02/11/2025
What don’t you want?
(A bit of nosework philosophy)
The landscape of nosework training is a little like the menu at the cheese cake factory – 23 pages of every type of appetizer, main, side, dessert and drink you can choose on a given day. After you have the dog, the leash, collar, harness, trained final response, speed, patterning, lead, follow, re-reward, waiting, etc – no choice is wrong – it’s all about our preference of dessert first or more protein.
So how does one go about choosing the best for your team? Que, the quick-witted waiter/waitress in a small town dinner you might have in a popular movie. They come to your table and ask “So what don’t you want?” – not because they are rude but they are optimizing for efficiency or rude. If you sound confused, they expand into; no one ever orders anything but the T-bone steak, bake potato and they either don’t want the green beans or they don’t want the corn on the comb. Yes, this is totally lifted from a movie scene. And risks exists for anything ordered but T-Bone steak, btw.
So – pivot to nosework and the question of the day is “What don’t you want?” – so either you don’t want that false alert in the last 30 seconds of the search or you don’t want to hear the 30 second called on you. Take the other end so you don’t want to miss that 2nd close hide or you don’t want to false on the nearby odor that is – insert your favorite term – “trapping, pooling, converging, etc.”
A short tangent; about 5 years ago the videographers started entering our competitive trials on a wide spread basis as a valuable tool for competitors to get a more objective view of how we searched, hide orders, leash handling, and how close to source the dog was when alerting. This began a process of video review – mainly geared towards “error” correction. That is how I reviewed video in those days, both for my own trial days and for coaching purposes. If you missed a hide, it was about how you didn’t get the dog into that area – which can be a valuable starting point. However, now the video is ubiquitous with a Gopro attached to the competitors – I think this observation of where we didn’t get is somewhat superficial of the menu of choices. Currently I tend to focus more on the pattern/flow of the search; what decisions did you make as a handler that created the perception of you not getting to that area? So when you are ordering on the menu of nosework decisions – What don’t you want? Is the pattern created in training or the pattern of the menu – i.e. trial search environment that modulates handler decisions. The search environment sometimes is all T-Bone steak and no real decisions can change the outcome – almost every team succeeds or not but it’s the environment that created that outcome.
Example; back in the days of my first few years of Certifying official assignments I would watch the trial video and catalog my hide placement patterns – so in interiors how many of the hide placements were from the start line encountered to the left or right by the team. Could I see a pattern of how I set hides left of the start in several searches? Keep in mind I’m not always thinking of every condition nor prioritizing countering my own preferences when setting hides; things like limited time or changes in flow and inexhaustible trial day variables for each day are typically encountered. I would review after the trials and mine the trial video to catalog what choices I made. Then compare these patterns to the outcomes over several trials. It was valuable to me to see that if I set more hides toward the left side of the start then the pass rates could be lower given the random set of competitors that were running that day. I would ask myself why – and I would weave several stories as to why in each analysis I performed. Maybe its that 80 plus percent of the world is righthanded and therefore tend to enter a room with a predisposition to go right. Is that the only story that can be true?
Nope, even more basic than that it could be a dogs story – one day going down the stairs at a hotel I was struck by the fact that my dogs would go to the door jam on each successive floor landing and expect the door open on pattern, going to the left – but the door opened on the right in this particular hotel. How was this expectation built, maybe it’s the fact that all most all the doors the dog used at my house opened that way. Is it possible that the dog built an expectation based on thousands of times out the door? It took a while to story this expectation out, but ya know after 20 hours of driving back from a trial – I had some time to analyze all manner of random happenings.
Therefore, when I got home, I removed all the doors used by the dog and switched them to right opening so that I could break this pattern! It wasn’t really that big a deal to change. Choosing a preference in the dog – or training it out of the dog feels about that simple to me most of the time. Which is to say very difficult. Even if you are able to decide what you don’t want, the effort needed to train that outcome is not clear or easy and from the coaching perspective I’m not always sure the handler is even clear about what the thing is that they don’t want. Therefore I was back to the handler side – decisions made in the trial day search where the handler can be seen making a choice – dessert first let’s say; and the dog isn’t always onboard, like that waiter saying all you can have is T-bone steak – there is no cake on the menu today. Do you have that dog? Not everyone does, some teams the dog is happy to say oh you want dessert “I’m all for that” no problem.
So in nosework terms when I’m watching a team decision out a search, live or via video and the handler has told me they missed a hide at the threshold it's about the decision they made in context with how the dog’s expectations entered into that search. If the dog is drawn to some initial pivotal hide that fits into how they normally pattern in their searching then the decision on the handlers part is to remember to return to an area where the dog as either traditionally missed or didn't objectively search. It’s on me as the handler to know this about my dog’s pattern. Just as the dog’s expectations to go to the left door jam may have been built without your consent, the nosework understanding is built foundationally on discovering all the patterns in my dog. Is the hide at the threshold always within the control of training, yes but that doesn’t mean the training is about the dog’s training. The lens of that Gopro is not always wide enough to get the patterning of a team.
So if, what don’t you want is the missed threshold hide then how many stories can you weave; training thresholds patterns(dog expectation), returning to the threshold before being done(handler decision), directing the dog to clear each threshold(handlers dessert first), searching ahead of the start(handler decision), start line routine(for either dog/handler or both). I have my preferences, tendencies, and patterns – do you know yours or those of the trainers you work with training you? Which one or more of these menu items can you reliably execute? You are the one with the menu and the criticism for eating too much cake – in the nosework sense as well. I’m open to many options based on the team – but facts and data when I watch your video tells me which of your patterns are reliably being executed. If you tell me, you have been missing hides, calling false alerts, or any number of “problems” the dog has trouble with – is that the only story being told?
– I may just ask; What don’t you want?
