Stark Realization: Checking v. Seeking

by Dianna L. Santos

You’ve carved out time to practice with your dog. Setting a few hides, you release them to search. One-by-one, they knock them off as if it were nothing. Training session – check!

The following weekend you go to a trial. You’ve listened to all the recommendations and advice and plan to follow it all. Packing a few days ahead of time, ensuring to include both essentials and items of comfort for both you and your pup. Outlining process and outcome goals. Getting to the hotel a day ahead to get acclimated to the area. Eating a hearty breakfast the day of. Arrive at the trial site when advertised, not a moment earlier. You will not be the cause for any unhappy volunteers! Your trial setup is to be envied. You have your gear, your treats, toys, chews and equipment all beautifully laid out, organized and at your fingertips.

Time for your very first search of the day. Your dog is pottied and returned to their crate as you practice some box breathing. Centered, you gear up and head to your first staging area. You follow your staging area routine designed to keep you and your canine partner focused and centered. Walking in unison to your start line, you take a final breath and release them to search.

Immediately, it all feels wrong.

The smooth and fluid tempo familiar when training is nowhere to be seen in this trial search. Instead, it feels choppy and disjointed, with your dog going from thing-to-thing but not giving you any changes of behaviors or communication that they are even remotely in odor. You are in a fog, unfamiliar with what you are seeing. Then, your dog starts looking back at you, expectantly. What does THAT mean!?

Your heart is in your throat. What do you do? Did you miss something? You should trust your dog, right? Thus, you stammer, “A-a-alert?” only to be meet with a, “Sorry, no.”

What happened? You did all the things. You trained. You practiced. Your dog completed the searches, they found the hides, you had the checkmarks to prove it. What gives?!

The rest of the trial day doesn’t fare much better. There are a few correct “Alerts”, but most of your searches either end with a “No” or your team timing out.

Understandably dejected, the drive home was torturous, as your mind replays each painful search in an endless loop.

To your credit, you try your best to shield your dog from your mental turmoil, but they know.  Still, you give them their favorite chew and tell them how wonderful they are, that clearly, they need a better human.

In the back of your mind, you hear the advice to give yourself time before reviewing your trial videos. In a few days’ time, feeling pretty much the same if not worse than you did on trial day, you question the validity of this advice. Still, you force yourself to sit through every single video. Each “Alert” and “No” stings more than the last. “This is POINTLESS!”, you exclaim as you storm away. You did everything right. You listened and did the things exactly as described, what more do the imaginary “they” want from you?

Now angered, you rewatch the videos, waiting to pounce on the evidence that you had been led astray. Someone is to blame!

Suddenly, your eye catches something. Rewinding the video, you remember how awkward the trial searches felt. In rewatching, you see it again. Your dog is going from item-to-item, but they do not look the same…

Curious, you bring up a few of your training videos. That is when your heart begins to sink.

No matter the day, no matter the training session, no matter the setup, your dog confidently strides into the space and checks the doorframe, the table, the basket, takes three strides then pops up onto the wall to check the underside of the shelf before turning left and checking the seam of the cabinet. Then they loop back to check the sequence in reverse.

What you have just unearthed is that your dog has not been hunting during your training sessions. They have been checking.

Along the way, your brilliant dog identified your patterns. You inadvertently trained them to check stuff and then rewarded them for doing so. The game became “check this and then that” instead of building a true desire to seek. Your dog was not activating their nose from the start line, seeking out odor plumes and attempting to use the odor information to work their way from less-to-more to get to source. No. They had a checklist in their mind, “check here, then there, then over there and then over there.”

They moved through space instead of investigating the space. There was no hunt, it was going from Point A to Point B.

Now what?!

Breathe and give yourself some grace. This is not an uncommon situation you find yourself in. Conflating finding things with building hunt seems to be a part of the Scent Work training journey for many teams.

Consider what you want your dog to do. Activate and use their nose to interpret the odor information within a space so they can identify the location of source. Not merely check this item or that.

How can we accomplish this?

One approach may be to practice within a different room in your house. Start by setting a blank search in this space. What does your dog do? What areas do they investigate? What areas do they seemingly ignore completely?

After running this blank search for a minute or so, put the dog up and determine where you will set your hide. Choose a location dissimilar to your patterns and in an area that your dog ignored during the blank search. Allow this to age for at least 20 minutes, so there is plenty of odor available. Ideally, you would pair this hide, so the dog is immediately rewarded upon finding the correct answer. Of course, you can provide supplemental reinforcement afterwards.

Get ready to video and then run your dog. What do you see? At what point do you notice your dog engage their nose, when they recognize the odor? Do they look to you? If so, when and for how long? The reward is with the hide itself, so they should be good. When they do find the hide, allow them to self-reward and jackpot them an additional amount. What a good dog! Put them up and plan for a second run.

This time, this room will be devoid of hides but there will be a hide slightly down the hallway, as an example. Once again, allow this paired hide time to age. When you are ready, bring the dog into this room that is now devoid of hides and allow them to work. Are they seeking or checking? Do they offer to leave the room to seek out the paired hide that is down the hallway or are they stuck in a vortex of checking stuff inside this room?

From here, you can play with sessions that start off blank, asking the dog to work the entire house as an example before you sneakily set a hide in a location the dog did not actually cover but merely moved through.

With time, repetition and observant progression, you will see a shift in your dog away from checking to truly hunting and seeking. This is when all the excellent advice you followed up to this point will click. You will reap the benefits of taking time to train and practice, for being prepared for trial day, outlining your process and outcome goals, setting the tone for yourself and your dog.

Scent Work is a complicated journey with many twists, turns and unexpected valleys. However, the view you and your dog will enjoy upon reaching the peaks makes every moment worth it.

Ready to learn more? Check out these excellent resources:

• Building Blocks for Elite and Summit Webinar with Wendy Krehbiel
• Components of Scent Work: Hunting Webinar with Dianna L. Santos
  
• Decoding and Understanding "The Look" Webinar with Khara Schuetzner
• Hunt Drive Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Let's Get Motivated: Secret of Motivational Searches Webinar with Tony Gravley
• Tackling NW3 Head-On: Conquering the Mind Game Webinar with Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow
• The Goal-Powered Search: Mastering Process & Outcome Goals to Achieve Success in Nose Work Webinar with Silke Wittig
  
• The Power of Purposeful Goal Setting in Dog Sports and Life Webinar with Teah Anders
• Training Blank Areas Webinar with Michael and Natalie McManus
• Worth Waiting For: Leveraging Staging Areas to Maximize Performance Webinar with Kayla Dever and Samantha Winslow

Dianna has been training dogs professionally since 2011. She has done everything from teaching group training classes and private lessons, to specializing in working with fearful, reactive and aggressive dogs, to being a trial official and competition organization staff member.

Following a serious neck and back injury, Dianna was forced to retire from in-person dog training. But she was not ready to give up her passion! So, she created Pet Dog U and Scent Work University to provide outstanding online dog training to as many dog handlers, owners and trainers possible…regardless of where they live! Dianna is incredibly grateful to the amazingly talented group of instructors who have joined PDU and SWU and she looks forward to the continued growth of PDU and SWU and increased learning opportunities all of these online dog training platforms can provide.

In June 2021, Dianna and her business partner, Sean McMurray launched Cyber Scent Work, an organization that operates in the gray space between training and trialing in Scent Work. With Cyber Scent Work, handlers have the opportunity to earn Qs, titles and ribbons while also receiving helpful training advice regardless of whether they qualify or not! The advent of the Cyber Sniffing Games, Traditional Cyber Scent Work Program, in-person and online assessments have been met with much fanfare! Be sure to check out Cyber Scent Work, you will be happy you did!