Post by oksaradt on Nov 17, 2009 14:17:31 GMT -5
I continue to get glassy blank stares from various dog handlers when buried problems come up. I continue to hear confusion on discussing buried problems. Burieds need to be a routine part of any HRD dog program once the dog gets it. Puppies get to start buried with me once they can find that elusive single tooth on the surface.
And, yes, buried problems are labor intensive to set up, some times taking hours to set up right what takes minutes for the dog to work.
Most of the National Standards now have some sort of buried in their testing. Not one of them goes into the detail required to set up a test fairly for the dog or the handler; Thus; one test set up at 12 inches deep can be a breeze for most competent dogs and another test set up at 12 inches can be impossible for nearly any dog team to work effectively in the limitations given. What to do, what to do....? Train beyond their expectations as life is always worse than most tests they can think up.
Terms to understand thoroughly:
Porosity: openings between the soil material, sometimes measures in Angstroms (look it up).
Permeability: Ease as which chemicals can move through a medium.
Moisture Content: Percentage of water in the soil that can move about. Moving about means it can carry scent for you when it moves.
Temperature Gradients/Frost line/Radiant Heat absorption: All concepts that one should know in their area that determines how the soil temperature is affected at any time of year.
For example, Oklahoma frost line tends to be 18 inches, meaning it's safe to think that your water pipes are safe below 18 inches of soil from freezing, bodies probably aren't going to freeze if buried below 18 inches, etc.
Example: A styrofoam cup has high porosity due to all the air gaps in the foam, but it has poor permeability which allows it to contain that coffee some of us so dearly need at times. If filled with coffee the moisture content is high, but not in the styrofoam itself. If a crack develops in the styrofoam bottom, moisture can escape and we can smell it further as it stains our tweed slacks(assuming you had a lid on your cup). You'll most likely notice a temperature gradient regardless of the temperature of the coffee when it hits your skin due to either scalding or evaporation.
I live in the land of the red man as so dictated by government mandate in the 1800s. I have to wonder if some sick bureaucrat didn't send them here because there is so much red clay......nyah, it's because they didn't think anyone could survive here or want to live here till oil was discovered. Even the native americans that claimed the area did so on a temporary basis as they were mostly nomadic.
Anyway, we have lots of red clay here. When clay dries out, it cracks and opens, but can just as easily seal up around something. When it's wet, it expands and becomes soft.
We had the dust bowl of the 20s, so most of our natural top soil now resides in Tennessee and parts east.
Top soil is mainly full of compost, i.e. loose soil components with decomposing vegetable matter and anything else that laid down to die in place. Such materail tends to be high in porosity and permeability.
In my area, the term, "Sandy-loam" is a catch-all for some sand/ some clay/some compost material of which one of the three could easily be zero amount. If one wants to have a septic tank with lateral lines, one has to run a "perc test" to determine just how quickly your sandy-loam can actually drain water. You dig a standard hole with your standard post-hole diggers, pour in a standard amount of water, then time to see how long it sits there before going away. Depending on how long that takes is whether you can have a septic tank or not. The joys of country living know no bounds.
Anyway, all this is a prelude for Muphy's last problem. I have to stress to the dog handler that with buried that the temptation to screw up one's dog is great. One has to set up buried problems with the attitude that if the dog doesn't locate scent that the option to just walk away should always be considered. One has to have the attitude that the dog may find scent, but not locate the source and again, one has to walk away for another day.
Seems a bit contradictory to training a dog, doesn't it?
The flip-side to this is extremely common and why one sees so many dog handlers that claim their dog can work buried only to have it struggle if the handler doesn't know where the source is.....BECAUSE THE DOG HAS BECOME DEPENDENT UPON THE (oh so helpful) HANDLER TO SHOW THEM WHERE IT IS!
ANOTHER KEY CONCEPT: A hole in the ground is like that coffee cup. Ask any archeologist and they will tell you that you can never put the soil back the way you found it. Dig a hole and fill it back up, almost always you have some darned soil left over. This would imply that by digging that hole we have altered its porosity and permeability as we have put back more air. The soil took millenia to compact into that fashion before we came along. All the soil around our hole is still in that compacted state. We've created a bowl/cup in the earth. Now, if we dig that hole in sand or soil with high sand content, then our cup has lots of cracks in it and the coffee (human remains) will most likely leak out all over the place such that a dog may have a tough time targeting exactly where that smell comes from. A friendly mole may decide to run a tunnel through our grave, having no clue we were so proud of OUR hole. Our scent will escape along the tunnels of the mole...more cracks for the coffee. But still, most of our remains being solid, the majority of the scent will remain in our bowl/coffee cup.
One of my students asked once with some trepidation, "But I stomped on the dirt, my body lifting off the ground and coming down to pack the earth back in....won't that make it harder?"
I suggested she go back to the hole, gently brush back the loose soil and see if she could define the hole by color change in the soil. Unless we're dealing with sand (or snow), the soil outside the hole is going to be more compact, less permeability due to gravity, and a recognizable line will define the *drum roll* seam of the hole.
Sooooo, stomp all you want (course you're leaving your scent all over the area doing this....don't work it for weeks in that case and hope for lots of rain...) the scent will still escape the SEAM.
Stomp really hard and your source may squish at the bottom..........ooooo, more scent available!
(No, I don't stomp on my holes.)
Soooo, ten days ago working some high blood-content remains at team training with Murphy, young Murphy dropped his well-deserved ball after making a find and began licking something in the grass nearby. He didn't tell me about it. In fact I spotted furtive glances from him. A sure sign of ill-gotten booty. I walked over and he looked up at me from a slightly decomposing deer leg complete with muscle tissue. A coyote must have dropped it when one of us moved through the area. Being the twisted HRD dog handler that I am (or so described by one of my area-search cohorts), I excitely put on a glove and placed the said deer leg in a paper sack to take away. I know the area search people worry about me because I always consider hiding for them as an opportunity for door prizes (or animal remains to torture my dogs with).
Three days ago I used said deer leg (placed in a ziploc as the area search dog handler stated it really stank) in a 14-inch hole out on lightly wooded prairie. Some 100 feet away, I dug an 18-inch hole and placed about half of a placenta that had been in my freezer for eight years ( I personally know the mother and child this one came from).
The deer leg went into earth that was easy to dig with my post-hole diggers, dark earth, high compost and sand content.....good permeability and good porosity....i.e. scent should go a long way and percolate out of the earth fairly easily.
The hole the human tissue went into.....a different story....it took me 20 minutes to dig (versus 3 minutes on the deer leg hole). Soil content was about 4 inches of the good soil, then 14 inches of sandstone/clay/shale. With both holes, I placed all soil in a bucket as I dug to minimize fresh earth scent. Extra soil from each hole was tossed 30 feet away from each hole to be present as fresh turned earth blank. A tape measure was extended to check hole depth. Both holes were dug first before any tissue was brought out to avoid any contamination.
Now, starting Sunday we began to enjoy a north-wind cold front. Both holes were placed near the south end of this particular field, minimizing scent travel into the field. This allows me to work the dog over a large blank area LIKE REAL LIFE.....
Yesterday, we got some rain, not much, 0.10 inches. From what all the trailing people tell me, my scent in the area shouldn't really matter after three days, but just to make sure I walk/dance/prance all over the area. I urinated 100 feet to the north on a tree. This is because there are always people that like to claim, "dog was tracking you....." If my dog could track a killer to a clandestine grave(days, weeks, months after), then I'd be working tracking/trailing dogs and not HRD dogs.
The point of mentioning the cold front is for the Temperature Gradient/differential between the soil and the air. Unless my dog is expected to rub his nose raw across the soil, I want some scent to escape into the air. For that to happen, it's advantageous for the dog to find scent (this is a concept that many of the experts like to gloss over, I guess that's what qualifies me not as an expert...I want all the advantages for my dog to make the find honestly, on its own, IF THE SCENT IS PRESENT.) I guess those experts just work their dog any time, any where, under any conditions. Must be great to be an expert.
Oh oh, latest quote from an "expert", "there are computer programs to solve the environmental issues for you."
I was raised old school. While I could build a calculator, I prefer to do the math in my head. While I can assemble a computer ( I really can), I don't like carrying one with me in the woods. I feel like I'm cheating when I carry a digital meat thermometer, but hey...
Anyway, taking the temperature after the fact: Air temperature when worked was 44.8F in the area. Soil temperature at 0.5 inch depth was 48.4F. Soil Temperature at 3 inches deep was 49.7F. I know (because I live in an underground house) that the soil temperature in my area in winter below the FROST LINE tends to stay around 54'F. Sooooo, scent should be puffing out of that SEAM.
Murphy was given up to one acre of area to work. Contrary to the TV shows, working buried is tedious work and old buried work can take one acre/hour for a single grave. Working a cemetery....well, that's a target rich environment and the dog team can rock....but searching for an unknown single grave can be grueling work for the dog. My game plan going out was I was going to grid Murphy in approximately 40-foot wide alleys to watch for scent behavior.
Murphy came across the deer leg at 4 minutes in as was my intention. I wanted to see what he would do with a scent he enjoyed that I might not know about. The source was in high permeability/high porosity soil so I could tell by his behavior that the scent had migrated approximately 60 feet to the south and 20 feet to the north (remember even though the wind was from the north, that scent can move during still periods and settle with moisture). Murphy had every opportunity to tell me about it, but after wasting about a minute on the area he continued on. I was happy. We continued to grid. Murphy got into the human remains at 13 minutes 25 seconds per my stop watch as to when he again exhibited scent behavior. Placenta is a blood-rich material, so I expected even with a deep hole that I'd have scent spread. If I'd buried a bone there, I'd have waited at least a month to work the hole.
Murphy defined the scent spread to be 12 feet to the North and 60 feet to the South. A small tree happened to be in the north section, so he ran his nose up and down it several times. I should note that Murphy barked multiple times once he got into scent. My response was always "show me". With each "show me" request, he would go back to working scent. I like this in a dog that they will tell you that they have scent, but will continue to pursue to source if requested. I simply wanted a target. I wanted to know where he would choose as the place to target. The hole was not visible as I always cut the sod off, save it, then place it back on top. I knew by landmark and tapemeasure where it would be. At 14 minutes 11 seconds, Murphy did a touch to the ground and barked again. I again asked, "show me." He repeated his touch, so I rewarded as I knew he was close. I placed a flag where he touched and then we continued to work for an additional 12 minutes of clear area (because that's what you'd do in real life on a search.....). At the end, I asked him to "show me" again. He took me back to the same location, checked near the flag and did another touch. I rewarded and ended the problem. I then brushed the leaves and grass aside to find the flag was placed ON THE SEAM.......
(Major point for handlers, until Murphy did a touch and committed, I stayed out of the scent area. I was approximately 30 feet away from any scent while he worked it. I did not stand in one place and stare at where I thought it might be. I kept moving about. The scent should hold the dog in place...not you.)
Wind speed from a nearby weather station indicates that wind speed during this problem was a steady 5-8 mph. Overcast through out the entire time. Total area actually covered was ~0.5 acre.
The reason I did this problem is because most of the national standards set up their burieds with tissue to expedite the testing procedure (I have to assume). I posted it on here to continue to familiarize handlers with concepts in buried work.
hope it helps,
Jim
And, yes, buried problems are labor intensive to set up, some times taking hours to set up right what takes minutes for the dog to work.
Most of the National Standards now have some sort of buried in their testing. Not one of them goes into the detail required to set up a test fairly for the dog or the handler; Thus; one test set up at 12 inches deep can be a breeze for most competent dogs and another test set up at 12 inches can be impossible for nearly any dog team to work effectively in the limitations given. What to do, what to do....? Train beyond their expectations as life is always worse than most tests they can think up.
Terms to understand thoroughly:
Porosity: openings between the soil material, sometimes measures in Angstroms (look it up).
Permeability: Ease as which chemicals can move through a medium.
Moisture Content: Percentage of water in the soil that can move about. Moving about means it can carry scent for you when it moves.
Temperature Gradients/Frost line/Radiant Heat absorption: All concepts that one should know in their area that determines how the soil temperature is affected at any time of year.
For example, Oklahoma frost line tends to be 18 inches, meaning it's safe to think that your water pipes are safe below 18 inches of soil from freezing, bodies probably aren't going to freeze if buried below 18 inches, etc.
Example: A styrofoam cup has high porosity due to all the air gaps in the foam, but it has poor permeability which allows it to contain that coffee some of us so dearly need at times. If filled with coffee the moisture content is high, but not in the styrofoam itself. If a crack develops in the styrofoam bottom, moisture can escape and we can smell it further as it stains our tweed slacks(assuming you had a lid on your cup). You'll most likely notice a temperature gradient regardless of the temperature of the coffee when it hits your skin due to either scalding or evaporation.
I live in the land of the red man as so dictated by government mandate in the 1800s. I have to wonder if some sick bureaucrat didn't send them here because there is so much red clay......nyah, it's because they didn't think anyone could survive here or want to live here till oil was discovered. Even the native americans that claimed the area did so on a temporary basis as they were mostly nomadic.
Anyway, we have lots of red clay here. When clay dries out, it cracks and opens, but can just as easily seal up around something. When it's wet, it expands and becomes soft.
We had the dust bowl of the 20s, so most of our natural top soil now resides in Tennessee and parts east.
Top soil is mainly full of compost, i.e. loose soil components with decomposing vegetable matter and anything else that laid down to die in place. Such materail tends to be high in porosity and permeability.
In my area, the term, "Sandy-loam" is a catch-all for some sand/ some clay/some compost material of which one of the three could easily be zero amount. If one wants to have a septic tank with lateral lines, one has to run a "perc test" to determine just how quickly your sandy-loam can actually drain water. You dig a standard hole with your standard post-hole diggers, pour in a standard amount of water, then time to see how long it sits there before going away. Depending on how long that takes is whether you can have a septic tank or not. The joys of country living know no bounds.
Anyway, all this is a prelude for Muphy's last problem. I have to stress to the dog handler that with buried that the temptation to screw up one's dog is great. One has to set up buried problems with the attitude that if the dog doesn't locate scent that the option to just walk away should always be considered. One has to have the attitude that the dog may find scent, but not locate the source and again, one has to walk away for another day.
Seems a bit contradictory to training a dog, doesn't it?
The flip-side to this is extremely common and why one sees so many dog handlers that claim their dog can work buried only to have it struggle if the handler doesn't know where the source is.....BECAUSE THE DOG HAS BECOME DEPENDENT UPON THE (oh so helpful) HANDLER TO SHOW THEM WHERE IT IS!
ANOTHER KEY CONCEPT: A hole in the ground is like that coffee cup. Ask any archeologist and they will tell you that you can never put the soil back the way you found it. Dig a hole and fill it back up, almost always you have some darned soil left over. This would imply that by digging that hole we have altered its porosity and permeability as we have put back more air. The soil took millenia to compact into that fashion before we came along. All the soil around our hole is still in that compacted state. We've created a bowl/cup in the earth. Now, if we dig that hole in sand or soil with high sand content, then our cup has lots of cracks in it and the coffee (human remains) will most likely leak out all over the place such that a dog may have a tough time targeting exactly where that smell comes from. A friendly mole may decide to run a tunnel through our grave, having no clue we were so proud of OUR hole. Our scent will escape along the tunnels of the mole...more cracks for the coffee. But still, most of our remains being solid, the majority of the scent will remain in our bowl/coffee cup.
One of my students asked once with some trepidation, "But I stomped on the dirt, my body lifting off the ground and coming down to pack the earth back in....won't that make it harder?"
I suggested she go back to the hole, gently brush back the loose soil and see if she could define the hole by color change in the soil. Unless we're dealing with sand (or snow), the soil outside the hole is going to be more compact, less permeability due to gravity, and a recognizable line will define the *drum roll* seam of the hole.
Sooooo, stomp all you want (course you're leaving your scent all over the area doing this....don't work it for weeks in that case and hope for lots of rain...) the scent will still escape the SEAM.
Stomp really hard and your source may squish at the bottom..........ooooo, more scent available!
(No, I don't stomp on my holes.)
Soooo, ten days ago working some high blood-content remains at team training with Murphy, young Murphy dropped his well-deserved ball after making a find and began licking something in the grass nearby. He didn't tell me about it. In fact I spotted furtive glances from him. A sure sign of ill-gotten booty. I walked over and he looked up at me from a slightly decomposing deer leg complete with muscle tissue. A coyote must have dropped it when one of us moved through the area. Being the twisted HRD dog handler that I am (or so described by one of my area-search cohorts), I excitely put on a glove and placed the said deer leg in a paper sack to take away. I know the area search people worry about me because I always consider hiding for them as an opportunity for door prizes (or animal remains to torture my dogs with).
Three days ago I used said deer leg (placed in a ziploc as the area search dog handler stated it really stank) in a 14-inch hole out on lightly wooded prairie. Some 100 feet away, I dug an 18-inch hole and placed about half of a placenta that had been in my freezer for eight years ( I personally know the mother and child this one came from).
The deer leg went into earth that was easy to dig with my post-hole diggers, dark earth, high compost and sand content.....good permeability and good porosity....i.e. scent should go a long way and percolate out of the earth fairly easily.
The hole the human tissue went into.....a different story....it took me 20 minutes to dig (versus 3 minutes on the deer leg hole). Soil content was about 4 inches of the good soil, then 14 inches of sandstone/clay/shale. With both holes, I placed all soil in a bucket as I dug to minimize fresh earth scent. Extra soil from each hole was tossed 30 feet away from each hole to be present as fresh turned earth blank. A tape measure was extended to check hole depth. Both holes were dug first before any tissue was brought out to avoid any contamination.
Now, starting Sunday we began to enjoy a north-wind cold front. Both holes were placed near the south end of this particular field, minimizing scent travel into the field. This allows me to work the dog over a large blank area LIKE REAL LIFE.....
Yesterday, we got some rain, not much, 0.10 inches. From what all the trailing people tell me, my scent in the area shouldn't really matter after three days, but just to make sure I walk/dance/prance all over the area. I urinated 100 feet to the north on a tree. This is because there are always people that like to claim, "dog was tracking you....." If my dog could track a killer to a clandestine grave(days, weeks, months after), then I'd be working tracking/trailing dogs and not HRD dogs.
The point of mentioning the cold front is for the Temperature Gradient/differential between the soil and the air. Unless my dog is expected to rub his nose raw across the soil, I want some scent to escape into the air. For that to happen, it's advantageous for the dog to find scent (this is a concept that many of the experts like to gloss over, I guess that's what qualifies me not as an expert...I want all the advantages for my dog to make the find honestly, on its own, IF THE SCENT IS PRESENT.) I guess those experts just work their dog any time, any where, under any conditions. Must be great to be an expert.
Oh oh, latest quote from an "expert", "there are computer programs to solve the environmental issues for you."
I was raised old school. While I could build a calculator, I prefer to do the math in my head. While I can assemble a computer ( I really can), I don't like carrying one with me in the woods. I feel like I'm cheating when I carry a digital meat thermometer, but hey...
Anyway, taking the temperature after the fact: Air temperature when worked was 44.8F in the area. Soil temperature at 0.5 inch depth was 48.4F. Soil Temperature at 3 inches deep was 49.7F. I know (because I live in an underground house) that the soil temperature in my area in winter below the FROST LINE tends to stay around 54'F. Sooooo, scent should be puffing out of that SEAM.
Murphy was given up to one acre of area to work. Contrary to the TV shows, working buried is tedious work and old buried work can take one acre/hour for a single grave. Working a cemetery....well, that's a target rich environment and the dog team can rock....but searching for an unknown single grave can be grueling work for the dog. My game plan going out was I was going to grid Murphy in approximately 40-foot wide alleys to watch for scent behavior.
Murphy came across the deer leg at 4 minutes in as was my intention. I wanted to see what he would do with a scent he enjoyed that I might not know about. The source was in high permeability/high porosity soil so I could tell by his behavior that the scent had migrated approximately 60 feet to the south and 20 feet to the north (remember even though the wind was from the north, that scent can move during still periods and settle with moisture). Murphy had every opportunity to tell me about it, but after wasting about a minute on the area he continued on. I was happy. We continued to grid. Murphy got into the human remains at 13 minutes 25 seconds per my stop watch as to when he again exhibited scent behavior. Placenta is a blood-rich material, so I expected even with a deep hole that I'd have scent spread. If I'd buried a bone there, I'd have waited at least a month to work the hole.
Murphy defined the scent spread to be 12 feet to the North and 60 feet to the South. A small tree happened to be in the north section, so he ran his nose up and down it several times. I should note that Murphy barked multiple times once he got into scent. My response was always "show me". With each "show me" request, he would go back to working scent. I like this in a dog that they will tell you that they have scent, but will continue to pursue to source if requested. I simply wanted a target. I wanted to know where he would choose as the place to target. The hole was not visible as I always cut the sod off, save it, then place it back on top. I knew by landmark and tapemeasure where it would be. At 14 minutes 11 seconds, Murphy did a touch to the ground and barked again. I again asked, "show me." He repeated his touch, so I rewarded as I knew he was close. I placed a flag where he touched and then we continued to work for an additional 12 minutes of clear area (because that's what you'd do in real life on a search.....). At the end, I asked him to "show me" again. He took me back to the same location, checked near the flag and did another touch. I rewarded and ended the problem. I then brushed the leaves and grass aside to find the flag was placed ON THE SEAM.......
(Major point for handlers, until Murphy did a touch and committed, I stayed out of the scent area. I was approximately 30 feet away from any scent while he worked it. I did not stand in one place and stare at where I thought it might be. I kept moving about. The scent should hold the dog in place...not you.)
Wind speed from a nearby weather station indicates that wind speed during this problem was a steady 5-8 mph. Overcast through out the entire time. Total area actually covered was ~0.5 acre.
The reason I did this problem is because most of the national standards set up their burieds with tissue to expedite the testing procedure (I have to assume). I posted it on here to continue to familiarize handlers with concepts in buried work.
hope it helps,
Jim