Post by oksaradt on Jul 17, 2010 14:45:10 GMT -5
This is such a big problem for so many handlers, that I thought I'd make it a separate thread.
One "good ole boy" expert that I spent some time learning from recently pontificated (he's a very good pontificator) that he couldn't understand why anyone would still use a bark alert as they were so prone to alerting in pool rather than at source. I didn't see any reason to note to that list that HE had been the trainer that convinced me to put a bark on my first dog. At the time he was trying the old "recruiter sell" on me to make my dog a Ca-Daster Dog (his term) and see the world.
On the potpourri thread, it was asked, "how do I fix my passive-alert dog from sitting in scent pool and alerting (sit) at the source?"
My point is that no matter what the alert is, either active or passive, that dogs might alert in pool versus at source.
Any trainer's first flippant answer to this query will be, "Stop rewarding your dog in pool and this will go away." If the handler accepts this then the trainer skated on having to go into the complexities and mechanics of the situation.
Why is this complex? Well, consider the HRD dog that is expected to alert on buried....at the closest point OR the Disaster Dog that's supposed to bark at the strongest scent source....... most often, the handler just doesn't have a clue if the dog is right or not.....
The good handler runs lots and lots and LOTS of training problems before ever working a blind or real search to determine if they can trust their dog.
So, what causes this to be an issue?
1) Highest likely reason is the dog has been rewarded in scent before it located source or the handler was slow and rewarded after the dog left the source and was still in scent. ...I know, I continue to harp that timing is everything...It's all the dog has to go on to know what you want of it.
2) Second most likely reason is the dog is guessing because it hasn't learned how to solve the problem yet.....which means the handler hasn't raised expectations upon the dog to where it must solve the probem....
OR
The handler has narc dog handler expectations on their dog where you often see bang-bang-bang search techniques and dog alerts......hours later, a gang of happy officers have totally dismantled the vehicle and found the drugs five feet away....dog got them permission to tear it apart, that's all they care about....this is the way it is foks
I will set up "EVIL EVIL nasty diabolical..." problems for my dogs that I know are going to be boogers and then I give them all the time they need to solve the problem. Next time they are faster. The time after that, they get faster still. Training a puppy and an experienced dog at the same time routinely slaps me in the face when the experienced dog works a problem like it was nothing and the puppy struggles. A first time handler might watch their puppy and cry "My dog is broken...whoa...." (I heard this and said this myself many times with my first dog......next day it was all better...we must learn as well).
When I set up these booger problems, I have pre-determined expectations of where the dog will be rewarded for a find...say right on the source or within 3 inches....buried a foot, maybe right over the source or within six inches...it all depends on the scent migration and where the strongest scent SHOULD BE.
I've heard one of the "experts" exclaim, "don't worry about scent theory, just train the dog right and the rest will fall into place..." My attitude is that without scent theory that I can't train the dog right in the first place.
3) Next likely reason the dog indicates in pool instead of at the source is the dog is stuck in a scent trap where the diffusion concentration in the trap is higher than the scent concentration flowing into it. The dog chooses the highest stength of scent in the current area. Again, this is an experience issue. My dogs taught me many years ago (and the people that set up the blind problems yelling at me...) that scent does not always travel the way we expect it to. The more you work scent, the better you get at how it migrates, but no smokebomb will recreate what HRD really does. You have to read an experienced dog to see what the scent is doing. Smoke is warmer and of a different chemical compound than HR scent, so it travels differently....even in water (a pet pieve of mine).
So, we've detailed the reasons a dog might alert in pool:
Low handler expectations, lack of problem solving experience, scent traps. These are the big three for this issue.
So, how to fix this?
1) Handler expectations - to be honest, this problem is created much more often with dogs that are started on blood.....and the fix is to work subtle sources that you can create scent pools with.
Blood diffuses amazing fast in nearly every direction. I've observed blood scent movement against the wind, up slope, in the shade.....and you can smell it too, so you know the dog is just going crazy. Way too many dog handlers start out with blood because it's the easiest to get. Very few searches actually have blood as a component unless you are looking for the very recent dead that was blown to hell by falling on their shotgun or as a college bomber we had nearby, dubbed "BOOMER SOONER" as his homemade bomb went off when he was setting the timer at a football game......then you really do have blood everywhere. In such instances, they really aren't going to call out a dog because well....he's everywhere.... Maybe for the lost hunter falling on his gun then the cross-trained area search dogs will be called out.
To be honest, when I've trained my cross-trained teams on blood (at their request) I ask them to get within three feet of where I poured the source. Almost always they can't target and they have me bring in one of my dogs to target where the source is. I do try to place the blood in such a way to mute it for them, but the stuff just goes everywhere.
Anyway, if you are training your dog on blood and are having scent pool issues, back off the blood for the next couple of MONTHS.
To solve this issue, get some intact teeth from the dentist. They'll have pulp inside for a tissue component. Soak the teeth in distilled water for several days...(10-20 teeth is more than adequate). The Day Before, place the teeth in a depression of say 10-20 feet in diameter in a shady area such that the scent is going to settle in the depression creating a scent pool. You are going to place the teeth in the center with the water they were in poured over them into the soil. You can hide the teeth if you want. If the dog is visual, you have more problems on your hands. Work this the next morning where the soil is warm, the air is cool, and your depression is like a bowl brimming with scent. If it's hot like right now, place the teeth at dusk or after to avoid drying out the depression.
What we've created is a big scent pool with a strong concentrated source. Start the dog 100-200 feet away and let it find the depression. If it alerts in scent, you simply tell it to keep working. It found scent, did a good thing. Don't correct it. But, don't reward it either. Just be neutral and tell it to keep working. It might even move about the depression, sitting here, sitting there, looking at you.........it's asking you what is the right answer. You simply tell it to keep working until it locates the teeth and sits there.
The secondary fix to this is you have a targeting mechanism on the dog. If I'm working a real search or a blind and the dog gets a good sniff and barks at me, then I reply with "show me". If the dog can't, he now knows to go back to work. He just told me that he found scent, but no source. That's good to know on a real search. Until he does a touch, I'm simply watching him work out the problem.
So, if your dog solves this problem, you only have about 99 more to work through. GRADUALly, make the problems more difficult by limiting the scent with less water. Migrate to wet bones,then to dry bones, then to historic level teeth with no pulp. WHEN the dog solves all these as routine, then *big breath* you might consider going the other way with the tissue-related components...which takes us to
2) The first solution was giving the dog a foundation in diffusion solving. The next stage is mgration into problem solving. You can do this with both skeletal and tissue, but tissue is easier to play with for this part. I do both because I have to as the bulk of my work is with older remains. If your dog can work the old stuff, the tissue related is a cakewalk except for blood....(oh, yea, a placenta is extremely blood rich...I've actually freeze-dried pieces of placenta to work with. It hits heavy humidity and the dogs treat it like it's 10 times as big......same handlers that primarily work blood do a lot of placenta...last seminar I gave away six placentas...that should have been a clue as to how little I train with it....)
So, our next goal is to create monster scent pools with a souce in them. When I was growing up in this, the evil instructor had us set up problems where we'd place a blood source out in a room for 24-hours. We'd be told to take the blood-source away and hide historic teeth in the room for the dog to find 20 minutes later......if you want to see handlers cry in frustration, this is a good way to torture them. This is one of those "graduate level for the masochistic dog handler" problems that I grew up on. The problem is that such problems can screw up the dog as well if the handler isn't very careful......no, i never did this to any of my students at a seminar....there's no point.
Get the point? blood can be vewy bad for dog training until the dog has a decent foundation in diffusion problem solving....I can't stress this enough.
So, our next migration is to try to work with some other tissue-related components such as adipose tissue, dried muscle, neural tissue.....yea yea, hard to get, i know. Even a scent source from a decomposed body is preferable to blood with its high ammonia concentration. So, for this stage of the game you need to beg or borrow adipocere, adipose tissue, muscle (preferably dried), and/or neural tissue. If you have connections with law enforcement OR a coroner/medical examiner then you might be able to work out a lend/lease program where you check out sources to train on.
For this next stage, look for depressions that have slopes going up from one side. You will place your source on the slope such that the scent will go down into the depression and collect. This can be a nice migration for highs as the dog will again get into the pool and from that have to solve where the scent is coming from and work up to it. Again, if the dog alerts in pool, your response is to tell it to keep working in a neutral tone.
At the start if you start seeing the dog nose up towards the source, it's ok to give a soft positive verbal praise to encourage the dog to continue to pursue upwards. You need to wean the dog and you off of the "getting warmer" praise fairly quickly though as the point of these exercises is to teach the dog to problem solve in its are of expertise, scent.
Another way to create this is if you have stronge winds then you can place a source upwind of a windbreak such that the scent will collect in the wind break. This migrates to the last set of issues.
3) Scent trap with weak scent leader....the leader being the stream of scent from source to trap.
Worst case problem I can do to someone in this arena is to place a blood-source 20 feet up overhead from a tree branch that is out and away from the tree such that scent drops down to the ground and collects. On a windy day, you can literally drive both dog and handler crazy with this problem. Many of the certifications state a "HIGH" is no higher than six feet......pooey. I was taught that a high means UP. You work a construction site and your body is on a scaffold some 100 feet up, the dog still better be able to tell you it's up there. Stating you passed national standards isn't going to mean a whole lot if you can't make the find.
So, in this stage you can migrate to your blood and placenta if you want. Again, you can still use skeletal for these as well. Both extremes have there issues. Working blood before now is like sending your high school freshman quarterback into an NFL game.....he'll look ok up until the first hike.
For this, the problem setter must be very aware of the surroundings and environment. At first the problem setter needs to be the handler so the handler can learn as much as the dog.
PLEASE NEVER THINK THAT YOU MUST MAKE A FIND WITH YOUR DOG IF THE DOG IS STRUGGLING. I've seen more dogs taught to give their handlers something when nothing was there because the handler just couldn't accept that the dog wasn't up to the problem they set out for the dog. If I set up problems for my dogs and they aren't getting scent, I give them three passes to find scent then we move on. No foul and no shame. It means the conditions are not appropriate for scent migration OR the dog isn't up to that level yet. Both are valuable information for the handler to realize. Some idiot wants you to work an asphalt pile in 100F weather in full sun then you need to tell that idiot gently that you'll try, but there could be a whole body out there and your dog might miss it because of the conditions. You can tell them, "now, if you want to meet me out here at say 0500 when the asphalt is still warm, but the air is cool...we'll rock the scent world for you."
At this point, you must have your evil problem setter hat on as you'll place sources in areas of lots of turbulence such as light woods with lots of cedars and a decent upwind with a couple of windbreaks down wind to trap scent in. I've observed ill-prepared dogs alert on every stand of slightly taller grass in a grassy field that was downwind of a blood source with 25 mph winds. The dog was basically telling us it found scent as it would turn upwind and MAYBE get teases. This is where you build experience on your dog that will at times frustrate you as they will become anal. My dogs often will go right into a source find it, then back away and circle round before going back in to alert on it BECAUSE they wanted to make sure their evil handler had not set up a strong source upwind. I don't let them leave the area, but I allow them latitude to make sure such that once they have convinced themself that they've made the find that their committment to the source won't let them leave until I give them a paycheck.
And yes, migration of these problems will have you eventually setting up a suet cage 20-feet up on a branch way out from the trunk and watching your dog solve the problem that the source is up from the scent leader. This is a booger problem that I sometimes throw at students at seminars, but I tend to soften it up for them as it's unfair to the dogs without all the problems previous to this point.
So, to conclude:
1) only accept an alert when the dog is at the source or as close as they can possibly get.
2) teach the dog how to work through diffusion with skeletal sources then muted tissue problems with pools.
3) teach the dog how to deal with bloody scent traps with no strong scent leaders taking them to the source such that they learn to seek out the source by searching AWAY from the pool.
4) have a targeting mechanism with your dog such that if you suspect it is in pool (and don't know) that you can ask for a target "show me" and the dog should not be able to in pool.
Oh, and I'm just as evil to myself. I set up a problem for my dog under expanded steel with bones above him and no way for him to get up to them. He found them and barked. I knew he found them, but I asked sarcastically, "show me." He did his best to put a paw up to them even though he couldn't raise up. I took it. If he hadn't raised the paw, I would have told him to keep working........ train as your search.
Work blood last if you must work blood.
Follow all of this and the result should be a dog that everyone watches and forgets that you the handler exists.
Hope this helps,
Jim
One "good ole boy" expert that I spent some time learning from recently pontificated (he's a very good pontificator) that he couldn't understand why anyone would still use a bark alert as they were so prone to alerting in pool rather than at source. I didn't see any reason to note to that list that HE had been the trainer that convinced me to put a bark on my first dog. At the time he was trying the old "recruiter sell" on me to make my dog a Ca-Daster Dog (his term) and see the world.
On the potpourri thread, it was asked, "how do I fix my passive-alert dog from sitting in scent pool and alerting (sit) at the source?"
My point is that no matter what the alert is, either active or passive, that dogs might alert in pool versus at source.
Any trainer's first flippant answer to this query will be, "Stop rewarding your dog in pool and this will go away." If the handler accepts this then the trainer skated on having to go into the complexities and mechanics of the situation.
Why is this complex? Well, consider the HRD dog that is expected to alert on buried....at the closest point OR the Disaster Dog that's supposed to bark at the strongest scent source....... most often, the handler just doesn't have a clue if the dog is right or not.....
The good handler runs lots and lots and LOTS of training problems before ever working a blind or real search to determine if they can trust their dog.
So, what causes this to be an issue?
1) Highest likely reason is the dog has been rewarded in scent before it located source or the handler was slow and rewarded after the dog left the source and was still in scent. ...I know, I continue to harp that timing is everything...It's all the dog has to go on to know what you want of it.
2) Second most likely reason is the dog is guessing because it hasn't learned how to solve the problem yet.....which means the handler hasn't raised expectations upon the dog to where it must solve the probem....
OR
The handler has narc dog handler expectations on their dog where you often see bang-bang-bang search techniques and dog alerts......hours later, a gang of happy officers have totally dismantled the vehicle and found the drugs five feet away....dog got them permission to tear it apart, that's all they care about....this is the way it is foks
I will set up "EVIL EVIL nasty diabolical..." problems for my dogs that I know are going to be boogers and then I give them all the time they need to solve the problem. Next time they are faster. The time after that, they get faster still. Training a puppy and an experienced dog at the same time routinely slaps me in the face when the experienced dog works a problem like it was nothing and the puppy struggles. A first time handler might watch their puppy and cry "My dog is broken...whoa...." (I heard this and said this myself many times with my first dog......next day it was all better...we must learn as well).
When I set up these booger problems, I have pre-determined expectations of where the dog will be rewarded for a find...say right on the source or within 3 inches....buried a foot, maybe right over the source or within six inches...it all depends on the scent migration and where the strongest scent SHOULD BE.
I've heard one of the "experts" exclaim, "don't worry about scent theory, just train the dog right and the rest will fall into place..." My attitude is that without scent theory that I can't train the dog right in the first place.
3) Next likely reason the dog indicates in pool instead of at the source is the dog is stuck in a scent trap where the diffusion concentration in the trap is higher than the scent concentration flowing into it. The dog chooses the highest stength of scent in the current area. Again, this is an experience issue. My dogs taught me many years ago (and the people that set up the blind problems yelling at me...) that scent does not always travel the way we expect it to. The more you work scent, the better you get at how it migrates, but no smokebomb will recreate what HRD really does. You have to read an experienced dog to see what the scent is doing. Smoke is warmer and of a different chemical compound than HR scent, so it travels differently....even in water (a pet pieve of mine).
So, we've detailed the reasons a dog might alert in pool:
Low handler expectations, lack of problem solving experience, scent traps. These are the big three for this issue.
So, how to fix this?
1) Handler expectations - to be honest, this problem is created much more often with dogs that are started on blood.....and the fix is to work subtle sources that you can create scent pools with.
Blood diffuses amazing fast in nearly every direction. I've observed blood scent movement against the wind, up slope, in the shade.....and you can smell it too, so you know the dog is just going crazy. Way too many dog handlers start out with blood because it's the easiest to get. Very few searches actually have blood as a component unless you are looking for the very recent dead that was blown to hell by falling on their shotgun or as a college bomber we had nearby, dubbed "BOOMER SOONER" as his homemade bomb went off when he was setting the timer at a football game......then you really do have blood everywhere. In such instances, they really aren't going to call out a dog because well....he's everywhere.... Maybe for the lost hunter falling on his gun then the cross-trained area search dogs will be called out.
To be honest, when I've trained my cross-trained teams on blood (at their request) I ask them to get within three feet of where I poured the source. Almost always they can't target and they have me bring in one of my dogs to target where the source is. I do try to place the blood in such a way to mute it for them, but the stuff just goes everywhere.
Anyway, if you are training your dog on blood and are having scent pool issues, back off the blood for the next couple of MONTHS.
To solve this issue, get some intact teeth from the dentist. They'll have pulp inside for a tissue component. Soak the teeth in distilled water for several days...(10-20 teeth is more than adequate). The Day Before, place the teeth in a depression of say 10-20 feet in diameter in a shady area such that the scent is going to settle in the depression creating a scent pool. You are going to place the teeth in the center with the water they were in poured over them into the soil. You can hide the teeth if you want. If the dog is visual, you have more problems on your hands. Work this the next morning where the soil is warm, the air is cool, and your depression is like a bowl brimming with scent. If it's hot like right now, place the teeth at dusk or after to avoid drying out the depression.
What we've created is a big scent pool with a strong concentrated source. Start the dog 100-200 feet away and let it find the depression. If it alerts in scent, you simply tell it to keep working. It found scent, did a good thing. Don't correct it. But, don't reward it either. Just be neutral and tell it to keep working. It might even move about the depression, sitting here, sitting there, looking at you.........it's asking you what is the right answer. You simply tell it to keep working until it locates the teeth and sits there.
The secondary fix to this is you have a targeting mechanism on the dog. If I'm working a real search or a blind and the dog gets a good sniff and barks at me, then I reply with "show me". If the dog can't, he now knows to go back to work. He just told me that he found scent, but no source. That's good to know on a real search. Until he does a touch, I'm simply watching him work out the problem.
So, if your dog solves this problem, you only have about 99 more to work through. GRADUALly, make the problems more difficult by limiting the scent with less water. Migrate to wet bones,then to dry bones, then to historic level teeth with no pulp. WHEN the dog solves all these as routine, then *big breath* you might consider going the other way with the tissue-related components...which takes us to
2) The first solution was giving the dog a foundation in diffusion solving. The next stage is mgration into problem solving. You can do this with both skeletal and tissue, but tissue is easier to play with for this part. I do both because I have to as the bulk of my work is with older remains. If your dog can work the old stuff, the tissue related is a cakewalk except for blood....(oh, yea, a placenta is extremely blood rich...I've actually freeze-dried pieces of placenta to work with. It hits heavy humidity and the dogs treat it like it's 10 times as big......same handlers that primarily work blood do a lot of placenta...last seminar I gave away six placentas...that should have been a clue as to how little I train with it....)
So, our next goal is to create monster scent pools with a souce in them. When I was growing up in this, the evil instructor had us set up problems where we'd place a blood source out in a room for 24-hours. We'd be told to take the blood-source away and hide historic teeth in the room for the dog to find 20 minutes later......if you want to see handlers cry in frustration, this is a good way to torture them. This is one of those "graduate level for the masochistic dog handler" problems that I grew up on. The problem is that such problems can screw up the dog as well if the handler isn't very careful......no, i never did this to any of my students at a seminar....there's no point.
Get the point? blood can be vewy bad for dog training until the dog has a decent foundation in diffusion problem solving....I can't stress this enough.
So, our next migration is to try to work with some other tissue-related components such as adipose tissue, dried muscle, neural tissue.....yea yea, hard to get, i know. Even a scent source from a decomposed body is preferable to blood with its high ammonia concentration. So, for this stage of the game you need to beg or borrow adipocere, adipose tissue, muscle (preferably dried), and/or neural tissue. If you have connections with law enforcement OR a coroner/medical examiner then you might be able to work out a lend/lease program where you check out sources to train on.
For this next stage, look for depressions that have slopes going up from one side. You will place your source on the slope such that the scent will go down into the depression and collect. This can be a nice migration for highs as the dog will again get into the pool and from that have to solve where the scent is coming from and work up to it. Again, if the dog alerts in pool, your response is to tell it to keep working in a neutral tone.
At the start if you start seeing the dog nose up towards the source, it's ok to give a soft positive verbal praise to encourage the dog to continue to pursue upwards. You need to wean the dog and you off of the "getting warmer" praise fairly quickly though as the point of these exercises is to teach the dog to problem solve in its are of expertise, scent.
Another way to create this is if you have stronge winds then you can place a source upwind of a windbreak such that the scent will collect in the wind break. This migrates to the last set of issues.
3) Scent trap with weak scent leader....the leader being the stream of scent from source to trap.
Worst case problem I can do to someone in this arena is to place a blood-source 20 feet up overhead from a tree branch that is out and away from the tree such that scent drops down to the ground and collects. On a windy day, you can literally drive both dog and handler crazy with this problem. Many of the certifications state a "HIGH" is no higher than six feet......pooey. I was taught that a high means UP. You work a construction site and your body is on a scaffold some 100 feet up, the dog still better be able to tell you it's up there. Stating you passed national standards isn't going to mean a whole lot if you can't make the find.
So, in this stage you can migrate to your blood and placenta if you want. Again, you can still use skeletal for these as well. Both extremes have there issues. Working blood before now is like sending your high school freshman quarterback into an NFL game.....he'll look ok up until the first hike.
For this, the problem setter must be very aware of the surroundings and environment. At first the problem setter needs to be the handler so the handler can learn as much as the dog.
PLEASE NEVER THINK THAT YOU MUST MAKE A FIND WITH YOUR DOG IF THE DOG IS STRUGGLING. I've seen more dogs taught to give their handlers something when nothing was there because the handler just couldn't accept that the dog wasn't up to the problem they set out for the dog. If I set up problems for my dogs and they aren't getting scent, I give them three passes to find scent then we move on. No foul and no shame. It means the conditions are not appropriate for scent migration OR the dog isn't up to that level yet. Both are valuable information for the handler to realize. Some idiot wants you to work an asphalt pile in 100F weather in full sun then you need to tell that idiot gently that you'll try, but there could be a whole body out there and your dog might miss it because of the conditions. You can tell them, "now, if you want to meet me out here at say 0500 when the asphalt is still warm, but the air is cool...we'll rock the scent world for you."
At this point, you must have your evil problem setter hat on as you'll place sources in areas of lots of turbulence such as light woods with lots of cedars and a decent upwind with a couple of windbreaks down wind to trap scent in. I've observed ill-prepared dogs alert on every stand of slightly taller grass in a grassy field that was downwind of a blood source with 25 mph winds. The dog was basically telling us it found scent as it would turn upwind and MAYBE get teases. This is where you build experience on your dog that will at times frustrate you as they will become anal. My dogs often will go right into a source find it, then back away and circle round before going back in to alert on it BECAUSE they wanted to make sure their evil handler had not set up a strong source upwind. I don't let them leave the area, but I allow them latitude to make sure such that once they have convinced themself that they've made the find that their committment to the source won't let them leave until I give them a paycheck.
And yes, migration of these problems will have you eventually setting up a suet cage 20-feet up on a branch way out from the trunk and watching your dog solve the problem that the source is up from the scent leader. This is a booger problem that I sometimes throw at students at seminars, but I tend to soften it up for them as it's unfair to the dogs without all the problems previous to this point.
So, to conclude:
1) only accept an alert when the dog is at the source or as close as they can possibly get.
2) teach the dog how to work through diffusion with skeletal sources then muted tissue problems with pools.
3) teach the dog how to deal with bloody scent traps with no strong scent leaders taking them to the source such that they learn to seek out the source by searching AWAY from the pool.
4) have a targeting mechanism with your dog such that if you suspect it is in pool (and don't know) that you can ask for a target "show me" and the dog should not be able to in pool.
Oh, and I'm just as evil to myself. I set up a problem for my dog under expanded steel with bones above him and no way for him to get up to them. He found them and barked. I knew he found them, but I asked sarcastically, "show me." He did his best to put a paw up to them even though he couldn't raise up. I took it. If he hadn't raised the paw, I would have told him to keep working........ train as your search.
Work blood last if you must work blood.
Follow all of this and the result should be a dog that everyone watches and forgets that you the handler exists.
Hope this helps,
Jim