Barn Search: The Dog Sport Anyone Can Try – with Barn Dogs Australia

Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining: Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. And I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address. Otherwise, the vote does not count. Thank you.

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Dog Pod peeps, it is only I. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. Just a quick heads up that at the very start of the episode, the audio is a little bit Dodgy. It's the first time we had quite a lot of people all squeeze into the DogPod HQ, but I promise you the audio fixes itself. Uh, so my apologies, but I hope you enjoy the episode. It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence. Secretly, I decided to start this podcast for some free dog training advice. And Max O'Neill.

You would not believe how many people I meet and I go, what made you want to get Say an Aussie Shepherd. They go, I don't know. I go, had you met one before? They go, no.

Here's the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, he's friendly. My name is Jack Lawrence, and of course Max O'Neill from the Down Under Dog Trainer. Max, we're talking some dog sports.

Yeah.

So as you guys heard in the last episode, we've got a little mini series about getting into dog sports, and we've got some really, really cool guests lined up over the next few weeks to talk about various sports. With us today in studio, we've got Sam and Maddie from Barn Searching and Dock Diving, and they're going to talk to us a little bit about each of these sports. So today we're going to cover Barn Searching and learn all about what it is, why it's really cool, and how to get into it.

I'm fascinated by this one because I know, ladies, it's all to do with obviously scent work and my dog Kira. Oh, I think it is. I'm saying that like I'm a— I know what I'm talking about, but I think it's to do with scent work, the Barn Searching.

Yeah, scent work.

It is.

It does involve scent work. It also involves Like a prey drive and hunting as well.

Yes, that's my— it's got my dog written all over it.

To be fair, so many dogs that have come to us have done no scent work before, and they're so good at it. Yeah, because they see the rat go in the tube. We do put real rats in the tube in the beginning, and then we take them out.

They just don't hunt for the real rats. We'll just put that out there.

No, they don't hunt for the real rats, but that's why they want to find it. A lot of the time, even when they've not done scent work, they'll still find it.

So you get some dogs that see the visual Of the rat, and then they think that the rat's going to be in the tube. So they actually look for the tube purely for the fact that they think the rat's gone inside it.

That's really cool. So what is it? So what is, what is barn searching? So talk us through how you might set up, what it looks like, what competition, what the dogs do. Give us a bit of a rundown.

So there's practically a search area filled with hay, hidden tubes. In one of the hidden tubes, we have our fake decoy rat. The other tube will have bedding, and then there will be an empty tube with nothing in, and the dogs have to come into the search area and find the correct tube. That's the decoy rat.

Wow. So they're given like a command, whether that might be search or find it from their owners, whatever they've taught them.

Yeah, whichever word.

Nice. And then those dogs are going to go through and indicate on the correct one. So they're not just finding any tube. We're like, no, no, no, you've got to find the one with the target odour.

So what if I, uh, so obviously I come with my dog and we've never done anything like this before. The dog has never searched for anything. Like, do you guys help us work that out and how to sort of teach the dog to do that? Or do they need to come with some experience or have done it before?

It's actually really interesting. So one dog you might get come in and they've done nothing before and they kind of see the rat go into the tube and it's really cool. You'll see their hunt drive kick in and you can hide the tube anywhere in the area and the dog will go and find it without doing anything before. It just comes naturally to them. Right. And then you get some other dogs come in. And they won't do it at all. And then you have to obviously like go through the steps on showing them how to do it and like conditioning them with the tube and the smell, like, find it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's quite interesting if they haven't been in before.

Yeah.

And they aren't interested in the rat at all, because what you actually do is you can let them go over, sniff the tube. So you let them sniff the tube first of all. Move the tube slightly away, put it down on the ground, use your word, find it, search. Then they'll go off, sniff the tube, and then you give them the food reward. And if you put the food reward right down by the tube, if they're not doing it for the hunt of the rat, then they're doing it for the food.

Exactly. Form that association. Hey, rat equals food.

Most definitely. And then you just move the tube further and further away each time and put the tube in different places in the barn. And then they soon realise really quickly What they need to do is find the tube.

That's so cool.

It's really good.

And that's what, that's why I really like it getting into sport. Like I've done a bit of scent detection and whatnot first. And as you guys would know, when you start off teaching scent detection, you typically start with a scent that's not really that reinforcing for the dog. You might use something like linseed oil or something. A dog's like, what the fuck's that? Whereas what's really cool about the rat stuff is for a lot of dogs, it's almost very inherent and innate for them, or it's inherently self-reinforcing to chase that odor. They go, hey, there's this little part of the back of my brain that's been dormant. That's just been flicked on. And I know how to find a rat already. So that's one of those sports that's pretty easy to walk into. I know one of the girls that works for us, Michelle, does it with her dog Bella. Bella's like a 9 or 10-year-old Border Collie, hadn't done any of this before, and she's picked it up and she's like smashing it in trials. So it's one of those ones you really can just kind of walk into. And it's— whereas a lot of dog sports might seem inaccessible, a little bit tricky, this one's one of those ones actually pretty easy to pick up. And I know Jack and I were talking before this episode, we're like, damn, we really need to come up and do a trial both with Kira and Nelson.

Oh, I'd love to. I'd love to give it a go because, yeah, I mean, I do it just with Kira with her toys. Like, I'll just hide them around the house and make her find it, or with dinner. We sometimes do it with the dinner. I'll go, you know, find it, and she'll go find the dinner. So I would, I would be fascinated to see her do it in an actual—

Yeah, and that's the best thing to do to get started as well, is find it with the dinner and the food, because they already know what the word means. As soon as you tell them that, they know they're going to be searching for something. But some of the dogs come in and they don't like the smell of the rat at all, and they hate looking at the rat.

Just looking at it?

Yeah, they do.

That's disgusting.

They're actually so scared.

Can we, can we try and guess the breed that would hate the sight of a rat? Have you had a Pomeranian compete?

I don't think so. No, I don't think so.

Okay.

All right.

So what breeds have been repulsed by the sight of a rat? I'm really curious.

They're either like, get it away from me, or they absolutely love it and they're awesome at it.

Wow.

But they go for maybe like one session or two sessions scared of the rat.

Yeah.

And then they love the rat. Oh yeah, they do love it. So sometimes they start scared.

Yeah.

And then love it after a couple of sessions.

And you know, that's the lovely thing. It's persevering. To persevere with something because sometimes they're coming on the first go, they won't want to go and find that rat. They'd be too frightened to go and find the rat. It takes the second go, the third go, and then they're on fire.

And then they're onto it.

Absolutely love it.

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Okay, so that's, so that's how it works, is you get there, you hide the article, they've got to discriminate between the real tube and the fake tube. So on the day, on like an actual, like on a competition day or something, how do you sort of compete? Is it who can find it the fastest, or is it different age groups, or what does that look like out of interest? Because I actually don't know the answer to this either.

So there's lots of different levels. So you start off with an amateur ratter, and then what you have to do for that one—

I love that.

That's a nice little rhyme.

Amateur ratter.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to get myself an amateur ratter.

That's a t-shirt.

So then you have one rat to find. So you have 3 tubes hidden, one rat, one decoy, one empty.

Yeah.

You have to find the rat. You have to complete a tunnel. It's only like a really basic tunnel.

Nice.

And climb some bales, all 4 paws on a bale. That's your amateur ratter.

Yeah.

And the next one up from that.

So just to pause there. So with the amateur ratter, does that mean the tube's hidden up high and the dog has to actually go up and get it?

No, the tube will always be down on the ground. On that first level, the tube's always on the ground and they've got 2 minutes to find it.

Yeah.

So as long as they can find it in the 2 minutes, you've passed. Cool.

Yeah.

They have 3 goes, don't they?

Yeah.

Okay.

So it's like 3 rounds.

Yeah. So again, like qualifying round, not crazy amounts of pressure. Like you can A bit of basic training, you're pretty ready to go at this stage.

Yeah, definitely.

Okay, cool. And then from there, in terms of difficulty, do you have less time or does the hiding behind come harder or how does it progress from there?

All of it. So you've got more tubes.

Yeah.

You have to find 2 rats next. And I think it's intermediate ratter.

Yeah. And there's more decoys in there as well. Yeah, more decoys.

Much, many more decoys. Yeah. 2 rats. One's going to be up high, one's going to be low.

Yeah.

So each level it gets harder and harder and harder and you can— the decoy rats, A lot of the dogs can struggle with the decoy rats to begin with. You've got rat bedding, so you've got that little tiny piece of a rat smell. So they have to be able to determine which one is the rat bedding with that little tiny piece of smell.

And the more rats you get, the tireder the dogs will get towards the end, and then they just start tapping.

And that's what we always promoting on this show is like, people are always saying, you know, how do we, what else can I do with my dog? Well, how can I really tire them out? And we always say anything involving that nose, like scent work is just brilliant for exhausting We've got 3 Malinois.

3?

Yeah.

You know what they're like.

I'll do a crime podcast on you. Someone who owns 3 Malinois needs to be looked at.

You can throw a ball, as you would know, for 3 hours.

They don't tire.

They don't tire at all. You do barn search with them for half an hour, they're shattered. And that is the main difference. You're tiring out their mind. You know, you're not just trying to tire them out physically. It won't work. You have to tire them out mentally.

It's proper genetic fulfillment. And that's what we always say to people, because And I think that's really important because when we look at, you know, why, why you guys should be taking note of this and why you should consider giving it a crack is because that genetic fulfillment, as we know, is such a key piece in the behavior modification puzzle. So with dogs, their primary sensory processor for information is their nose. They take the most amount of information in. When they think of the beach, they don't think of the sound of the waves, the look of the sand, the feeling of the sand in the water anywhere near as much as they think of what does that salty sea air smell like. So when they use their primary sense of information in a constructive manner, it gases them. It's like us, like reading a book.

Interesting.

For us, it's our eyes. When I use my eyes like this and like doze off to bed reading a book, that's the same thing. Or when we're driving, concentrating on those white lines, boom, it puts us out. And that's what it's like for our dogs. And we see like detection dogs, right? If you go to an airport and watch those labs work, if your flight's delayed and go, let me watch that beautiful little sniffer dog work for a bit, 30 minutes, that thing's on its side tapped out and it's barely moved a muscle. It's just sitting there sniffing a few suitcases. So when we start to incorporate this with our dog, if you've got a dog who's a bit hyperactive, like Bloody Sam and Maddie over here with their 3 Malinois. Odor detection work is so good for them.

It's so important as well. You know, nowadays you get so many dogs living in apartments.

Yeah.

Living on the Gold Coast, they don't have enough room to be able to meet all their needs.

It's like the sausage dogs that come to us. You don't realize how much people don't do with them until you see how much they're capable of. And it's actually really sad to think you see the ones that Are in the handbags and do naughty things.

Yeah, they're just frustrated.

Yeah, what they can actually do, and they're probably the best ones at it.

So yeah, they have been so far. Yeah, awesome.

I love to hear that. And there's a reason you see so many of them and you just go, those dogs are jerks. It's because they are small dogs and people buy them thinking, I'll get myself a nice little small cute dog, I don't have to do much with it.

It's totally true.

And you're actually getting a killing machine, really. I mean, it's what they're bred for. I mean, it's like, you know, for badgers.

Yeah. So they're small but mighty.

Yeah, they're weapon dogs. One thing we always like to get across to listeners of the podcast and my clients in my business is there's such a strong relationship between natural behavior and unnatural behavior, right? So the worst examples we'll see this is maybe at some zoos. If you've ever been to a zoo overseas with pretty low ethical standards, you'll see monkeys that are cutting laps around the thing and weaving their head or bears that are nodding constantly because Because they're not getting to express natural behavior, we see lots of unnatural behaviors happen. Now, with our dogs over here, we don't see it as strongly because most of us give our dogs pretty good lives. But we do see a lot of that. Like I said, if you've got a dog who's been for hundreds of years selectively bred to be this little long hunting machine, and then next minute they're in an apartment carried around in a Louis Vuitton bag, the less natural behaviors they get to practice, the more unnatural ones we start to see. And we start to see this reactivity. And then same, if we're not letting a dog practice what they were designed to do, we see it misfire. That's why they bark at everything.

It's like, are you a badger?

You're not a badger. That's, that's why it's so important for you guys. You don't have to be this like crazy dog sport enthusiast to have a crack at barn searching, right? You can just go, you know what, I want, I want something cool to do with my dog. I'm sick of walking around the block for the 5,000th time. Let's do it. So with that being said, how do people get into it? If people want to find you or just the sport in general, how would you recommend that Jack and I get into it, for example? Because we're both actually legitimately keen.

Okay. We've got a Facebook page, Barn Dogs Australia Incorporated.

Yep.

We've got a webpage. The link is on the Facebook page as well.

So somebody listening to this right now, who, as I said before, like has never done anything like this with their dogs before, can they just come along?

Most definitely.

Completely no knowledge whatsoever. Someone with their sausage dog who wasn't a Louis Vuitton bag and they go, you know what? I feel bad. I want to get a little fluff fluff.

I want to get back to their little hunting roots.

Yeah.

I'm going to take them along. Let's go see what happens. There's a lot of guidance and obviously—

All you'd have to do is email us. We'd give you a time. Like to come and then we personalize each session to the person.

Nice, right, okay, perfect.

That's really cool.

Yeah, you might have, we can have up to 4 dogs in a session, but it does tire them out and no dog wants to be sniffing for an hour. So if it was a new person, obviously we kind of cut down on how many we had, but yeah, we just go at their pace.

So you'd start off with some training days and once you feel like you're at a level like, oh, my dog could be doing this for realsies, you might go to one of the weekend competitions or trials that are a lot of fun.

Hey, we hold trials every month or we try and try. Hold trials every month, don't we? But we hold training four times a week. Ah, so there's always a time and place.

Okay, cool.

I'm coming. Sign me up.

But so in America they call it barn hunt, and that's its own like you know registered trademark copyright things. We're not going to call it barn hunt. So in America it's obviously a big sport with multiple clubs and organizations. Now we've got listeners from across Australia and abroad. So if you're in a different part of Australia, weren't local to the Gold Coast, are there other clubs around that people can get involved in the sport with?

No, which is absolutely crazy. What we've actually started to do, we're trademarked now. Barn Search is trademarked. So we are looking for sanctioned facilities across Australia to do Barn Search. We are hoping that we've found one in Sydney. We're hoping we've found one in South Australia. We are spreading.

Well done, girls. That's awesome.

Much like COVID, just without all the negative side of it.

Definitely just the positive stuff.

But no, we are spreading.

Fantastic.

Well, if you're listening to this and that's something that interests you, hit up the girls, honestly, because like we said, like the more dog sports in Australia, just like kids, like we look at getting kids into sport and how good it is for them, is we want more clubs opening, especially ones that are so accessible, like barn searching, like dock diving. So if it's something that interests you, hit up the girls and we'll see what we can do. But if you are local to the Gold Coast, these two are just in Coomera. You'll definitely catch Jack and I there because we're 110 million percent keen to get into this with the dogs.

Thanks for Thank having us.

you.

We look forward to it.

All right. Well, yeah, any more information on that, obviously check out the girls' website and Facebook. And also you can hit up our Facebook as well, the Dog People Podcast. You've got any questions, we will get them answered for you. The Dog People Podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.

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