A detection-dog trainer explains why handlers accidentally sabotage their dogs by showing them the odor source too quickly. Dogs need to read air currents and find the source themselves. Over-assisting feels good now but cripples the dog's real-world skills.
Chapters
Couple things to think about, right? Why would she have any problems with that pond right there? Because, because the odor is probably swirling in that area? Yes, and that's a great answer. But she's a seasoned dog. Yeah. So why does she have problems with it? Because we never found no problem. Okay, absolutely right. Could be that, right? But at the end of the day, dogs are taught to read wind and air currents to find source of the odor, right? Yeah. So I would assume in past, what would have happened? She's had trouble with it. What do we do? Let me show them where— oh, it's at right? In our head, we think that's right, 100%, right? Oh, she needs to find it. Yeah, the problem is you never give her an opportunity to figure it out and how to read that current, that wind direction. So she turns all these circles because she hasn't fully understood how to read that current, right? Because predominantly you would have went, all right, let's go, and then I'd show her. You would have showed it to her, right? And that's a downfall to what we do a lot of times. But what we found in through experiences is if we allow this dog some difficulty in training, because it's training, and allow the dog to teach itself how to read those air currents in the real world, we're going to be much more reliable because that dog is going to be able to read that the next time in the real world. Does that make sense? I've seen this before, right? But then that confidence to know, yeah, that I can do it, right? But in the real world, we don't know. So where are you going to present? And then she's looking at you like, okay, show me where it's at, because that's what she's used to in training. But in the real world, you don't know that. So now you've limited the team because your training philosophies have hindered you more than helped you. I don't know why it is, but it's the hardest thing to teach handlers, to have a little bit of patience and just to sit back and allow that dog to work it out. Okay, what have you lost if they don't figure it out? Nothing. So then what do I do? I change the aid location and through successive approximation work to that more difficult find. But I don't show the dog where it is because that— the only thing that does is give us satisfaction. Oh shit, look at my dog, right? But it doesn't help the dog learn the wind and air currents and odor concentration it takes to get source. Really, it probably hurts them. It hinders them. Absolutely. Problem becomes there's two jobs that we have in this team, right? You and the dog. Dog's job is to identify the odors that it's been trained to, but also part of that job is to get to the AT, move to the DT, and move to source. But if the dog doesn't do that or doesn't know how to do it in a situation where we have odor swirling or whatever else is going on, Obviously she had difficulty with it, right? She kept tracing it into the car and all those. We never fully allow her to learn the full spectrum of it because we just want to step in and show them because we happen to know where it's at. But it doesn't accomplish anything in training. The only thing it accomplishes is that you get the satisfaction that your dog found it and you rewarded it. That's it. It doesn't teach the dog anything. And so detection training is not about finding odor all the time. It's about teaching dogs to increase their capabilities of finding odor. But if we hinder that and don't allow that to take full scope, then that dog will be limited in what its capabilities are. Because you start to get into more difficult finds and you're wondering why your dog is having trouble in the real world. Oh, they always find it in the, you know, in training. Yeah. But then you start thinking back into your training and how many times they actually found it or how many times you actually showed them where it was. And so we want to put more weight on the dog, right? We should come in to present areas when we're reading the environment, you know, and we're practicing those things where we are reading the environment, we're reading what the dog's giving us on single blinds or even double blind searches, where now we're trying to figure out what the dog is telling us by their behaviors. Then we go in and present those productive areas. But as a common practice with a detector dog, I would say stay away from it. Allow the dog to figure it out. And even if they fail, then that tells me I need to back up the aid a little bit and work towards that location versus showing them how to do it, because they don't learn anything. Okay, let me just follow this idiot real quick because that's what I'm supposed to do, and that's where I always find my alerts. Aah!
