E39: 줄리 사이몬스(Julie Symons) - "핸들러 디스크리미네이션 & AKC 센트워크"

Awesome. Well, last time you were on the podcast, I know we talked a little about AKC Scentwork. Since today I want to dive a little deeper there, do you mind just starting us out by sharing a little about how the program works? Yeah. The AKC Scentwork program has three divisions. They have their odor search division, which is what we're typically familiar with, with the oils, the birch, the anise, the clove, and they have a new odor cypress. And they have four search elements, containers, interiors, exteriors, and buried. Buried is a new element across any of the venues that I'm aware of. There is no vehicle search in this venue. I think that's actually nice because vehicles are always hard for trials to find, to use, so people don't want to get their cars scratched up or just to get enough volunteers to volunteer vehicles. So that's a nice difference for some variety there. And they have four levels, novice, advanced, excellent, and masters. And then they have the handler discrimination division, which also has the same level, novice, advanced, excellent, and masters, where the target scent is your handler scent. It could be, you know, your dirty sock that's been in the laundry or a cotton item that you scented with your hands. And the first level there is, in novice, is your scented sock or glove that's in a closed box. And then after that, the higher levels are a scented Q-tip or cotton ball that's hidden in an interior, exterior, or a multi-element search area. So we're starting to get some trials out there at the advanced and excellent level. So it's kind of fun to see how that division is going to progress as time goes on. And then they have a detective division, which hasn't been offered yet because there's nobody yet that's qualified, you know, to enter one of those. You have to actually have a master title in one of the other divisions before you can enter a detective division. And it's an integrated search environment with unknown number of hides and a variety of elements. So you could be, you know, indoors with containers or outside and buried with containers. And it's just, you know, multiple search areas, up to 10 hides, all for oil odors. And they wanted to emulate as closely as possible to the work of a true detection dog. So that's going to be a really exciting class once people have trialed enough to get to that level. That sounds awesome. Yeah, yeah. And like with most AKC sports, you're required to get three qualifying scores in each element to earn a title. That's different from what we're typically familiar with with the Nosework Association,

where you have pass all four of the elements. You have to pass vehicles, containers, interiors, and exteriors in the same day, which adds an element of challenge. And you can't have any errors to title. Whereas in AKC, you know, you might, you know, not do as well one day, but then you can get your next score the next day in title. So it's just different. You know, some people think one's easier or harder. And I'm just telling people they're different. They're just different programs that really kind of, to me, result in the same outcome, the same challenges and skill and work involved. You mentioned a little bit in there kind of how it compares to some of the other venues. Is there more you want to say there? Are there kind of more differences or similarities that are kind of worth making sure people know about? Yeah, yeah. I think the skill level is pretty comparable. And some of the other venues have like game classes or specialty classes like speed, like a speed class or a distance class. You can't pass across a line. Or some endurance is where they're going to have like pin hides in a small area. So a lot of venues out there can offer something for everybody. AKC is going to allow spectators. And that's one item that's different from the other venues where they kind of keep things closely monitored where there's less people. And in all venues, you never have another dog out when you're working your dog. So those are the differences that you really want to read up on the rules before you decide. And a lot of the other, you know, not as known venues are starting to get more popular. Some of the California-based, they're sniffing dog sports. They're starting to make their way out here. So there's a lot of fun options so that you can trial more. Because sometimes, you know, I've only trialed sometimes twice a year. And now it's so exciting because there's so many more venues out there that you can get out there and get more experience. And that's just better for you and your dog. So if you're already trialing, if you've already been trialing and knows the work, you're pretty much ready to go into the early levels of AKC. You pretty much have the skills. But you do want to practice the stronger odor because AKC does two drops of oil on these Q-tips, which is quite a lot of odor. It's not too big of a problem. I just think there's sometimes a little bit more pooling odor going on in these search areas. Dogs picking it up off hide and alerting on the fringe. And so they might get a no because they're not close enough. So you want to practice with a stronger odor.

And you also want to practice buried hides. Buried hides is unique of any venue that I'm familiar with. And in some ways, it's straightforward. The dogs generally have no issue. The first level, it's just buried two inches from the surface of sand in a container. So you have six containers. But once you start getting to the advanced and higher levels, it's deeper than it's in the ground. And I think it's just a little different for the dogs. Some different skills that you're going to want to focus on specifically for buried hides. And then the other main difference with AKC is that they have intentional distractions that get pretty challenging at the higher levels. So you have your typical food and non-food distractors in the early levels. But once you get to excellent and masters, they'll have auditory, visual, mimic, and human distractions, which has concerned a lot of people. You know, a lot of sensitive dogs do this sport. And so if you want to, you know, trial in AKC, you definitely want to acclimate your dogs to that, introduce them to these types of things before you're doing a nose work search. So those are some of the things that are different and unique in AKC. And I haven't heard, and we have an AKC judge forum, people really are going to be fair. They're not trying to scare dogs. And the intentional distractors aren't supposed to be meant to scare them. You're not supposed to drop loud, loud pans or slam doors or anything like that. But they're going to have like a flashing light or some toy that turns on when your dog gets close to it or somebody clapping, things like that. Or a mimic is, you know, a statue or a stuffed animal that looks like the real thing. It might make dogs want to go check it out. You can train for those stuff pretty easily. And then I think one of the hardest things for some dogs would be having more people in the search area. So you're already your dog has to learn to work with a judge and a couple of the other helpers are in the search area. But they usually stay off to the side and the human distractor can be actually right in the middle of your search area, you know, sitting or standing. So to me, that's actually something that's very doable to train early on with somebody that you know and let the dogs get used to it. And by the time you're at that level, if you're traveling at the master level, you're not going to have an issue with that. And dogs, from what we find, once they get working, they get so focused on odor that they really, all their worries go away. So those are some of the things you want to look out for.

And I would make sure to read the rules very closely because it describes them in more detail. I mean, that's a good tip for any sport. Oh, yeah. You know, and I find that, actually, that people don't read the rules. And sometimes I feel bad that I didn't tell somebody something in one of my classes. And I'm sure I do at times. Maybe they didn't go to that class. But you have to take the responsibility to read the rules because you'll find something. I mean, I'll find something that I hadn't read, you know, the first time I read it. So that's true. Right. So I want to switch a little bit from outcomes to training. So what challenges are there when training a dog to search for handler scent? You kind of mentioned that. That may not be present when you're teaching traditional odors. Yeah, that's a good question. First, it is just another odor. I mean, we can attack it that way, and it's true. It's just another odor that we teach our dogs. But it is different, and it does have its challenges, especially for savvy nosework dogs that have been on oil for a lot of years. We've seen a little bit of it being a little bit more difficult for them in certain situations. For example, there's no aging handler scent like with the oil odor. So oil hides the nosework venues we've been at. They're usually placed, and they're out there 30 minutes to hours. So the odor is going to disperse more and diffuse into the area. For handler scent, you pretty much give it its last scent. You hand it over to the helper. They place it, and then you go on a run. So the scent's going to have less diffusion in the area. Handler scent's a little heavier, and it's going to fall down more than like a vapor odor oil will disperse the room. And, of course, it depends on airflow. So any kind of airflow is going to travel any scent. It's going to be helpful to your dog if the scent's going to travel into the space. With my dogs and many teams that I've worked in, I found that the dogs have to get a lot closer to where the hide is for handler scent to really hone on it. So in this case, I'm not talking about the novice level in boxes. I'll get back to that. But if they hide Q-tips or a cotton ball in a search area, and your dog really has to get close to it to find it. So what I'm finding is that I'm actually introducing a little bit more of direction with my handler scent, and it's actually helped a lot. And it gets my dog kind of focused and more kind of a pattern search, but just getting them to search. Like, for example, in advanced handler discrimination, it's an interior search, and no hide is higher than 12 inches.

So I'm going to point low. I'm going to be like, have my dog search low. And they find it really easily. And I found when I have blind hides that somebody has set up for me, I feel more liberated to point and direct, whereas if I know where the hide is, we tend to, like, not want to, you know, intervene at all. And my dog finds it quicker because I don't know where it is. And I'm just going to have my dog cover the area, and then I usually find it. So that's been very helpful in the difference with the handler scent. Also, another thing that's really interesting, if you watch dog search, you know, the traditional oil hides in a box, they just find it really easy. You put your scented glove in a box, and the dogs just search differently. They have to go cover the boxes a few times. They just don't hit on it as easily as oil. That oil odor, especially for AKC, is so strong. And that your handler scented item is just not going to be as strong in a box, especially it's not aged. So those are some of the differences and why I think the handler scent is a little bit harder to source for a dog, just because of just the amount of odor that you have and the fact that it's not aged. What additional skills or things do people who have previously taught their dogs on oils need to consider when adding handler scent to kind of their lineup? I guess, what do they really need to think about that might not have occurred to them? Yeah, we actually found this when I taught my first intro to handler scent. It was so fun because we were kind of realizing these things, exactly what you just said. Like, we were realizing, oh, I didn't think about this. A couple of the things are we were really worried about, how can I train in my house? My scent is everywhere. We were really worried about that, but it ended up not being a problem at all because we actually teach our dogs to find our hottest scent, just like we do with obedient scent articles. You're rubbing, you're scenting a hot item. All the other items have been lightly touched by somebody else, so it's your hottest item. So it ends up not being a problem if you've touched stuff in your house or touched a box that you moved around. It just has not messed up any dogs because they are looking for that hot cloud of odor on the highest gradient of odor. So that was kind of neat to realize we could train at home. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, you can reuse boxes. In nose work, if a box is, you put, you know, Q-tips in there, hide in there, it's always hot because if oil gets on cardboard, it's there forever.

Handler scent, I mean, I do keep my hot glove or sock separate. That's always hot, and I throw that in a jar. But for the boxes that I use, if I throw my glove on one of those boxes, once I'm done with that session, I'll just open up my boxes, air them out. So people put them outside on a nice day, let them air out, and you can reuse those. So I don't have to make a box, you know, hot and always hot because we all have so many boxes. Nobody wants to get any more boxes. Oh, the other thing that's really important is if you think about the trial situation. So if you're searching for oil, you know, containers with oil in it, the same container is out there for every dog. So by the time you're at the last of the running order, these dogs, these boxes have saliva on it. They have probably food drops near the hot one. They're pretty kind of traveled. They've been traveled pretty heavily by the other dogs. In handler discrimination, you have your unique box that's pristine. So when the next dog comes in, they take another box that has your glove in it, and they actually, you leave with your box. So when you run and you find your, hopefully you find your hide or not, you leave with their box. Your box is never used for another dog in a trial. So they're pretty pristine when you're trialing. In training, we were all using the same, you know, box just over and over and over, and it had like saliva on it and some food crumbs. And then we realized when we went to a clean box just to switch out to a new box, our dogs really had trouble. And we kind of figured out that the dogs were kind of alerting off the saliva that they had, you know, left on the hot box. So what we've learned is you really, maybe even more so than the oil searches, is to rotate out a new box in your training sessions. So because you're going to have a pristine box that doesn't have your dog, any dog's saliva on it when you go on there. So that was another kind of neat thing that we found out. Interesting. And I know you mentioned your intro to handler discrimination class. When is that up next? That is up in December. So that opens Wednesday is the registration day, and it starts December 1st. Well, Wednesday for us, and we're talking now, for when this airs, it'll have happened already. But, yeah, so registration will be open when they hear this. That's right. That's right. What else is different? Well, you can make things different from your regular, you know, nose or training. You could have a different start line routine, and that's really important. So we kind of discussed that a lot in our classes.

And I decided that I'm going to make my sent searches to be similar than my obedience articles, where you're rubbing your hands because you're senting an article in obedience utility. And so I'm going to rub my hands because my advanced dog knows what that means. So that means, you know, that I'm going to do a pivot and turn and send her. So I'm actually, my start routine for my advanced dog, I actually face away from the search area. I rub my hands like I'm sending an article. I pivot and I send her. And that kind of just gets her into that frame of mind that it's because she turns around and she sees, you know, these 12 or 10 ORC boxes that look like nose work that she's done for five years. My young dog, I'm just facing it and rubbing my hands, and I might put my hand up to his nose and send him on his way. So that's been important. I find to have a different search routine when you're starting to train your dog. Interesting. That's kind of neat that you use your AKC obedience, you know, work to carry over. I wanted to ask if there's anywhere that people tend to really struggle as they kind of work through this stuff. Yeah. I found that people have a hard time kind of reading their dog at source initially when we're starting to, you know, introduce it. Oil odor is strong. You know, the dog can't help but notice it. I think we can build that association quicker with the strong odor. But it really is no different with our scents. You just have to have good timing. You have to – your dog has to actually be sniffing and using their nose. Sometimes when you're starting to get socks or gloves out there, a dog is like, oh, I'm going to pick it up, or they're going to retrieve it, and they're not sniffing. So that's one problem that they have. So we can work on some of that through the class. You're not even waiting for an indication. You're just like the minute they check it out, you're rewarding it. And then they're just going to start understanding that, hmm, this smell keeps giving me food. The other thing is dogs perch. So when you start putting things in containers, and especially we have had more obedient people coming into this area because it relates to them. This sounds like something I'd be intruded in. You know, it's handler stem. I do this in obedience. And those dogs have done a lot of platform and pivot work. So they see these containers and boxes, and they perch on them. So that's one of the problems that we deal with. And tracking dogs. So we had one of my students, it was a great, great experience to have her in the class.

Her dog saw these socks and started downing on them like assent articles. So what, I mean, assent articles, tracking articles. So what we did was we immediately got them in a bowl. We just picked her bowls in the kitchen or whatever. And once we changed that picture to the dog, he started doing much better. Because, again, context is so important that for that dog, it just said, oh, I always down on socks. And that's how we actually teach them article indication. We just lay out some items, and our dog's supposed to go up to them and down on them. So we got creative with dealing with dogs that thought it was an article. That's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was such a great, and it was so good to have her in class, because I think some of the bronze students really, really resonated with that, because they were having the same issues. And then you have dogs who want to retrieve. And it's not really a problem if they're retrieving the right one. I mean, I've always heard if, even in nose work, dogs will retrieve the 10 or the height, and there's nothing more clear when a dog retrieves the fourth. But eventually, you know, they'll never be able to retrieve at a trial, especially handler scent, because it's either in a box or it's pretty tucked away. It'll be a cute zip or cotton ball that they'll hide very well. So unless the dog's not sniffing and they're just, you know, retrieving randomly, then we have to back up and build the value for that odor before we move on. Since you mentioned that, I'm going to jump around to my questions a little bit here. You know, what can students do to help their dog understand the different contexts? You mentioned the retrieve thing. What should students be doing to make sure their dogs understand, okay, in this situation, in this type of trial, you're doing this, in this type of trial, you're doing that. I feel like that's such a complex thing. Yeah. Well, I think, but I think when you get to the final picture, so I think early on when you're training, they look very similar. You know, how you teach scent articles is very similar to how you start teaching oil or you start teaching, you know, the cotton items with your scent on them. Once you start getting to a picture that looks more like the final picture, like a pile of scent articles, they're going to know they're going to retrieve it. And I do think the odor versus handler scent can look similar with the boxes, and that's why the routine, your start routine is really important, as well as, you know, a different search cue.

I had to think long and hard if I wanted to really have a different search cue, and I decided to go ahead and do that. So I did, like, in obedience, I do a find it, so I did a find mine in handler scent, and I've always done search and nose work. So that's how I did it. You know, whether the dog's really going to pick up on that verbal cue, I don't know, but I'm going to be consistent with that, because I do think in the long run that it's going to make a difference. And then gear is really important. I mean, I've had people think tracking dogs shouldn't be doing nose work at the same time. And I get a little bit where one of them is more air scenting, one of them is more ground sniffing, but, you know, dogs recognize that flag out in the field, you know, versus I'm in a classroom searching for, or I have 12 boxes out. I think they know the difference between, you know, I'm going to go check these objects versus I'm going to go run a track in the field. So when you have handler scent now in the mix, I think it's just, if in our minds we realize it's just another odor, whether it's birch, cypress, or handler scent, and we've taught our dogs that those odors will pay, then I think they, with time and some experience, they're just going to be searching for any of those odors. And when they find them, they're going to alert. So that's how I'm approaching it. So you mentioned kind of the start routine in there, and I did just want to quickly ask, at what point in the training process do you start routinely using the same kind of start system or process, I guess? Yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't start that right away. I will start using it when my dog's doing some, like, mini searches. But, of course, the first couple weeks when you're just building value for odor, we're just building value for odor. So I would say maybe halfway or by the end of a six-week class, you're going to start putting a search cue. But, like, with anything, I'm not going to put a search cue to something until they're actively searching. I think the rubbing of my hands, I did start that pretty early because I often would, like, rub the item and then go put it, you know, hide it or something. And that was, oh, it was a warm-up. So we would go place to hide, and then when we were warming up, I'd have another item on me, and I would, you know, warm up with my dog with another. And you can do that. You could actually, at a trial, you know, you give your scented something, you know, item to the steward.

And at the start line, you could actually warm up with another glove and show it to your dog and then have them search. So I think those things just are all going to be context that's going to help your dog. You mentioned earlier a little bit about kind of the idea of pulling from your start routine for obedience into your scent work stuff. And I want to talk a little bit more about how those two things compare. So how does the new scent work program compare to the classic handler scent discrimination task in obedience? Yeah. So, again, we mentioned that contextually they're just very, very different. So when you're going to be in an obedience ring, your dog is going to have done probably an exercise, you know, prior to the scent articles. They're going to see a pile of articles. When you do obedient scent articles, you start off by facing the steward who's jingling the bag and putting the articles down. So right there, your dog is thinking, you know, scent article retrieve. You've also taught them that those articles are what you retrieve. So you've already gone further in that training process to complete that picture of the behavior that your dog is going to do. It's a chain of, in that case, it's a chain of behaviors. You're going to be, you know, pivoting with your dog, sending your dog. You know, they're going to search for scent. They're going to retrieve it. They're going to do a front and finish. So it's all these chains that you've already taught up to that point. And a good thing is a handler scent search looks so different from that. Like I said earlier, I'm more worried about a search area looking similar for oil odor or handler scent odor. That's going to be probably more confusing. But between those two exercises, the obedient scent articles and handler scent, the dog is going to know what they're there for right after that. Does it matter which one somebody trains first? No, I don't think there is any order to that. And if I hadn't mentioned it already, a lot of teams that have come through my class that did obedience are thrilled with their, that have come through saying their obedience scent articles are just better and better. And I think what we're able to do is we're able to play a lot more game in the handler scent work arena before we're even worrying about, you know, retrieves or anything. And we're able to build a little bit more value there. And I'm going to already, and I already have with Drack, teaching him his scent articles differently than I did my previous dogs.

You know, rewarding at source, doing these games, you know, worrying about the retrieve later, but just getting them sniffing. A dog cannot search a pile unless they're using their nose. So we're going to teach them to use their nose. We're going to teach them what odor is valuable. So I don't see any problem with teaching those two at the same time. Are there any concerns at all when training one or the other? If you hope to compete in both sports, is there carryover? I mean, is there anything else that students should know if they're going to do both? A lot of the ways we train carry over to each other. So I think in that way, a lot of the same games and exercises that I do are going to carry over. So I found when I started doing nose work, it helped my tracking dog. It helped her article indication. She started, you know, danging an article and like holding her nose to the article because of nose work. Because I taught her that, you know, reward comes from staying at source, whether the source is, you know, an article on a track or it's oil or now if it's handler scent. And they all really just complement each other. And one thing that I just love is I love this new sport. I love this new division, Handling Discrimination, because it gives us another thing to learn about our scenting dogs and learn about scent and our scenting dogs. And I just think I think they all complement each other. Now, I wouldn't start maybe them on the exact same day, but they can overlap in whatever time frame I think that you have. I have not seen any problems with that. That's certainly reassuring to hear. Yeah. And, you know, that question comes up all the time. You'll see it. It's one of those questions that just resurface. People are really worried about it. And now maybe some dogs, it wouldn't be the right thing to do. I mean, you have to know your dog and you have to know your skills, you know, and you just have to make a decision for yourself for the most part. But I'm here to say context is playing a large hand here. And as a handler, I learn more about scent and scenting dogs by participating in these multiple scent areas because of that. So once you do one, you're just going to be more skilled and be more ready for the other one. To kind of round things out, if someone hasn't taught any handler scent yet, where should they start? What does that process look like? As we mentioned earlier, if, you know, people can sign up for this intro to handler scent course, that would be great on December 1st. But what you would do, if you've done nose work already, then you start the same way.

We use a game called It's Your Choice. I'm not going to hold these scent articles in my hands because my hand actually has the scent. But I get the item on the ground. I just put one item that's heavily scented. The dog tucks it out. I mark quickly and reward. I get quickly the two and three gloves, two cold, one hot, and move them around in the shell game. And then I get, again, quickly I get some more items. Sometimes people get stuck at a few items. And I think dogs do better with more choices. They're going to start using their nose more. So I get up to four to five items, socks or gloves. And what I do is I heavily scented between reps. I do a cookie toss to reset. And then I just move the hot glove and repeat. So you want to get a high rate of reinforcement in a short period of time so they find a scent. And, you know, in a short period of time they're going to hopefully find it like 20 times and you're going to give them a lot of reward for that. So that's very similar to how we teach a nose work scent oil. And the same way that we start out scent articles for obedience. You get these, you know, we get these metal canning lids or I actually use some leather strips that I have. And it's the same way I start that. So if you've never, you know, if you've had some experience in either of those sports, all you've got to do is just go get some cotton gloves, some cotton socks, and play around with the same way you've taught your other scent work. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Julie. It was great. I love talking about this. Awesome. I enjoy teaching it and I enjoy competing and training in it. I think that comes through. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Nancy Gigliardi Little to talk about Startline Stays. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing is provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you.