you have received the dog's information of, "Ooh, I'm a little worried about going over there." And if you've been working on this type of thing for a bit and now you are just pushing the envelope a little bit purposefully with this setup and you're 99.9% positive that they could do it, they just have to try, then yeah, maybe you smile at, "That's such a good honey, go ahead and give it a try.

(05:36):
I'm still here for you. I'm listening to you." And if we can't do it, okay, no problem. There was still that 1% shot that this wasn't going to work, then yeah, then we're going to call it quit and we're going to make some kind of adjustment. But is that making sense that the immediate response shouldn't be in any weird kind of extreme? It shouldn't be, "I'm now going to go over there and yank the dog and throw them into the corner." Of course not, please don't do that. I'm not going to walk over myself and point to the hide, be like, "Come over here, come over here." I'm also not just going to just go back to the start line and just be like, "All right, well, best of luck to you. " It's not that either. So what I'm hoping that we can kind of talk about in this episode, and you don't really have a choice because I'm just talking, is the importance of finding this balance.

(06:33):
And I want to try to help it make a little bit more sense by thinking about when we're starting brand new teams or when you first started your whole journey and how your approach may very well change depending on what you're seeing. So let me give you an example. For my Puppy Scent Work class, I organize it a little bit differently than my other classes, and there's a reasoning behind it. There's always a reasoning behind the madness. And one of the differences that I have in there is that we'll have hide, puppy finds hide, let's say in a box, handler comes up and gives a nice little jackpot to puppy inside of the box. And the reason being is that puppy is baby, small little attention span and I can then decide, are we going to end here or are we going to find some more hides in other boxes?

(07:33):
I'm also letting the puppy know they did a really good job and there's just a lot of assessing that could be done in this moment. That being said, there are absolutely puppies that are ready to go from finding a hide and finding another food hide. And when you try to do that jackpot at hide number one, now everything becomes very disjointed and kind of icky where they were ready to eat their cookies, maybe you're giving verbal praise from the start line, "Oh, what a happy little puppy. You're amazing." And then they're like, "Yeah, that was great. I ate all my cookies. I heard you. You're great. I'm going to go find another one." That's very fluid. That's fantastic. That's a seat that we want. If you were to step in and provide that jackpot at box number one for that puppy, now everything is all about the person and they don't want to go on to find hide number two as an example.

(08:28):
So this very simple example, finding the balance would be, what is it that I'm looking for? Does it mean that jackpots are bad? No, it does not. Does it mean that you should never do jackpots? No, it does not. But maybe in certain times of your journey, you may notice that you're having too much handler focus. So now you want to have a little bit more Seek or a little bit more independence. How can I promote that? That's why, again, working with primary is fantastic because again, the puppy or the dog can just find their primary, move on to find another one. Great.

(09:10):
But the other extreme can also be true where Michael McManus just did an amazing livestream for us. Really should give it a listen if you haven't already. It's very good. Talking about single hides and multi-hides. And one of the things that he was talking about was dogs who will grab a hide, whether it's a primary hide or primarily a paradigm and just run off with it. So they get it and they just go where the person isn't able to provide additional reinforcement. In that situation to the dog, the person is not part of the thing at all. So we have the complete opposite extreme of what I was just talking about with the puppy, where the dog is just self-rewarding and then they're gone. So you would want to do some of the things that Michael suggested inside that livestream in order to build more of that stickiness at that hide, but you're also making yourself, like, the cookies come from me.

(10:10):
I'm important to this. We should do this together.

(10:16):
But the key thing that I'm trying to emphasize with this episode is that these kinds of situations, these kind of examples that I'm providing, they happen all the time in Scent Work because you're constantly trying to find that perfect balance that's going to be for you and your team and you never do. And that's very frustrating for people. What do you mean? And for me, trying to find that middle, that's the fun part. That's the, okay, I went a little bit too far this way, not a problem. I went too little far that way. That's okay. Oh, this is good. This is good. Okay. Now it's even smaller. The equilibrium I'm trying to find used to be a pretty big span, and the more that I'm working on this, the more that my team is kind of jelling, the smaller and smaller and smaller that space becomes, you're trying to get right in there.

(11:12):
And that's fun. That's what training should be because it's perfecting the communication between you and your dog and from your dog to you too. It's a two-way conversation thing. And there are times when your dog doesn't think they should talk to you because what's the point? And we want them to think that they should talk to us. And sometimes, again, we're not receiving that information. So then they're like, "Why bother?" And then there are times that we need to talk to our dog like, "Hey, I know that you want to go range out 30 feet that way, maybe don't because there's a railroad track over there and we're going to die. So let's not do that. Let's come back over this way." There are real tangible reasons why the communication and finding the balance between what am I doing as a handler and what is my dog doing is very important.

(12:11):
And I think it's very easy for us just as people to try to simplify this way too much to say, "Well, either you're in the camp of you are pointing out everything in a search area or you're in the camp, you're standing at the start line, your dog is doing everything." And I just don't think either of those are true. Even those really extreme examples, there's still balance going on in there. I think it's not imbalance of what I'm looking for, but there's still a thing going on between the handler and the dog.

(12:50):
You want to find what's going to work best for your team. And the key part is recognizing it's always going to change. So let me try to give you a tangible example because my head is about to explode. Lady, make this more clear. So for my little tiny terrier, if you've been listening for any period of time, yeah, yeah, we know he's on odor, blah, blah, blah. Yes. But now we're playing with antlers like, "Oh, geez, still not doing Birch." He loves the antler game. Oh my God, I think he loves antlers more than he loves anything else at this point in time. And I have some thoughts as why, but this again ties in really nicely to what Michael was talking about in that single hide versus multi-hide livestream, and I'm just experiencing it firsthand, is my human thing to do was like, "I'm going to put down a bunch of antlers." We did things, broke it down the beginning to start, but then I go, "Oh, I'm going to put out a bunch of antlers." And that was a mess.

(13:54):
It just was not good. So now I've backed off and like, try being a trainer for just like two seconds. Think about this logically. So now we have two and we do one antler at a time. He goes out, he finds an antler, he brings it back to me, lots of cookie, you're amazing. And then I toss another antler, he go gets that one. And now we're to the point where he will be waiting inside, just like for my normal searches, and I set out one antler. He goes out, he finds it, he brings it to me, he thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread, wonderful. Put it back inside, hide it antler again. He does it again. He's like, "This is the best thing ever." And now I've progressed over a period of time to where now we're hiding two antlers. And here's the part that's relevant to what we're talking about is up until today, today was the first day, we've been playing with this for about maybe two weeks.

(14:53):
He would find antler number one and would bring it back. And that was the whole thing that we, again, we broke down individually, blah, blah, blah. And he was just like, "I am amazing." I'm like, "You are amazing." He said, "This is the best thing ever. I love this game. That's wonderful." Now I'm sitting stationary in a chair. I'm not following him around the search area and you're like, "Why?" Bad body, but also I'm trying to get him to work more away from me and be able to do some of this stuff without me influencing him because he does absolutely pick up a lot of my cues. So now I'm trying to make certain that he's able to do some of the stuff on his own because that will also carry over to our network. So he will be able to go out, find an antler on his own.

(15:40):
Great. He brings it back, lots of reward, you're incredible. And up until today, what was happening is I would then put the antler he gave me up on a table that I have next to me. I have a whole setup. It's all very contextual. I give him my queue to go find some more and he'll work. He'll work the whole space. And these antlers are not scented with antler oil or wax, I think. They are just antlers that I just got. So there's just an antler. Again, dogs are brilliant. They can absolutely do it, but it's not as potent as what you may have at trial. And he will work and work and work and work and work and work, work for quite a bit. We're talking probably two minutes of working, and then he will come over and ask for help. That's what we were consistently having.

(16:25):
He's like, "I cannot do this. " But that was a communication. This is the balance part that I wanted to pull upon is that I then have a decision point to make because I'm asking a lot of him in that I'm sitting in this chair and I'm doing a whole lot of nothing. He's taking on 99.9% of the responsibility of finding this thing. He worked for two whole minutes working this whole space, trying his little tiny terrier heart out, and he wasn't successful. He then comes back to me and goes, "I got nothing." And I say, "Okay, do you want some help?" All I've been doing is standing up and taking one step in the general direction of what part of the yard the antler is in, and that's been enough for him to be like, "Okay, great." Now, that's still more of a cue than I would like.

(17:24):
But the point being is that what I'm trying to figure out is, what I have been trying to figure out is how to get that right balance of I'm asking a lot of him and I know I'm asking a lot of him. And when he needs help, I'm not just going to hang him out to dry. That's not what I'm looking for. I want him to ask me for help if he really needs it. I want to build up skills for him so that he doesn't necessarily need help about figuring things out or trusting his nose. I want him to trust his nose. And there have been times where he kind of second guesses what his nose is telling him because he will absolutely make assumptions about things, which again, he's a very smart dog and I'm not a very smart person at times, so I can fall into patterns.

(18:18):
So when I go outside of the pattern, he goes, "Well, huh, that's not within the pattern. My nose is telling me that, but she doesn't normally put a hide there," like that kind of thing. So I've been trying to make sure that when I'm doing training in all contexts, that he can trust what his nose is telling him. And he's not just merely developing a assumption about what the thing could be. But at the same point, if he needs help, I want him to know that I will help you. That may not be to get to the answer, but it may be to be like, "Okay, well, let's just go back inside and let's just rest for a minute. I'll make some kind of adjustment and then you can go try again." And that adjustment may literally just be just letting the hide sit out there a little bit longer or maybe having him just rest inside for a bit or may just be giving up, be like, "Okay, well, we'll do this again later," or whatever the case may be.

(19:15):
All I'm trying to describe is that I don't want him to think that he shouldn't communicate to me. That's not what I want. I do want him to be able to trust his nose, to work independently, to work confidently, but I don't want him to think I'm not going to listen to him. So today was the first day that he successfully found two antlers on his own without asking for help. Again, with me doing this very big ask of, "I'm just going to sit my big old butt on this chair and I'm not going to do anything." It is an incredible ask for him to be able to do that, to go out, find this thing that again, he hasn't been on this all that long. That's a lot. That's very hard. So that was a very impressive thing and I was very proud of him.

(20:10):
And then we did a bunch of like, "I'm just going to toss the antler, you're going to bring it back I'm going to toss the antler, I'm going to bring it back and then can I ask you to do a trick and then toss an antler and bring it back?" So I don't want this to just become a, "You can just ignore me all together. I am not important. Do not worry about the lady person. Just go forth and do your own thing." That's not what I want. That's not my goal. I want this still to be a game for us, but I want him to recognize that I may not be the gateway to the answer and I want him to trust himself. So to try to help this make a little bit more sense, you may be saying, "You're talking in circles." The reason why this is so important to me is first of all, for my own preference of how scent work should be as a whole.

(20:59):
I want dogs who, again, are very independent, they're very confident and they trust in their noses. But with him in particular, when I very first started playing with him, again, it was with primary, it was with food, the very first time that I did it, I had one little cookie out and I just held him by his chest. It was nothing even the way I normally set it up with my clients, just playing around with it. Put my hand in front of his chest, I tossed a cookie out in front of me. I said, "Okay, go get it. " And he went like two steps and turned around and looked at me. I was like, "Is this a trick?" He's like, "No, it's not a trick. Just go get the cookie." So then when I would put him behind a gate and I would put a cookie and a cookie, he would find one cookie and then come back to me, be like, "Oh, okay.

(21:40):
Well, now what? " And that was the way that it started. Every single time I was like, "Well, now what? Well, now what? Well, now what? " And the thing is, if you know him, he is a food hound, just put in perspective, when the person who sprung him from the municipal shelter got him, he was 330 pounds. He is a terrier. He's tiny. The size he is now is 21 pounds, so he was very overweight. So he is a fan of food, and that's what surprised me so much when I first started was just how unsure of himself he was with this, that he didn't want to not only trust his nose, he didn't trust what the game was. And a lot of people, if they've seen videos of him searching now, they wouldn't believe that were the case, but it was. He was very much like, "I'm not so sure what is it that I'm supposed to do?

(22:38):
" And would constantly come back to me. And there were lots of times he wasn't even sniffing. He was just looking. He had to learn to use his nose in this context. Now he's just amazing. But my point being is that that's the kind of balance I'm talking about, is that where you may have a certain preference of doing things, maybe you're instructor, you're doing something in class, maybe you're doing something with friends, maybe you've had lots of different dogs, maybe you're on nose work dog number five, whatever. You may find that you have to change things no matter where you are in your journey, because that balance may be going out of whack, that the dog is either too invested in you or they're not invested in you at all. You're not invested in the dog or you're too invested in the dog. Maybe you're too invested in the hide, a whole other conversation, but knowing that we should be able to shift what we're doing based upon what we see, that this is all supposed to be, no matter what kind of training methodology or school of thought that we have, it should be a fluid, living, breathing experience of, I had a plan to do blah, blah, blah, but this happened when I was expecting that.

(23:59):
So what do I need to shift or change because it didn't go the way that I was expecting because I'm looking for this ultimate picture of this kind of balance between the dog having their role and my role being something that's important as well. So I hope that kind of sort of something for you at least to think about. They're like, "Sure, I'll be having nightmares about this episode." But my point being is that for me, I recognize even just with how I design my own training, how I talk about with clients, I have a preference of how things should go, but nothing is ever meant to be cemented in stone. It's supposed to be, this is the way that we're going to give it a try and we're then going to see what happens. And if that balance starts going out of whack, again, going back to that puppy summer class example of, okay, the jackpot is causing the puppy to spend too much attention on you.

(25:03):
Okay, we're going to back off on the jackpot and we're just going to let them fluidly go. But if you had the introduction to set recourse where we don't do the jackpot right away, we're doing it much later on. And then by the time you're trying to do the jackpot, the dog is like, "Woohoo, bye." Okay, we're going to make some adjustments to it. And they're like, "No, actually I am a part of this because that's important." It's all about finding that balance and it's going to be different for every single team. It's also going to change throughout your journey and you're probably going to be adjusting this thing forever. And to me, that's the fun part and it can be very frustrating for people because they want to know, what do I do? And with dog training, particularly with Snap Work, it's not so much, here's what you do.

(25:53):
It's more so here is an array of choices and there's different flavors of all of them and you have to figure out which choice is going to work best and you're still probably going to want to change and modify as you're going along. But that were my thoughts about finding balance.

(26:12):
Well, good for you, lady. I don't know what you were talking about. I hope it was a little bit helpful. Please let me know in the comments. If you have any comments or questions, always happy to hear from you guys. We are going to be having some more outside speakers like, thank God, but I'm always very interested in hearing from other colleagues as well. So if you know of someone who is involved in some are like, "I really wish you would talk to them and have them speak on whatever it is. " Let me know. I would love to speak with them. I just want to take a real quick second to send a huge shout out to all the instructors who've been sharing their expertise with us. We have more instructors joining on to, again, they partner with us, meaning that they are putting together content for us to share with you and that's amazing because all these people are incredibly busy.

(27:05):
They are traveling around the United States. Many of them are now traveling around the world. They're doing trial officiating. They teach their own classes. They are working very, very, very hard, all these people. So a huge thank you to all of them for sharing their expertise with us. Again, I know that I have improved as a professional and as a dog trainer and also as a dog owner, thanks to all of them and also a huge shout out to all of our clients. Truly, you guys have just been absolutely amazing, so very good with all of your support. I mean, I think we're coming up on 10 years soon or something, which is nuts. It's crazy. But also the level of interest and the growth that you all have had, the fact that you're still interested in doing more when many people at first glance at first impression like, "Oh, Scent Work is just that your dog just goes and finds something", like, no, so much more complicated than that.

(28:11):
And you guys have been so passionate about it. You've been sharing your dog with us. So just thank you. You guys are all awesome. Instructors, clients, everybody, good job. Click and treat, cookies for all. So thank you also very much as always for all of your support and for listening. Really do appreciate it, but please make certain you give a cookie to your puppy for me because they've been like, "Okay, can you stop listening to that lady? Let's go do some searches." All right, thank you so very much. Happy training. We look forward to seeing you soon.