Katya, a detection dog imported from Holland, learns to find a scent-laden ball paired with a search command. After a few days of imprinting, trainers hide the odor on walls and fences, rewarding her with a tennis ball instead so she doesn't eat the source. The goal is building independence and preparing her for real detection work.
Chapters
This is stage 1 right now. And what is stage 1 exactly? Just imprinting new odors. It's just allowing him to go out and play with the ball that's got the odor with it, allowing him to have fun. We're pairing it up with a command right now so that he understands. We give him his search command. He goes out, he finds it, it's all fun. It's not really work. You know, hunting dope, hunting explosives, or whatever you teach the dog to hunt, pretty much is hide and seek for a dog. So it's as much fun as you let it be. And that's what we're trying to teach him right now is when he hears that command, it's like a track runner hearing the starting pistol. It's time to go to work, it's time to have fun, it's time to enjoy your time. He's only been doing this a couple days. This is, like I say, a couple days into it, just starting out with his imprinting training. He is from Holland, as well as about 95% or more of our imports all come from Holland. Fitz is here actually doing his trainer school. This is just one of the dogs that he's billeted to work while he's here at trainer school. So he'll see everything from— he actually went down to the airport to pick this dog up along with a couple of the other new imports that he went to pick up, and he'll essentially see this dog from start to finish of his training. Oh man, you really can't get behind that thing.
You back up if you need to. Good boy, let go. Good boy.
We're actually seeing here he's taking her down there to break, but she is not. Once she saw us, once she sees the balls, all she wants to do is go to work. So she has a good association of this, she has a good association of what we're doing. We're just going to kind of see where she's at. And press it on from there.
Got her.
So we're kind of to a point now with her. She understands, you know, the moto action that we're trying to teach her with the command. She understands the basics of what we're trying to do, what the odor is, how to hunt for the odor. So what we're doing is actually moving her into the next phase where she actually has to go out and sniff objects looking for the odor ball.
Gotcha. Find it. Atta girl! Atta girl, Katya! That's a baby! Good girl!
Well, we just call it a high-pitched praise voice. What we're actually doing is associating a value to what she's doing. Now, the odor of marijuana, the odor of an explosive, the odor of any narcotic, they don't really mean anything to the dog naturally. They have the value we assign to it. So when they find this odor out here, we play with them, we hoot and holler, we make it a big deal because otherwise, why should they care?
Gotcha. Find it. Right now we're not going to contain it, allowing her to do it, allowing her to do it by herself.
The more independent that we can make her, the more we can make her want to do it by herself, the better off we are.
I'm just talking with her.
There you go. She offshoots it like that, holds it down, and turn her back into the area.
There's your change of behavior. That a girl! Gotcha! That's a baby! Good throw, good throw!
Up until this point, what she's actually been hunting has been odor balls. So she finds the odor, she can play with the odor because the odor is the ball. Now we're changing it up just a little bit. We're taking another step toward the realism. We'll come in here, we'll hide, actually hide the odor on this wall, or this fence rather. We'll come in, we'll allow her to go up to it, work the odor out on her own, sniff it, and when she sniffs it, we're going to pay her with a tennis ball. So everything we're doing is kind of just progressing toward the next phase. They have to know the odor so that you can go ahead and hide the that. They have to know the odor. Once they know the odor, they have to hunt for it. Once they're hunting for it, then we'll move into this and allow her to hunt on it but get paid with a secondary reward.
Watch out!
That a girl!
That's my baby! Gotcha! Find it!
What it actually is, she's used to playing with the odor. She associates the fun with the odor. So we'll get her on the tennis ball pretty much as quick as we can so that we don't run into her wanting to eat it later. Let's take that out completely.
Okay.
She's got— now just put it in your pocket. She's got that in her mind right now. Uh, that's why we're seeing she's wanting to play with it. She's played with the odor when she found it, so we need to assign a good value to that tennis ball. So when that ball hits, if she chase it, you go ahead and reel her in, get her down there, love her, play with her, you know, let it be a Gotcha.
Find it.
We're seeing good change in behavior. She's actually moving really, really quickly. We're seeing good change in behavior. She's hunting, obviously. Fantastic change on the wall. Because we don't, or we want to get her out of this eating it or wanting to go after it really quickly, we'll go ahead and move her to the wall where she doesn't have that option. We'll do, we'll run her on that next set.
