time and land management

[rthonor]

You said to me at the training, that I did not always use the time that I had effectively to cover the land that I had to search. Can you cover this topic further?

[oksaradt]

This should realy be time restrained area management. Any search or problems you are given, you should begin to automatically take certain factors into consideration:
1) What's my dog's endurence level? OR, how long will my dog typically work before it requires a break? This can be dependent on the environment, the scent source types, distractions, terrain.

2) What's my dog's style of working an area? If my dog is fast paced checking for scent, will it miss the subtle sources? If my dog is methodical, how am I going to cover the entire area in a reasonable time? If the scent problems are difficult, how am I going to cover the area multiple times in the time allotted?

3) How much time will the environment be conducive to working scent? Take for example working buried in the summer when the air temperature becomes either too hot for the dog to work effectively OR the air temperature is such that air pressure contains the scent down in the soil where the dog can't access it.

4) What are the expectations of my law enforcement in working an area? I tend to quote an average for working clandestine graves at one acre per hour. If the grave(s) is recent, the dog should be able to work the area much faster. If the grave is old and the area is covered now by blackberry vines, brambles, poison ivy, etc. then one hour might not be enough. If the area is conducive to scent with say water moving through it, over cast skies, porous and permeable soil, etc. then you might cover an acre in 10 minutes.
If law enforcement's only canine scent work experience is a wonder Malinois working narcotics in buildings and then they want you to search multiple floors for remains placed decades before, this is going to change how you perform your preliminary search in hopes of narrowing the search area down.

Overall though, you want to give yourself time to run a quick run-through the area with the dog to give yourself some information on how to work the area. If you're lucky, the scent is such that your dog narrows in on the source(s) on the first hit of scent. If there are overlap issues, you need to learn to read your dog to spot this and you'll have to set aside time for the dog to work through the overlap(s) and how you will control the dog's area to achieve this. Telling law enforcement that the room stinks of dead and they need to figure out where the body is simply negates the need of a dog. They know the room smells and hope the dog will tell them where the body is.

If your dog is distracted by the environment and you are under a time crunch, then you need to quickly figure out how to still work the dog in the limitations you have to best cover the area. If that means putting the dog on a long line so that you can still quickly rough the area, you do that. My dog recently got his first exposure to a cattle hot wire on a search. I still needed to cover the area along the wire which he suddenly developed an avoidance to. I put him on-lead and moved through the area while watching his reactions for any scent response. Would I have liked to put him up and come back another day? you bet. It was hours to the search area and the search waiver was for a limited time. I adjusted to the area to still accomplish the task asked of us. As I worked the area on-line, my dog relaxed and I could go back to working him off-lead with my body acting as the guard for him from the hot wire.

If a handler doesn't develop the habit of working an area as efficiently as possible in minimum time, we quickly come upon searches that we take on without any idea as to whether we can do it. I've been asked (seriously) by law enforcement to cover square miles for old graves on multiple occassions. Once they realize the limitations of scent and time, we can work together to gain intelligence to begin whittling down the area size for higher probability of a find.

I'd suggest every problem you set up for yourself and blinds set up for you that you time how long it takes you and your dog to complete the problem. You'll quickly learn that when you know where all the sources are that you perform much faster if for no other reason that you know the areas to blow off. In blind problems every area is a possible location, so we expend more time covering clear areas. The longest time is expended on blank or negative areas. This is true for blind negatives and for the typical search created by a tip where someone thinks they saw a homicide, a burial, whatever and law enforcement has to check it out to do their duty. This will be the most common search for any HRD dog handler and requires skilled area and time management to avoid taking hours on an area that should be cleared in minutes.

Hope that makes sense,

Jim

[rthonor]

After leaving the seminar and critiquing my performance, I thought that I should have put a long line on Abby during the 2nd phase of the testing. Can you explain "griding" an area?

[oksaradt]

Putting a long-line on your dog might have helped. It's always an educated guess. In the situation I described with my dog, I watched to make sure the lead was always loose. Working your dog with a tight lead runs a high risk of cueing or correcting your dog in scent. I was concerned also that if the lead was tight that I'd actually be creating a fear rather than alleviating it. But, you would have been fine hooking up a lead on your dog to work as we state up front that we are more interested in the end result then how you get there.

Gridding is a term probably more familiar to the search folks than to law enforcement, but we all do it. Gridding is how you break up your search area such that you can manage it for the dog.
If you are working a large area and have the luxury of a flanker, a map is often utilized. The size of the sectors or width of the grids is determined by the sources you are searching for and the conditions you are dealing with in the search. Let's look first at the second level test where you had 100 ft by 100 ft area with open terrain at the north end, large debris with undergrowth at the SE corner and large debris with water in the SW corner. If I was working this, I'd mentall break it down into three sectors in which I'd have three different grid widths. Per the restrictions of Shreveport's test, all the sources had to be tissue-oriented, so pretty easy to work and wider grids.
I should preface this with dog handlers with fast dogs tend to develop a technique where they allow their dog to race across the area in wide grids. In this area that would have been 3-4 runs through the area at about 25 ft intervals. The handler hopes to get lucky on an easy find, but (more importantly) watches the fast dog for head turns. It's pretty common for fast dogs to be moving too fast to stop on a dime at scent, but their body produces a noticable change the handler can read. Then the handler will use this to determine what areas they want to focus their dog on and what areas are less important. That doesn't mean the handler will blow off the areas where he/she saw no reaction, but they will be worked later on. In this case the dog assists in defining the handler's grid strategy.
If you have a more methodical dog like mine, then I tend to define grids for scent advantage. So I would have started with the low places knowing scent flows downhill. I'd also be aware that all the debris and water can act as scent traps. Handlers can get caught up in such areas and dwell on them for way too long. This problem was designed to have a scent trap downwind of the source under the cedar debris pile with the easier source in the water area. The source on the log overhanging the water was designed to determine if the dog could work out of the water scent trap to the source and navigate the precarious situation to target.
A handler working from the north to south would have found the strong source in the cedar debris pile first before the scent trap it would create and then the handler would have to decide if his/her dog was on scent with no source further downwind or if they had a third scent source.
You don't need to know why I set up the problem the way I did, but it helps to understand how you'd manage the area from how I used it for the problem.

So, on gridding, you might see if you can locate basic search manuals. NASAR has one called FUNSAR or FUNdamentals of Search And Rescue with a chapter on search grids. It tends to focus more on how to utilize man power to effectively cover an area, but the same mindset can be applied to dogs.
For example if I'm working a cemetery with multiple dog teams, we'll break up the cemetery into equitable sectors and the dogs have to be able to work side-by-side if they are in adjacent areas. Each handler then will break up their sector into grids they feel are advantages to locate the first graves that might define rows and columns (in a christian cemetery) or circles in some native american cemeteries, etc. In a christian cemetery, once you've located rows and columns, then you can more tightly grid your dog (narrow their alley to search along a direction) to mark all the graves in that row or column.

On the extreme of gridding, let's say you need to find that single tooth. A couple of years ago I met up with a handler that had just move to my state from elsewhere. This handler had lots of experience coming in and we just decided to get together to set up blinds for each other to see strengths and weaknesses. The other handler knew I trained my dogs periodically down to a single tooth which I consider the toughest find. She wanted to call my bluff and placed a single tooth in a very muddy stretch of road. My area was approximately 80 feet long by 20 feet wide. She felt confident in telling me, "Oh, you have a single tooth to find." The dog I'd taken with me had done lots of cemeteries with me and I simply told her my nose-to-ground command. From her years of experience, my dog picked up on tooth scent and went into her own 2-foot wide grid, setting up alleys in the muddy road as I set the boundaries with a "back" command. The other handler and I basically just watched in wonder as this dog methodically worked back and forth longwise till she stopped, wagged her tail, barked at me and stood in place. I squished out to her and asked her to check (she has a touch, but I feared the touch would bury the tooth). I watched where her nose stopped, reached down, pulled out the tooth. My point is not to brag on my dog (she was a wonder), but to demonstrate that as you get into the routine of setting up alleys/grids/search widths....through your area then the dog can pick up on this and they develop their own. This same dog quickly learned to turn her head sideways in strong winds when we'd work cemeteries like people cock their ears to figure out direction. She was doing it with her nostrils. It wasn't something I taught her, but it was a skill she developed to help her work cemeteries with lots of overlapping sources (graves).
So, practice working your areas in controlled grids and the dog often picks up on this and develops its own style to improve its odds in making the find and getting the big party.
At first it might help to draw a map of the area without the dog, go through it considering wind, topography, sun/shade, depressions, creeks, etc and draw a rough grid on top of the map to work your dog with. Do this routinely and you'll find that you quickly start breaking up your search areas into sectors of search ease and difficulty, areas you can cover quickly and others you'll burn a lot of time on, or where the dog is going to struggle scent wise such that your guidance might be required.



Perfect world where we just set the dog loose, sit in our fold-out chair and the dog makes all the finds are great, BUT...... Gridding is the handler's part of the job to insure the area is covered completely. If I'm working (what turns out to be) a negative area, it's common for me to search it three times from three different directions. I do this to give my dog every opportunity to access scent. At this point I know that if the dog gets into scent that it will pursue to source if possible. If my dog and I work an area from three different directions (say with the wind, into the wind, and cross-wind....just an example) and I see no scent behavior in my dog then I feel pretty confident in saying there is no scent to find. If conditions are very good for scent work, then I might even call it clear. The more I do this though, the more comfortable I feel in saying "we did not find scent".

Hope this helps,

Jim

[rthonor]

Yea, that helps alot. I know that I dont really have to know "why" you put the source where you did, but thats the fascination part for me beside the working of the dog. Its seemed like a deceptively random and easy place, but obviously there is more to it than meets the eye.
I want to know these types of things to make challenges for my dog. thanks,rt