Establishing a Reward System

[oksaradt]

I decided to write about this because there are so many in the scent detection industry that swear by only one method. I have to wonder if Mr. Delee doesn't use this same technique.
The military and law enforcement (in general) swear by a technique that hinges on the dog having very high ball drive. Their method is based on putting tennis balls into containers with their scents of interest to saturate the balls. The dog with the high ball drive seeks out it's favorite toy and over time begins to associate getting the ball with these particular scents . This works just fine for cocaine, heroin, marijuana, ectasy, gunpowder, C4, etc. I've yet to see any of these scents (except for the clandestine pot fields in SE Oklahoma) occur naturally in the field. Soooooo, testing puppies to see which ones just go ape-kaka over heroin doesn't make much sense. Testing does make sense to find puppies that seek out the live scent of humans or the scent of death.

This said, many of the "for pay" instructors out in the dog world now come from the military and L.E. backgrounds. They teach what they know, the ball drive technique. They swear by it as...well, most of them don't know another way but the ARMY way (sorry Curt). The problem with this system is it's not uncommon for me to find puppies in testing with great ball drive that smack their lips distastefully and walk the other way when the scent of death hits their nose. Why is this a concern? Because there will be times when the dog decides that getting that tennis ball just isn't worth going out to find a scent it really doesn't like anyway. Such dogs are known to go through the motions to make the handler happy anyway as otherwise ....well as we learned form the Murrah Building bombing...the dog can work its ass off trying to find non-existent live victims, but if the handler doesn't reward them for the effort then they become confused and people explain this away as "the dogs were depressed at so much death..." Bull hockey, those dogs didn't know those victims from shinola.

So, with this in mind, I've always started with a dog that loves the scent I want it to find. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the demise of others, death happens and has happened since there was life. The decomposition process (the study of this is called Taphonomy) is part of nature as otherwise we'd have bodies lying about everywhere and there wouldn't be room for the living.

From Day One with Murphy, him becoming interested in the scents I need him to find has not been an issue, so much so that his world shrinks down upon him and the remains and he could care less about anything else, including me. As an HRD dog handler, I just have to believe I made a wise choice in puppy. My dilemma is how do I get him to include me in on the find. During the first weeks of training, we do what's called "Imprinting". We allow the dog to come upon a scent both he likes and I want him to like. He finds it, I show utter happiness in his response. His association with the scent sources becomes even more positive as "not only do I like this, but the guy that feeds me thinks it's great too. LIFE IS GOOD!" During imprinting, a lazy handler, such as myself, begins to watch if the puppy has a habitual response to his find. In Murphy's case this response is if I get all happy and excited, he puts a paw on the scent source. We call this a "TOUCH INDICATION" (or alert depending on what part of the country you are in). As this response becomes more regular, I know only reward with a happy response, toy, food, etc. when Murphy does his touch. For those dog trainers out there, this is akin to back chaining except I didn't have to teach the touch. With Tempe, I'd taught the down/sit/stay on the side and she chose to down at the scent, so I rewarded for that and backchained the behavior into (1) finding the scent source & (2) Telling me (giving me an indication) with a down near the source.
With Murphy, I'll eventually backchain more with a bark as well...but that's months down the road.

Soooooo, Murphy is finding the stuff and doing a touch fairly effortlessly. How do I get him to leave the stuff while still having a positive association? My dilemma is if I pull him away, I'm giving a mixed message with a passive negative reinforcement. Soooo, a reward system is required. Over the weeks I've experiimented with balls, tugs, food, and variations. With each of my dogs I go through toys till I find THE ONE and for the next year I give the "wannabe toys" away to other handlers. With both Dax and Tempe, their hunt (or food drive) was as high as their ball drive. It's the same with Murphy. So, I went back to my logs on both and read how I solved it. I used a device created by Kong called a "goodie ship" and/or "goodie ball". I don't like rewarding with food at my scent sources as I feel this often leads to contamination of the scent sources with the scent of the food, i.e. my bones will start smelling like hot dogs and the dogs will begin alerting/indicating on hot dogs rather than bones....not good.
For Murphy, I went through Pet Co (as Pet's Mart was a washout) and found a puppy size "goodie ship"....the goodie balls are fairly heavy as they are solid rubber with a food slot in the center. I filled this with pressed in hot dog and also put some lamb/rice chewies in my pocket. On Murphy's first find of some teeth down in some rocks, I rolled the goodie ship past his eyes and his prey/ball drive took over and as the scent of hot dog filled his nose, his acceleration went up. As Murphy had an established high ball drive already, once he decided he really couldn't get the hot dog out of the ship, he brought it to me for another roll. At that point I trade him the goodie ship for a small chewie, i.e. he got a paycheck....this is also called a secondary reinforcer for the ball/reward system. Murphy's eye's lit up. We found two more sets of teeth and his interest went up more with each find. I was lazy and didn't pick the teeth up till this morning, so when I took him out last night to potty, he raced over to where he'd found the teeth and found them again...I praised him and fortunately had a food treat and gave him that as I picked him up, petting him and treating him as I moved away from the scent source (so as not to contaminate it).
Dax got to work these teeth problems as well, but she had to find all three before I let her have her old goodie ball filled with treats. She promptly took it over to a tree and cleaned it out.

so, my next milestone is crossed. Murphy has now defined what reward will cause him to find the scent sources I pay him for and the reward is sufficient enough that he'll leave his "kill" to me in trade. I can use the goodie ship (unloaded except for the scent of food) till the end and then load it up with food as the end reward, putting him up to enjoy cleaning his toy of all it's food. He's happy with the reward, my scent sources stay pristine except for what nature does to them, and my dog includes me in on the hunt.


Regards,

Jim Delbridge

[Maverick]

Great stuff as always!

Thanks, Pete

[blue]

Old Navy, Curt White, sent this to me a couple of days ago and (tho it is against my policy to validate such nonsense) I felt I would clarify some of the rather obvious "misconceptions" contained herein.

I decided to write about this because there are so many in the scent detection industry that swear by only one method. I have to wonder if Mr. Delee doesn't use this same technique.
The military and law enforcement (in general) swear by a technique that hinges on the dog having very high ball drive. Their method is based on putting tennis balls into containers with their scents of interest to saturate the balls.

This is so patently absurd I have to wonder what Debridge has been smoking. I have been training scent detection for 15 years and have been privileged to train with some of the best anywhere, including the pros from Lackland and the LE luminaries around the US. I have never seen anyone but the amateur and novice use tennis balls in training ANY facet of scent detection.
The reason is that tennis balls are too obvious in the environment. Think of it like this : a NDD Team is searching a school for narc and the tennis ball trained dog hits on a locker, the subsequent investigation reveals ... tennis balls. That team just lost it's credibility with the school admin, LE in general and the agency the team represents now has a BIG problem. So who exactly is Debridge referring to here? I don't have a clue.

This said, many of the "for pay" instructors out in the dog world now come from the military and L.E. backgrounds. They teach what they know, the ball drive technique. They swear by it as...well, most of them don't know another way but the ARMY way (sorry Curt).

This is, again, more nonsense. The ball drive technique is one of about a dozen different techniques that competent scent detection trainers use. The fact is that most of the guys and gals who present educational seminars are pros at what they do. The people attending the seminar are there to learn or solve a problem. It is like a health clinic that only is capable of offering an antibiotic regimen to the sick. It may cure certain infections but would certainly not have an impact on a virus or a cancer patient.
So Debridge, perhaps if occasionally left Oklahoma you might get some better info.

So, with this in mind, I've always started with a dog that loves the scent I want it to find

I love this quote...look at it closely and think about this: What is a dog but a predator AND a scavenger? As a scavenger, the dog goes after dead scent for a variety of damn good reasons. First, dead stuff is an easy meal which presents no danger to a hunting predator. Second, the odor of death is a foil to other prey animals which know the dead don't hunt. Third, it is a masking scent in the environment. But yet Debridge wants you to think that he has some "secret" or "magic" way of determining that a very young puppy has an innate preference for the odor of human remains that is distinct from it's innate interest in dead things as easy meals. I would love to watch his theory subjected to the skeptical standard of scientific observation. I think the average reader can draw the obvious conclusion here.

I could go on and on in this vein but I won't. I just want to point out a few facts about some of the ideas Debridge has been presenting.
First, there is no scientific evidence to support a positive correlation between any known puppy test and later adult behavior or proclivity to exhibit a chosen working behavior. (I am not referring to retrieving for Labs or herding for Malinois, but work as a PSD or MWD) dhis was proven at the Swedish Working Dog Center in a blind test on data collected on dogs bred, raised and trained there. There was not even a correlation between the puppy test and the success of that puppy as an adult working dog. Puppy test seem to be accurate as predictors of noise shyness, but little else. For a fact, neither DoD nor TSA, which both have breeding and puppy programs, rely on ANY puppy testing procedures currently in vogue. The idea of puppy testing started in 1924 in Vevey, Switzerland. There a wealthy lady named Mrs Harrison Eustis began a "super dog" project involving the breeding of GSD to produce the ultimate working dogs. The project was called Fortunate Fields after Mrs Eustis farm. Since that time, dozens of researchers have attempted to devise an accurate "puppy aptitude test" which will predict that animals aptitude for work as an adult. Success is probably due, in some programs like Guide Dogs for the Blind, to the fact that virtually all these tests are conducted on animals which are the product of assortative matches.
Second, Debridge has some confused ideas about the application of reward training and the precepts which underly it. Chaining is the term used to describe the process whereby a secondary reward is used to create a new secondary reward. This could have several reasons: trainer convenience, less obvious or prominent to the public in demo situations and others. "Back chaining" not only sounds redundant but is not part of any literature I have seen (which of course does not mean it is not valid, just that I have never heard of it). So I asked a dog training friend at The Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio if he had ever heard of it being used and what it meant.
He had never heard of it either so "Back Chaining" is a wild card too.
Third, "touch indicator" sounds like an aggressive alert to me.
Fourth, I really have to question the wisdom of teaching a working Victim Recovery Dog that it is OK to eat on the job. Imagine if you will that a dog trained this way is on the job and while it is searching for the victim, one Fred B Dead, the dog locates Fred ahead of its handler. It has been a long day and the dog is tired and hungry. When the handler arrives, there is a Debridge trained HRD snacking on Fred....Using bone and teeth as training aids is good, but what about decomposing soft tissue? I doubt it produces a scent cone similar to dead bone or teeth. It is known that the human body smells differently at different locations. Due to the types of glands and the concentrations of various constituents of the sebum, the crook of the arm smells differently than the back of the calf to a dog. Entrails and the various constituents therein are known by physician/surgeons to smell differently so shouldn't it follow that those same differences would apply to K9 olfaction? How about muscle tissue...?
Fourth, There seems to be a distinction in Debridge's mind between an object as a chosen reward and an activity as a self reward. His musings and wonderings on my training methodology notwithstanding, Debridge has obviously a different set of goals than I do in training a scent detection dog. My ultimate goal is for the dog to view the WORK we have trained to perform IS THE REWARD. I don't know what he is attempting to accomplish in his "training".
Finally, and this is the second best joke in this thread, Debridge worries that a food reward scent is going to "contaminate" his training aid. Think about it this way...(there is no such thing as a pristine scent except at source and the farther away from source scent travels the more "contaminated"[diluted actually] it becomes), by definition scent is the product of an ongoing process of deterioration into the environment. For an object to take on the odor of another substance in the immediate vicinity, both substances would have to be enclosed in a negative pressure environment, like a sealed jar or box. Then the substances which was most volatile in it's deterioration would be more likely to infuse the other substance. The volatility of hard substances, like teeth or bone, is almost always less than soft substances like weenies, so if you put a weenie and a bone in a jar, the weenie may be likely to infuse the bone. But, if the two substances are in the open atmosphere, then the high volatility of the weenie is going to be influenced by the temperature, the velocity and constancy of the moving air and humidity. In that case, Debridge's training aid is just as likely to be "contaminated" by the puppy's breath or his own bath soap or deodorant as the weenie odor; and, as the hard training aid is in the exposed environment it is just as likely that heat, moving air and the sun's rays will scrub the soft scent off of it as "contaminate" it.

I trust that this will clarify some of the nonsense that the reader has been subjected to in this latest "training" installment. In the future, if anyone wants to know something about me or my training methodology, I suggest you contact me and avoid the fantasy and whimsy.
Good Luck and Good Training

[hicntry]

I am curious Michael, why does Jim have dogs that are called out to locate and your's what.... ride around in the car with you? I think the proof is in the puddin here. There are those that train and get to use their dogs, then those that train and just get to talk about it.

[Admin]

Ya gotta love when they Slide in and think Nobody Knows anything But them. welcome Back Micheal .Heres a thought instead of the mascerade Use your real name.

[hicntry]

Which name you want him to use...Michael DeLee, Sirius Canine, Jarhead, or maybe the fictitious Farley Johnson the pig hunter that Michael just happen to locate two of the greatest hog dogs for. After that charade I wouldn't use my own name either.

[oksaradt]

I started replying to Mr. Delee's idiotic diatribe point by point. It was sad to see him prove himself so uneducated about dogs when he likes to strut around like THE EXPERT. I guess he convinced one lawyer in Texas and felt that was all it took.
Let's see, names that use the ball drive and swear by it: Renee Utley, past president of the NNDDA and swears that she trains and certifies dogs for many federal agencies....in many ways she reminds me of some other self-proclaimed experts, but at least she got herself voted in my other law enforcement. She's from Port Arthur way....hmmm, another south Texan...you could look her up. Maybe she could give you some pointers. Jonni Joyce, been working bomb and narc dogs for law enforcment for over 20 years and now makes a living training other dogs, she loves ball drive as her way of starting dogs on scent. When I critiqued the tennis ball imprinting method on a forensic dog list, I got others who stated they'd been in law enforcement for years and swore by this, learned it in the military. That doesn't mean the military hasn't moved on to whatever some officer has decided was the way....It is the ARMY WAY for a reason. My dad, a paratrooper from WWII times was always fond of telling me, "there's the wrong way, the right way, and then there's the ARMY way." I guess it tarnished their rep in my eyes.

I don't care for tennis ball training, but I do know enough to realize it's very popular with the narc dog groups. I do believe they have "proofing off the scent of tennis balls" down, so we can breath easier that the locker rooms of the world are safe from false hits except from novice dog handlers. But......surely, you being the big expert in narcotics dogs and all....you'd be versed in this method whether you use it or not....No?....ahhh well, it is comfortable being the big fish in a vewwy small pond. Curt's there at least, you have at least one fan and your buddies that you consult as the experts.

That Mr. Delee has never heard of "back chaining" just demonstrates to me how small his world of dog training is. I did a simple search on Google for "back chaining" and "dog training". Darned if I didn't get 1320 hits. Considering I learned this simplistic method over 2 decades ago and it's still used today to build a procedure out of stacked trained behaviors strikes me as odd that a renowned (perhaps in his own mind) dog trainer of scent dogs hasn't come across it nor his other experts. Guess they live in their happy small world. Me, I try to learn what everyone is doing whether I agree with it or not....I get asked to fix such problems from time to time, so it's better I have a glimmer of an idea of what they are attempting to do. But, I'm just a journeyman at this with working dogs that I actually handle in searches. I don't profess to breed stock to sell to the DOD at 12 to 36 months of age to let someone else train and then brag on their handling skills.

I don't believe I ever sold puppy testing as THE WAY. It works for me. It works for other dog handlers I work with. I never declared it as the way. I suggested it as a way for dog handlers to get a dog they knew had the right stuff in the beginning. It's up to the handler to either make the dog shine or make it suck after that.


I do appreciate the post though Michael. You might delete it though. If this one gets out to the dog world it will definitely demonstrate how small your world is.

Whenever I think of you Michael, I still see that French Counter-Terroism movie you almost wet yourself over. The Mals were racing into gunfire with blank bullets. They were so hyped up on bitting a decoy that their handlers had to wear steel mesh gloves as their own dogs would bite their handlers in their frenzy. I recall you wanted this for ADTs. I'm all for dogs in protection work as I believe that's about control, not creating "land sharks" that get shot by their own officers at times as the dog doesn't distinquish who it bites. Doesn't appear like you've moved past that point at all.

But, keep on posting. You are your own worst enemy.


Regards,

Jim

[blue]

What I fail to comprehend is why you keep attempting to stick your thumb in my eye on these public boards. This post like your NAWATA post, to which I couldn't respond, was derisive in both motivation and presentation. I suppose that in your quest for guruship you don't think it wrong to maliciously gossip about others especially if you don't know them.
Rene Utley is a case in point...you obviously don't know Rene. She is a career LE professional with thousands of hours of training experience and is a very competent trainer and handler. She has retired from the Jefferson County Sheriff's office and now works for the Port of Beaumont in security handling detection dogs. Those are the facts; but yet you feel comfortable with disrespecting her and her career/contribution to her community and her country. I do know Rene and she is a fine lady and dedicated public servant.
I don't know Ms Joyce.
You keep mentioning the Army in relation to MWD and training...here is a newsflash for you. The DoD established the US Air Force as the branch in charge of training MWD almost 50 years ago. The other services do train MWD but under the US AF protocols and the dogs are supplied by the US AF. I also think it pertinent that in quest for guruship you seem to think that you have the ability to do what the DoD has not been able to accomplish with all their money and personnel.
They supply dogs to the FBI, the Secret Service and dozens of other agencies as well as State Gov'ts. They will even train police handlers on request without charge. But you cannot say anything positive about any of the DoD member services or the folks or the dogs they train. Why is that?
Twenty years ago you learned about back chaining? Good for you and good for google, too. Of course if it can be located on google, it has to be true (or at least valid). Stacked trained behaviors? Don't you really mean succesive approximations? One of the things I've learned about the guru wannabes is that they usually give some bizarre twist to accepted terminology.
I guess it sounds better to them and keeps the novices intrigued.
Back to puppy testing....how can you expect any reasonable individual with an even rudiamentary knowledge of dogs to believe that you have discovered something "that works for me" that some of the finest scientific minds of the past 80 years have been unable to validate?
And then you bring up the French SEDCE (sp) antiterror dog training tape....I thought it an interesting demo of what scenarios they were training for and yes it was very demanding. Like a lot of people you missed some crucial points which were implied by that tape. The most obvious is that a trained dog can press a bad man by attacking him and relieve his handler from being THE target. The reality is that it is always going to be more desirable for the handler to go home to his family at the end of the day than it is for the dog to return to it's kennel at the end of the day. I posted the video as an item of interest. At no point did I advocate that Airedales be trained to do that job. And the bunny hugging attitude that dogs shouldn't ever bite their handlers....It is not the preferred response...It does happen....If you take your dog to a gun fight he had best be a very bad dog ... And how do you know that the dog who bit the good guy was actually biting his handler? Frenzy? I saw a bite resulting from the frustration of being called off before the dog had a chance to "satisfy" his desire to end the fight.
Since you like to denigrate any and everyone (regardless of their education, expertise or skill)
why don't you give the reader a short synopsis of your training mentor? Do you talk with her often? Or just when you go and visit her at the Federal Pen? She is the only dog handler trainer I know of who turned criminal in the course of her dog training work. She got what 15 years for planting cadaver evidence in murder cases? That si your background and a very exalted position from which to pot shot others. I am impressed!

Finally, I will make this observation about you and your "response"...
it is called Benford's Law of Controversy: which states that the amount of emotion or passion interjected into an issue are inversely proportional to the amount of factual information advanced. Thanks for showing us "your" way.

[blue]

Don Don Don
How do you know, for a fact, that Debridge has ever been called out?
How do you know, for a fact, that me or my dogs have never been requested for a search? Obviously, you don't. But a niggling little thing like accuracy or factual information shouldn't ever inhibit you from expressing your intense dislike for me. You never even mentioned the substance or any point in the above posts by either myself or Debridge. You just pot shot me with this innanity. Shows a lot of class...and is so very effective in promoting working
Airedale Terriers. I applaud you.

The other comment by Admin is of the same ilk.. a lot of class. What difference does it make to you who I post as? You two seem to be more interested in promoting the fantasy and whim of some folks (including yourselves) than what is accurate or factual. If you want to meet Farley Johnson, come on down for the hog hunt ... I do believe he can show you some good hunting Airedales.

[oksaradt]

Michael,
You do spin a good pile of horse puckey.

While mentioning Renee and saying she has bona fides, not once did you state of her preferred method of imprinting with tennis balls and relying on ball drive.....more smoke.

Look up Jonni Joyce, she's high up in the IPWDA...oh, sorry, you appear to be web-handicapped. That's International Police Working Dog Association. Hits on Google does not make a training method credible, but it does mean it has been heard of. I believe your smart ass remark was that neither you nor your expert buddy have ever heard of it. The concept has been around longer than Koehler. I use some of his concepts to. I don't hang dogs, but I do take the good techniques he wrote about and apply them to what I do.

Hmmm, why would I slander your fine name on the odd occassion.....since you can't defend yourself on the NAWATA list. I suppose like Curt, you whine about getting tossed off the list. Me, I've been tossed off many lists. Such is life, you move on, quit bitching. At the time I do recall you posted that anyone could train a dog to "find fred." Tit for tat, big boy. Narc dogs train a max of 10 scents, most 4 to 6.

Show us how good you really are and train an HRD dog that can locate/work 1 day old to 35 years dead remains in a real life setting, not like Renee's scattered skeletal remains in a 10 foot circle with animal bones mixed in. You said it was easy. I have a very long memory. Come work the swamps or burned out buildings. Heck, come take a boat ride with me and locate a drowning victim, water work is the easiest to do. How hard can it be....as you say.

I have fun with you Michael because you leave yourself open for it. I have no aspirations of being the expert. I'm happy just to work my dogs. I don't seek out students. I'm happy to share with others what I've picked up on what works for me.

As for dog studies on puppy testing, I've yet to see a valid behavior study on dogs with the population required to get valid data. I test puppies because of breeders that tell perspective owners their dog can do SAR when they rarely have a clue. I took what was already developed by others and tailored it for my needs. This doesn't make me an expert. It simply makes me a smart shopper. The DOD circuments this by waiting until the dog is adolescent or mature and performing their own tests. I can't waste 12 months of training when it takes 2-3 years to get dogs that reliably search for what I ask of them in a variation of environments thrown at us by law enforcement. Not many dogs can find a single tooth in a gravel drive or dried blood under wood trim in an entire house. Most dogs don't have the focus to perform a fine grid search unless they have the obsession for the scent.


As for your misconception that I have any aspirations to being a guru...oi vey...what have you been smoking? I was asked to do these posts. I warned Don that I don't hold back with MY OPINIONS. Anything on these posts have been my opinions. I watched a video of your narc puppy demo, in my opinion...lacking, but it made the Airedale people impressed.
I'm not the one trying to sell myself as the expert. You so often seem to be fulfilling this role. I have issues with those trying to sell themselves as experts in a field that's been reinvented hundreds of times since dogs and humans came together. I'm still waiting for your books to come out. I look for them. I guess you couldn't find a decent publisher.
The dog world is full of so-called experts willing to enjoy the acolades of others. I just want to work my dogs and not have to deal with the misrepresentations of others in the process.

I suppose others might be embarrassed when Sandra Anderson comes up. I've never make it secret that I trained with her in the past. I've trained with lots of dog trainers and dog handler trainers. Sande taught a good method, but had no ethics. She got caught and rightly so. Those that felt her way was the only way have gone by the wayside. Those that took the good from her methods and added it to the other plums they've picked up from other trainers and continue to get better. Sande picked dogs by their cute value, so I guess your theory sort of blows chunks there. While training with her I also trained with Shirley Hammond, Adela Morris, Bill Dotson, shall I go on. I have lots of names. One of the dog handlers that I trained with just had his dog named 2007 dog of the year. I mentored him for a year, but he and his dog get all the credit. We simply swapped training ideas. He definitely deserves all the credit. Your dogs work Katrina?

I'll continue to use you as a poor example when the whim hits me Michael. I can always rely upon Curt to let you know about it as well. I have no fear of your responses. I remind my those handlers I work with on a regular basis to never put me on a pedestal as I saw too many people do that with Sande. Even then I just wanted to work dogs and make my dogs the best at what they do. I guess that gave me a coating of teflon.

I will be truly impressed Michael if YOU could get Gator and Curt their Schutzhund protection title that he just so dearly wants. How tough can it be, it's only tug-of-war and hide-n-seek. It's not for me. I'll stick with finding fred, thank you very much.


been fun,

Jim