Interest vs Alert

[oksaradt]

Most of the experienced handlers I've had the benefit of comparing notes with all (as I) detest the phrase, "My dog had interest." We don't like it because it's not definitive. Some handlers use it as an excuse when their dog exhibited scent behavior towards a location, but didn't commit to either it was human remains or it wasn't. I decided to wade into this debacle because there seems to be a sufficient number of dog teams out there that dabble in human remains without having a trained alert or indication. These terms flip back and forth depending on whether you are in one part of the country or another, so I used them at the same time.

For me, an alert/indication is a trained behavior response triggered by my desired stimulus, i.e. the presence of human remains. Murphy's natural indication is a touch. When he's located scent, he invariably will touch a paw to the location he has decided the source is at. As I can't see this touch if he's head-deep in poison ivy, I've also got a trained indication, the bark. If Murphy can see me, this often comes out like a chuf. If he can't see me, this comes out as a full bark. He's consistently unique, so I accept it as it is. The key is CONSISTENT. Once I get closer, I can ask for a "touch" or a "show me" and he'll do the touch again. If I think he's unsure, I might ask for a "check", and he'll put his nose around to make sure then repeat the touch in his location of choice, his judgement as to where the strongest scent is(in the case of buried).


NOTE: If you ask your dog to check on a real search then you better do it in training. You better do it in training when you know he's right, when you know he's wrong, and when you just don't know. You don't always ask for it, but asking the dog to check can not be allowed to become a cue in itself to alert or to leave a source...... oh, and please, don't nag your dog by constantly going, "check check check" as you cover an area. If the dog doesn't know it's job, it shouldn't be there. Nagging isn't going to help. END OF NOTE.


This trained response can be read by all. Once an officer knows what my dog does, it's as readily apparent to the officer as it is to me. If any officer goes on more than one search with me and my dogs, they know what a find looks like as it is always the same. I take it as the highest form of compliment if an officer gets excited and tells me that my dog just made a find like I didn't know it myself.

So, what's the deal with Interest, Jim?

There appears to be a lot of handlers under the misconception that they can get away with simply reading their dog's scent behavior, i.e. the dog smells somthing, this scent draws its attention into it....it must be HRs! Must it?
While the perfect dog will totally ignore the dead critter, the McDonalds hamburger, the deer bone, etc., on the long searches, they (like most of us) are happy to come upon anything unusual. If my dog exhibits interest, yea, I'll watch him to see what happens, but if he checks it and moves on then I must have confidence in the countless training sessions we've done to convince him to produce a trained indication on HRs and to move on for anything else.

Too many handlers watch their dog on a search exhibit interest and their response is "whatcha got? whatcha got boy?!" Their vocal tone goes up and the dog suddenly wonders, "is this what he wants me to find?" It's been hours, I'll make him happy and agree with him.

But, the worst case is where the handler is under the egotistical belief that they can tell the difference in their dog's posture if its human remains or if it's not. They make the call simply off the dog's body language. They don't bother with backchaining in an indication/alert with a scent stimulus; Thus, the dog may have made a valid find, but without any consistent communciation tool to let the handler know they often just move on. So, we hear later, "yeaaaa, my dog had interest in that spot. Guess it just wasn't to be." I'm more concerned with the HRs that never get found because the authorities believe in full honesty that they ran "cadaver dogs" through the area and they didn't find anything, so it must be clear.


The solution is again the handlers have to subject themselves to routine blinds to build confidence in their dog's abilities to make the right call when it comes across the acceptable scent stimulus. The handler has to build that solid alert/indication that the dog performs without thinking once all the tumblers in its head come up "DEAD HUMAN! I WON THE LOTTERY!" The dog should know it's going to get rewarded and be bouncing up and down with excitement, "pay me! pay me! pay me right now!"
Now on a real search, we often have to pay the dog with a "good dog, keep searching" as we flag it and move on. We'll move the dog in from another direction and see what happens. We'll call another dog in and tell the handler, could you run over this area? You don't tell the other handler that you have a find as you want them to work the area objectively. You want to see if their dog comes up Jackpot. And, you only trust their dog because YOU KNOW it has a solid alert/indication as well that everyone can read.

So, if a handler tells me their dog had interest in a spot, I'll often ask them, "So, was it human remains or not?" If they can't tell me, then they didn't do their job to it's fullest extent. They didn't fully train their dog. They don't trust their dog....


And, if I'm with a handler that places a flag without their dog doing something definitive.....I just don't trust the dog team after that.



Regards,

Jim

[terrierlvr]

Jim, couldn't let this one go without a response.
You know my boy. He's going down the right road. After we left the seminar, we did a variety of blinds. Terrain wise, one of the easiest ( for ME) was outside of Memphis. It was at a state park in about a half acre, minimal vegatation. Rick placed five sources in the area. In the middle of the field, at the bottom of a small slope, Porter immediately focused his attention. At the bottom was a rather large collection of thick clover. I "immedately felt" there was something there so.......stupid me, I lingered in that area instead CONTINUALLY MOVING. Porter false alerted. Kind of blew me away. After we moved on, he found all five, but it really took me back a bit. How could something so, apparently, easy could be mistaken? It was not Porter. It was ME.
So, this leads me to my question.........what problems could be triggered by asking the dog to "show me" or "check it" if there really is nothing there? Doesn't that reinforce a negative find, in this case?
Not only have I learned to tie my hands behind my back ( started doing that, figurately, a long time ago) I now need to put my marching boots on to KEEP MOVING and not linger. It creates anxiety, apprehension, frustration, and all other negative responses. Bad handler. Bonnie

[oksaradt]

Hey Bonnie,
Porter is a great dog. Let me get this out now instead of later, (bad handler....bad bad handler....ok, consider yourself chastised). You learned a great lesson though, better in training than on a real search. I guarantee you that this temptation is exponentially increased on real searches.

Soooo, how do we handler-proof our dog? (The handler is the biggest weakness any dog has)

In a nutshell, I purposely do all the bad habits in negatives on a varying basis. I set my dog up. I teach my dog to truly know that I am a scent moron. If the dog succumbs to my pausing and guesses, he gets a Jeapordy Game Show Buzzer and a "Let's work". Once I trust him in a blank negative then I'll start loading up all those temptations such as the dead racoon, deer bones, turtle shells, road kill, mummified gopher, rotten food, on and on. Don't forget to put this in your logs because you've just documented that you can cause your dog to false alert, so you must also put in a plan and the following results for fixing this.
As you got to see with Murphy, I create anal dogs that just have to be sure about their finds because they know that Jim is a vewwy evil evil human that plays dirty....and they do so want the ball.

Remember to do this problem solving in knowns before you ask (yes, you must later ask for it) to have such situations in blinds. Because in blinds are when all your bad habits will come out AND those protect us all from our bad habits on searches.

Oh yea, once you feel confident with the loaded negatives then they go into the blinds with sources. As I recall when I set up the Distraction Hell, almost every dog did great on three correct finds, but when they were searching for that last source is when the handler and the dog began stressing and guessing. The more we do this in training, the less guessing that goes on in real searches and the victim wins.


Great question Bonnie!


Regards,

Jim

[ed]

I don't do SAR but this interesting to me. Some similarities to finding and alerting "articles" for sport tracking. Since I hunt him quite a bit in birds and they are so much more interesting than articles its always an issue.

[oksaradt]

This is a great example of the conflict between hunt(scent) drive and prey(visual) drive. I'm assuming the tracking is like that in Schutshund where the dog is on a longline, finds an article, and is expected to alert(from what I've watched it was a down) next to the article.
Being an evil handler with the luxury of a long-line, I'd set the dog up with a helper. Using radios with ear pieces helps a lot. You could cue the helper to throw/roll/bounce a tennis ball past your working dog such that your timing of a correction via the lead would be just as your dog is visually stimulated. With most dogs, if the head turns or the legs engage, the correction is too late. When the dog stays on task, you could then praise it verbally and repeat the scent command once to remind it of it's task.
Consistently responding to the dog this way with similar stimulus will convince the dog that it's more important and more rewarding to stay on task.
Of course, this implies the dog's reward for the proper action is entertaining enough for the dog to pass on the other stimulation...........(dog's mind: bird...."good dawg"....bird...."good dawg"......BIRdddd.....*sigh* "good dawg"....) If the reward really flips the dog switch then the association should go the other way.


Regards,

Jim

[ed]

Great ideas Jim! It is Schutzhund tracking now called VPG tracking
At the start responds to "Find" vs "Hunt". Even when VPG tracked on a long line which requires a deep nose he will air scent which is when things begin to unravel and the Hunt is taking over. Almost always then looks back after a repeat find command with a "DO I have to" Thanks regarding distraction ideas. Ed

[Summit Forge]

Very interesting analysis of the conundrums one encounters when one wants the dog to perform multiple tasks that ideally require the dog to change his standard operating procedures, ie, air scenting versus nose on the ground (deep nose). These issues routinely pop up, if one is trying to train the dog to be a versatile hunting dog. Efficient bird work requires air scenting; efficient trailing of coon scent is primarily a nose to the ground, if the scent is not real fresh; and efficient retrieving requires the dog to forget his nose and believe his eyes to be able mark the bird and then resort to the air and ground for a precise location of the bird. Luckily, the alert in these situations is much more obvious in comparison to finding human remains but one still must train with distractions of various sorts or your dog will not be able to retrieve the mark, flush the bird or bark treed. Very interesting and challenging.

Another reality is that most dogs do not have the equipment in equal measures to do these multiple tasks. So, one must first realize the dogs strengths and weaknesses and work through and sometimes around the dogs genetics. A good example: My boy Forge had such a wonderful nose, intelligence and desire to hunt compared to his sighting ability that he finally after much training and my wringing of hands, he "allowed me" to handle him to marks.

Ron

[oksaradt]

Ron,
This is why I try to hedge my bet by selecting a puppy up front that tests high for hunt drive obsessed with human remains and a low prey drive. The end goal being that when my dog is on the scent of a clandestine grave, the rabbit that races past it won't cause it to drop everything to enjoy the chase.

Jim

[terrierlvr]

<< The end goal being that when my dog is on the scent of a clandestine grave, the rabbit that races past it won't cause it to drop everything to enjoy the chase.>>

I am pulling my head out of my derriere and getting back to BUSINESS. Worked a couple of times this week, and more to come. Tonight, I met with a couple of others within the group to work just HRD. It was by water, rather open area, pretty warm ( too warm for HHRD) and some new sources Porter has not sniffed before. There were two sets of blinds ( one with five sources, the other with two) and then one set of five sources I set up.....two of them buried. Porter pretty much aced the ones I set up, although the EASIEST find ( in my mind) was the HARDEST for him. HOWEVER.......I was MIGHTY proud and happy to see him blow off MANY little hopping bunny wabbits around.......I simply told him "leave it" and leave it, he did. AIN'T NO TERRIER! We DO know THAT!
I'm getting my working hat back on, FINALLY.

[oksaradt]

Bonnie said:
"Porter pretty much aced the ones I set up, although the EASIEST find ( in my mind) was the HARDEST for him. "


So, the way you become a better HRD handler is to use circumstances as you just described. I'm happy to see you are setting up problems with the idea that you have a good estimate where scent will travel and how the dog will pick it up. That's the only way to improve your understanding of scent travel. Soooo many handlers just toss stuff out there or the other extreme, try to see how evil a game of hide-n-seek they can create. They then often create crutches for the dog if the result isn't as they expect (or they don't want to get embarrassed in front of other handlers).

By setting up problems with planned increased difficulty in one venue, such as source type, and then easing up environment and complexity, we build the dog's skill levels. When Dax was working, there were problems where I knew the younger dog's nose was better, but I would apply Dax because I knew her problem solving abilities were much higher. Working blinds with a handler I'd just met a few years back, she set up a single tooth in mud problem. I just turned to Dax and said, "oh my Dax, it's a booger problem, suuk suuk." Dax went into her own 2-foot wide gridding pattern and located the tooth. Murphy is no where near this focus- or skill-level yet such that if I need to work a similar problem, much more control on my part would be required.

Anyway, off that tangent......
The main point I wanted to touch on is that you need to determine why you thought the "EASY" problem was easy and why it turned out to be "Difficult" for Porter. What environmental factors did you utilize to make an easy problem? Had they changed since you set it up? If the problem was a surface problem, could the air versus ground temperature difference be affecting scent diffusion rates in ways you didn't consider?
Basically, when a problem doesn't turn out the way you expected, analyze the crap out of it. It could be as simple as there was a distraction you hadn't anticipated that dropped the dog's focus.

Analyze it such that you can 1) train beyond it where the expect EASY problem is easy for the dog. 2) Learn more about scent travel such that you can deploy and manage your dog better in similar circumstances to make the successful find.
If there is a situation that your dog feels uncomfortable in, but is a likely situation you may have to search in (and we are asked to search in really bizarre circumstances for HRD).....then you must acclimate the dog to working scent in that. You start with minimizing the distraction to where it is barely perceptible for the dog and the source is huge. The dog does fine in this a few times and you either decrease the scent source strength or you get closer to the distraction. You do this in graduations in both to where you are looking for that single tooth in gravel next to that distraction (one test I had to do with Dax was find a single tooth wedged between concrete and soil up against the outside kennels of a municipal pet shelter with the biggest dog frothing and barking at her the entire time she had to work....yes, I said this was a test...Dax passed. I just watched amazed and was happy I'd worked problems along fenced lands with lots of dogs claiming their territory through the fence.)

One of the reasons I really don't like operations that sell "Cadaver Dogs" is that it suggests these dogs can be cookie-cutter produced when in reality an HRD dog team is a team. The handler must know his/her dog's weaknesses and strengths and strive to minimize the former and maximize the latter. The handler must be able to read their dog like no one else to decide if the dog was just pausing to read the neighborhood urine marks or if it got a whiff of HRs. Anyway, more soap boxing...sorry.

Figure out why Porter had difficulty with your EASY problem such that you can repeat the problem somewhere else and he can nail it. Then, gradually make that harder and harder to continue to build his skills. Unlike the old saying, Old dogs really can learn new tricks and the HRD dog's training never stops through out their career. If it does, both the dog and the handler begin to stagnate.

Later,

Jim