The Spaniel Annals

Human beings are always fascinated by the dog’s ability to use his nose.  While our primary sense is our sight, the dog’s nose dominates his perceptions of the world, through scent receptors that are thousands of times greater than ours.   So training a dog to do scent work is really diving into a world we don’t understand–a mystical, blind world that the dog understands naturally, but we can only make educated guesses about.

I’m in an unusual training period right now where I have three springers at very different stages of their scent work for obedience trialing.  The “scent discrimination” exercise in obedience requires the dog to select from a pile of articles (dumbbell-shaped objects of metal and leather) the one article that the handler has scented.  The dog must do this twice, once with a metal article and once with a leather one.  Here’s Kani performing this exercise at a recent trial in January:

While audiences are often deeply impressed by this exercise, by this stage the scent work itself is not the challenge for Kani.  Rather, it’s the fact that the scent work is occurring in a new building, a distance away from me, with a stranger standing nearby with a clipboard. With all of these external distractions, Kani has to concentrate and continue working until she finds the right article.   This is tough for the impulsive spaniel!    I mentioned in an earlier post that this particular show site is stressful for Kani, and you can see that stress playing out in her hesitation over the metal article.  She indicates it, but still checks everything else and then rolls the article a bit before picking it up.  These are all signs of stress. 

Because of the inherent stress of this exercise, I’ve realized how important it is to teach the baby steps of it very early, in a way that is non-stressful and is a “win-win” situation for the dog.  The method I like best was created by Janice DeMello, a nationally recognized dog trainer.  It’s called the “round-the-clock” method.  Rozzie is just now being introduced to this method, but this can be done even with puppies.    At this early stage, the trainer’s scent is associated with a small strip of cheese  that is sprayed on the article.  The dog simply has to find the article with the cheese on it, lick it off and then return to the trainer.  Even though Rozzie can retrieve, I don’t ask her to retrieve the article.  Instead, by putting the articles in a circle (the “clock”), she’s learning to scent in a pattern and indicate the correct article.  This exercise has to be FUN, and she needs to be 100% RIGHT.  If that doesn’t happen, I’ve messed up.   This video is fairly long because as you’ll see, the articles are put out gradually so that she learns a pattern of searching.

In training dogs to track human scent, most trainers use some sort of secondary motivator, like food, to teach the dog to follow a particular scent.    After all, the dogs know how to use their nose!  It’s really a matter of the human communicating, “Follow this track, not that one.”   In training, tracks laid by humans are laced with hotdog pieces, that are gradually faded as the dog learns to follow that scent.  I’ve heard that many police trainers, in training their dogs to follow scent across asphalt (a much more difficult surface because of the lack of ground material to hold scent) will use a spray bottle of urine produced by females in heat! 

You’ve now seen videos of two dogs working scent at the opposite sides of the spectrum: Kani, who has been doing this kind of scent work for years, and Rozzie, who is just beginning.  The next post will show Reardon making the transition to eliminating the cheese and indicating my scent only.  It’s a big leap.