In this episode of the K9 Paradigm, hosts Pat Stewart and Glenn Cook focus on scent detection training for dogs, sharing insights from their experience and industry leaders like Mike Suttle and Randy Hare. They stress that successful training begins with a clean, clinical environment to prevent scent contamination, where odors can spread and mislead the dog. Key steps include selecting and shaping behavior around a durable receptacle, such as a PVC vessel with inspection caps, and deciding on an indication style: passive (e.g., sitting or staring) is preferred over active (e.g., clawing) to avoid risks with explosives or evidence. A practical technique involves using a glass jar to imprint the dog—shaping it to insert its nose and inhale, which allows trainers to mark the behavior on an inward breath and build a strong foundation. The hosts emphasize combining theory with hands-on practice, as dogs need to understand that a specific odor has value. They warn against common mistakes, such as mishandling scent vessels, which can cause the odor to leach onto other surfaces and ruin training. Overall, the discussion provides actionable advice for novice and experienced trainers, highlighting the importance of precision, early imprinting, and a systematic approach to develop reliable scent detection skills.
What's happening in the K9 industry? For all the latest news, views and expert opinions, stay right here for the K9 paradigm. You'll hear from industry leaders, experts, giants of the industry, learned colleagues, moveers and shakers, and the odd, randy guest. Get the latest insights and expert advice from both here and abroad from the people in the know. Now, here are your hosts, Glenn Cook and Pat Stewart. And I'm Lofty Fulton, and I'm out of here. (upbeat music) Welcome back to the K9 paradigm. I'm your host, Pat Stewart, and I'm joined in studio today by my co-host, Glenn Cook. Welcome back, everyone. Good to have you as part of the show, was always. Are they part of the show? Well, they're listening to it, so hopefully. (laughs) Podcasts is the least interactive media form. Really? Yeah, well, people can just hear us, they can't talk to us. That's why I have a Facebook. People can talk to us there. If you want to talk to us, get on Facebook, you can talk to us there. Okay. So you can talk to us on Facebook, but all you can bring me on the phone if you want. I won't answer it, but. Or you can yell at us in your speakers in your car while you're listening. So what are we talking about today? Today's topic is going to be on sent detection. It's an interesting topic, one that I'm very passionate about. I've been involved in it for quite some time. I've had quite a good career working with some of the world's best, including people in Australia and around the world. Yeah, right. Who's the world's best? Well, that's debatable. As always. As always. And I guess the reason why, rather than trying to be elusive about the question, what I will say is that you can currently be the world's best until somebody takes your place. However, there are people like Randy here. Mike Sottles brilliant at it. There's been people like Glen Ard Johnson in the past. He did the Alaskan pipelines and taught dogs to detect microfishes in that sort of work. But again, it's what are we talking? We're talking nose works. Yeah, it's true. It's a difficult to quantify. That's right. To quantify their loaded question. Well, it is. It's a load of question because there's so many fields like there is in everything. Who would you say would be the world's best IPO trainer? Who would be the world's best ring sport trainer? You've got your opinion on that. Other people have their opinion on that. And that exists in the same field in sent detection. Yeah, of course. So what I did want to do is as we teach this as a very small component in the NDTF course, I've got half a day to work with students on trying to get them up the speed on sent work. And all I'm literally doing is giving them an on tray of the main course. It's like it. Well, I wouldn't even call it an on tray. I'd call it a tapestish. So yeah, it's a very small snapshot of something that is incredibly important to try and get people's head around how to prevent issues in their sent work in a dream world to teach the theory. How long would you like two days? Right. Yeah, to properly go through it because it's not one of those things that I think is complemented on doing the theory alone. I think you really need to have the theory. Not think no, that you really need to have the theory combined with the physical instruction. So you it's basically the whole walk and talk scenario. We're talking about it and then showing people what to do and then going back to the theory and then going back to the practical and it's yo-yoing backwards and forwards. It's an element that really needs to work in conjunction with each other. Well, that's something that we're speaking about, Mike Sutter, when he's been here, we've been lucky in the past that Andrews had, who brought him out, had puppies. Yep. And so you could talk about something and then show it. Yeah. And that is the brilliant part of it. It gives people a wonderful insight where if they're confused about the actual theory behind it, they can actually look at the practical and then it makes sense. Because there's some people who are highly academic. When you explain something to them in an academic model, they actually get it straight away. Whereas other people, they're not, they're practical, they're tactile. They actually need to touch things, feel things, see things. And all student groups are different and I'm the same. There are some things that you can talk to me about and it's just like talking in a different language. When I actually see it and it translates into real time, then I'm getting the message. And we're fundamentally all like that as students of anything that we're actually doing. So I like to do the same thing with sent detection work. Now sent detection work can be quite simple, but it can be messed up very easily as well. And this is one of the things that I wanted to sit down, have a talk with, especially with you. I know you've done some sent work as well. But for the enjoyment of our people who listen to the podcast, if they are actually going to get out there and start working on anything, there's a few good things that they can start to do to avoid creating problems for themselves. And one of those areas is setting up a clean environment in order to teach the dog how to identify what it's doing. So explain that clean. Okay. Let me start in a little bit of a different environment first and then I'm going to get to that point. So the first thing that people need to do in order to teach the dog successful sent work is teach the dog how to behave around the receptacle or around the scent that they actually try and develop with the dog. So let's say for example, I've selected a no-der, which I have to do in order to teach my dog sent work. It has to be an isolate odor, not something that's combined with a lot of things, but something significant. So I've got a no-der that I'm, let's say for example, I'll use the nose work soda that they usually start with in their level one, which is birch. It's pretty indistinguishable from everything else. On birch, talk about indistinguishable. Irak and I could pass nose work's level one because it's, it's birch is so powerful. It is. It's a bunch of no-der. It's a very pungent owner and I mean I can smell it. I'm a nose work judge in Australia. So I can smell it when it's been laid out. I can walk past and it is significant to everything else. And with our limited ol factory, which I'm going to talk about as well as part of this podcast, one thing I do want to talk about is that you can smell it. Yeah. As you've said, it's indistinguishable. As soon as you walk past that you can smell like a sweet type of smell. And birch is. By toothpaste. Yeah, it is. It's birch is also, I think, xylitol actually, which is a sweetener actually comes from the birch byproduct. Yeah. So it's a sweetening agent that they use in coffee and tea and cooking, etc. Yeah. A no sugar sweetener. Correct. And it has a different effect. Narels is probably a really good person to talk about the whole breakdown of xylitol. Yeah. And what I do have to mention too is that xylitol is actually toxic to animals. Yeah, right. So it is actually I believe it's a neurotoxin to dogs. I can verify that. I sure. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, you've got to be very careful with xylitol and dogs. It's toxic to them. I'm not sure about birch, but it's not something that they're supposed to be getting to and. They shouldn't be the licking. They shouldn't be. This is the thing, one of things in scent development as well is that dogs shouldn't be interacting with the scent. Okay. So for example, if you were teaching a dog in bio security, canto detected dog or anything. The last thing you want your dog to do is go chasing down cantoes, biting them and then getting poisoned by their venom glands. Yeah. So things like that, you need to be quite mindful of. This is why I say to people and students and anyone who's doing good scent detection work that you need to be very mindful about how you're developing the behavior to start with. And as anything that you're starting off in that type of work is, is you're learning to shape a skill around a desired behavior. So for example, I don't even have to put the scent in first, but I would. And I'm going to talk about that too. So I know I'm sort of jumping, leaping all over the place. But one thing I do have to say is you could have an empty receptacle or a vessel or whatever you want to call it. And you could teach a dog how to behave around that before any scent was even put in it. However, I would want that admitting scent from the get go point not if you know your odor, you may as well start with it. Very, very learned people. And this is a good trick that I learned from Mike Suttle was that he starts doing it from the minute he's starting to feed puppies. He's got like a feeding bowl for all the pups. It looks like a hubcap. And he drills holes around the top layer and he inserts his scent underneath that. So while the puppies are in early development, they're starting to associate when I'm getting fed this smell is a meeting. So it's like a Pavlovian effect for them, which is very smart. And this is when people are paying attention to what they're doing. So what we want to do is we want to have a select vessel, something that is very convenient. It's not going to break. It's something that you can wash easily. So if you want to eliminate that odor, you can stick it in a mild bleach bath or something like that, which will eliminate the scent. It won't contain the scent long term, but it will act as a very efficient vessel, something will stop the dog from breaking it apart, getting in there. So I usually use PVC and what they call inspection caps that I find at Bunning. So I go out there and start creating my own little creations. And I can put pictures up. You've seen them. All sorts of things that I've used. I've helped students do it. I've helped my boss's son do it for a school project where we were teaching truffle detection. And like I said, very easy to find. You can go to Bunnings, you can go to any local hubs, weir store and just muck around for a period of time. If you do want to get Mike Suttles, I know I'm mentioning Mike a lot because I'm possibly - because you love him. - Because I love Mike. - Well, he's a send detection guru. - He is, very much so. And he does it as a professional career for some serious players over in the United States and worldwide. He trains dogs for people and sends them out. Like Randy here does as well. I love Randy's system. Spend a bit of time with Randy. Talk with him here and there. So there's a lot of guys who have really looked at this as a long-term perspective.
effective and thought there's room for improvement here. So what they have all done is they've created their own systems and very effective ways of teaching dogs how to hunt for sand. So first and foremost, I know we've jumped in there this, but first and foremost, you've got to shape your dog around behaving around the receptacle. And that is to come in and smell it and then start to behave in a certain way. So what type of indication are we teaching our dogs? So we can look at various types of indications. The most popular one is what we call passive indication where the dog comes in and sits or drops or stands and stares at it or whatever it is over an active indication where the dog starts to claw and pour at it. And there's various different schools of thought there. People say, "Well, I like an active indication because I want the dog to be in high drive and very enthusiastic." But a dog can still do that with a passive indication. And if you're teaching explosive detection, it's less likely that it's going to interfere with the explosive and create an explosion which kills everyone in the process. Yeah, I would say something controversial that might upset people. I think most people that say they like an active indication don't know how to teach a passive indication. That will upset people. And I'd have to agree with you. I don't think a dog needs to do an active indication. And if there's anybody that has suggestions why it does, I'd love to hear from you. Yeah. Because I just can't think of a circumstance where my job relies on a dog finding something and then I want him to claw at it and smash it. Because if it's explosive, as you're about to say, now he's interfering with an explosive. And if it's drugs and some police is now tampering with later what I'll use of evidence. And if white chance is sniffing for cocaine, he like rips the bag open as he's indicating and gets a nose full of cocaine, now I'm dealing with the jacked up dog who wants to go on a party and then do a poo. Okay. Why the poo? Never mind. Okay. So the way. Okay. So the people will understand. Some people will understand. Oh, this is a cocaine user drug. Okay. Not that I'm a cocaine user. I'm regular drug tester. It's not. I'm not a drug user. I'm not saying you are. But you just never say people like they use their can. Okay. And now I've got a shit. No. That's been my observation. Maybe we need to actually do a podcast on it. If you're a regular cocaine user and you'd like to come on and explain whether you need a poo straight after. But no, Joe, aside, I think that last thing you want is a dog actually inhaling or damaging. You don't. The thing that you're looking for. Yeah. You do not. And with an active indication you're increasing the likelihood of that. Yeah. There is. And like I said, the reason why we have this receptacle, an active indication, do we say that it is clawing and biting and smashing around with it with the thing when they find it? Yeah. Where the passive indication is just staring in a sit down stand, whatever it is. It's whatever behavior you shape. Yeah. So you could have the dog downing in front of it. You could have the dog standing in front of you. You could have the dog sitting in front of it or just doing like a pointer does where it indicates that there's birds ahead, not to give it away. And which effectively is a model of detection. Yeah. They found the quarry they've located it and they're showing the hunter it's over there. By whatever means that you want to do for your process of indicating, you can do that quite fine. You need to shape that behavior. So we, in the course, you've done this with people, you've taught, I've done it with people, I've taught and people all around the world have taught people how to shape simple behaviors, how to bring a dumbbell back, how to bring, how to go and touch a light, how to just touch your hand. Come on, do a nose poke on your hand. You can do exactly that same thing. Now, but did something which I liked and I've adapted that into my early modeling, which is the glass jar method where he sits with a glass jar on his lap with the scent buried deep in the back of the glass jar and he teaches the dog, he shapes the dog into sticking its nose in the glass jar. So he can actually watch the dog doing an inhale. I think that is brilliant. And I've now adapted that in and I now teach it that as part of the course to the students where I show them the glass jar on my lap. I hold it down with my hands and I start getting the dog to put its nose in and teach the students to incrementally teach the dog, stick and hold its nose in there and start breathing. It's a great way because it forces the dog to close its mouth on its own. It's like muzzle train teaching dog to come and stick its head in the muzzle. The dog is doing that with the glass jars. You could have your odor up the back of the glass jar, have the dog come in and just start learning how to not pant when it gets in there but to actually pace itself and to start breathing in a very controlled manner before it gets anywhere. I love it. I really do. And it's one of the, it's so simple. It's such a simple thing. It made a big difference to my early approach in installing this behavior into the dog. The glass jar, I like for a few reasons, glass is very easy to clean and get completely clean. Yeah, it is. And you can go even a step further and the dog's got his head in there and you can mark on an inwards breath because you can actually see that. You can see and hear it. Yeah, you can hear it. You can see the glass will fog on the edge. The jar amplifies the sound as well. So it's a good system. And it's very easy. You just sit there and everyone's got a glass jar. You can use any kind of jar because as I say, glass is very easy to clean and get totally clean. Like absolutely have it back to nothing but glass and get even your cleaning agent, you detergent and that sort of thing can come off glass. Yep. So yeah, carry on. So that's a new part of the training that I'm now quite encouraging all the students to actually partake in and stealing the original work with the dogs is that we start with the glass jar training. So a lot of, you know yourself Pat, you can't get a level where you're dealing with baby puppies where you're starting to imprint. Okay. So the actual turn that we use, the industry turn that we use in that type of training is we're trying to imprint the behavior and the dogs from an early age. Yep. So I'm trying to do that with the dogs as soon as I can get them, as soon as the students are aware of what we're doing, we're trying to imprint. It's imprinting the knowledge of there's a smell here and the dog has no idea what it is. Okay. So this, but that there's value in that smell, but there's value in the smell. So the dog is just thinking, well, I'm just sticking my head in the glass jar. Yep. At this very point, the dog is still unawares to what it's actually doing that it's about smell. It still is, it has no clue what it's all about at this very point in time. Yep. So this is where, now I know again, I know that I'm leaping around here. But this has to form part of a big picture. So I'm now going to talk about something before I answer the riddle of why does the dog not understand that smelling something. And before I talk about that, I have to talk about scent contamination because this is one area that completely destroys dogs in scent work and completely befuddles anyone, any students all around the world because they can make a complete mess of it. And what they do is they tend to see a student will look at it or anybody who's doing any type of training, they'll look at it from this point of view. They'll go in there and think to themselves, what I'm doing is teaching my dog to smell this odor. So they'll set it up and they'll put the odor in the vessel and they'll start teaching the dog how to behave around the vessel. What they don't realize they're doing is as they're handling that vessel and they're storing it is that the scent is leaching out onto everything else. So what you've got to think of is when you've got scent inside something, it's like containing an octopus and that octopus is looking to get out. So it's wriggling around, thrashing around and it's touching other things and sliming all over everything as it's trying to escape from it. So it's the tendrils of an octopus spreading out along the room. Now that source of scent is always going to be rich at the primary location. However, it's going over everything. So when we're teaching a dog, the origins of scent work, what we have to do is be very clinical about what we're doing. We have to be clean. So it's almost like you're in a laboratory wearing a white coat and you're making sure that if you spill something, then you take your jacket off and you throw it in the laundry and you start over again. So students need to be clean when they're doing these type of things. Now people have argued, well, how clean do I have to be? How fastidious do I have to be in this line of work? That's a good question. So if you want to win, if you want to do well, if you want to make a sensitive dog, then you have to be very clean about what you're doing. If you're in explosive detection, there are no excuses whatsoever. Okay. So things like narcotics and explosive detection where people are being arrested or you're determining whether a ship or a plane is going to get blown out of the sky or bringing down a building, etc. Well, then there's an expectation that you have a very, very high standard and high level about what you're doing. I think the highest standard as well as that accelerant detection, right? Because it is. That indication by the dog can be used as evidence to steal your, I'm wanting your phrases. It's one of the wavetops. Yeah. That's incorrect. That's not right at all. So you totally fucked me with your army terms and now I don't know what I'm talking about. Now you got to tell me what the wavetops are. The wavetops are when you're just talking about like a little bit, a little bit, we're just going to talk about the top bit of each thing. Well, this is the top. No, that would be a poignant point. Okay. All right. So yeah, we've established it. We've established it. It's not on a wavetop. It's on a wavetop. No. Okay. So we'll call it an apex point. Yes. Okay. So it's the zenith, the apex point. Yeah. Explicit detection is the apex point on making sure you have absolute certainty in the dog that it's that scent and only that scent that I'm looking for. Yeah. You don't want any confusion in the dog's mind. They have been recorded cases. I'm not going to name and shame anyone because I don't know.
it's funny, but there have been agencies that have in narcotics all over the world. It's not, but there was one in Australia where the dogs were working on an odor and it was six months work that had to be scrapped. And I believe that the whole program, even the dogs had to be taken out of the program and recovered. It was a news program, so I'm not talking out of school. It was actually broadcast nationally. It's those things itself. You didn't say because the dogs were indicating on a cutting agent, right? Yeah, that's right. They were indicating the cutting agent, not the actual odor, the actual source odor itself. So for people listening, how do they identify that? So in your imprinting of your source, you want to remove every possible variable. Any variable that you can possibly think of, so you need that source odor in the most purest form that you could possibly get it. And this is where there's an argument for high quality pseudos and so forth is that they replicate the source odor as pure as it possibly can. The problem is, let's take narcotics, for example. If you go and seize narcotics off the streets and you store it and then someone comes in and goes, well, we've got big, you know, like a kilo of coke or something like that sitting in our locker room and our evidence locker. That's a one. So sitting in the evidence locker and your commanding officer comes and goes, well, I've got a kilo of coke sitting in there. Let's just use that. How do you know that it hasn't already been pre-cut? Yeah, that's right. Okay, so and there's a good chance that it possibly has. So if it has been pre-cut, will you bring that dog in that was on sent and knows how to party and you get him to taste it until you, hey, what's the what's a purity of this? And we just like it like if he poo straight up. It's good. It's good. It's good. No, that is the risk of using any street level or capture. It is because you don't know how the cutter actually is like and to test that is expensive and difficult. Well, it is and the difference, the outcome is is that now you have a dog that is uncertain of what it's looking for. Yeah, well, no, you are uncertain of what the dog is looking for. He knows exactly what he's looking for. Good point. And yeah, more to the point, the dog does because that's what he's been trained on, that's what he's been rewarded on. So in a roundabout way, we're explaining that you don't know what he's smelling. So you have what you do when you know he's not finding it. Yeah, but so then you're teaching a dog to find a scent. You have to remove all the variables that he could be looking for anything other than the scent that you have. And when you, if you have your scent, you're using birch and you put it in the glass jar. The glass is not probably not a meeting much of a no-da, but what clean the glass certainly is. So when the dog puts his head in there, he goes, I smell birch and I smell detergent. Yep. And both those things have value to me at this time. Right. And then he doesn't know that the birch is important until now there's two glass jars and they have to be that's 100% identical. That's the only thing that's separate. And that's the point. That's the pointy point of all this. Keep going. You can talk about it. So you know what you're saying. So now my dog is consistently and happily sticking his head into my glass jar. Yep. Contains my odor. Yeah. Nothing else. I've cleaned it as much as I possibly can. So it's got birch and detergent. Yep. Yep. And now I bring out a second glass jar that has never had birch in it, but was cleaned with the exact same detergent. And touched by the same people and stored in the same location. So everything went the same. Same, same. Same. And my dog sticks his nose into that one. Yep. Expecting to be rewarded. And he doesn't. Yep. Through frustration, pool of these nose out puts it in the other one because they're right next to each other and does get rewarded. And at that point, he goes, what was different about that one to the other? It was the birch. There was a point of difference and it was that. And so to actually have trained your dog to identify scent, the only point of difference can be the thing you want it to find. Correct. And that's when you get a synaptic explosion in front of your dog's head where the dog goes, holy shit, that's the only time that it ever makes 100% sense to the dog when the dog realises I'm only being rewarded not for sticking my head in, not for breathing, not for anything else. Like all this is great and I have been rewarded for it in the past. But now when I do it, if I stick my head into the jar that doesn't have that unique odor in it, the only one because it's not in there, it's not present. There's nothing. There's no contamination, which is why I've been leading on to this importance of a clean environment. There's no chance of contamination. There's no residual odor in it, which means that there was no, it wasn't stored with it overnight and a little bit of odor and leech in there and get stuck in the bottom of the jar, which like I said, it's like an octopus tendril. Once that happens, all of a sudden the dog goes, oh my god, it's the scent, it's the smell. And it's that particular odor. The clean odor, the sour soda, the only thing that differentiates everything from the picture and finally gets the clicker to go off and the dog gets rewarded. And this goes into Sapolsky's theory of when a dog has the highest level of dopamine. You know, I mean, the dog will be excited about all this because it's doing the work and it feels very excited about it. But then finally bang, the clicker goes off and the dog goes, it's the fucking odor. That's the birch. That's what's different. That is all very easy to explain. They're doing is a lot more difficult and it always is because now he's just one variable, right? So you are putting your birch into that jar somehow. Yep. It's probably on a q-tip. Yep. So now when you have an empty jar, great point, when you have an empty jar and the dog doesn't get rewarded and he does from the one with the birch in it, is he identifying the birch or is he identifying the q-tip? You don't know. We don't know. So that's a variable that has to be removed. So when we say that the jars have to be identical. Yep. They have to be identical in every way. So now we have a q-tip in the empty non-target jar that doesn't contain birch. So now that's the same thing. Then you do know. Then you can rule out it's the q-tip. Yeah. And that's even an easy way of explaining it. That's just one of the variables. Now you're probably wearing gloves when you look when you're in non-target as well. That's to name these things, your birch is what we call target odor. So that's an industry term. So we call that target odor. Your q-tip is a non-target. Your gloves have to be a non-target. So anything like you're going where you're going with this, anything that you can identify, I've used this along the way. I've touched the jars with it, has to be put into jars at some stage. So you can rule it out that the dog is going, it's not bad, it's not bad, it's not that. It's a 100% birch. Yep. In the world, in the practical world where we live and you're setting this sort of thing up, you'll probably get it. Everyone knows, oh yeah, I wear gloves when I'm handling my target odor so that I don't contaminate myself and therefore touch other things. But what you then do is contaminate the vessel of your target odor or part thereof with the center for gloves. So now with those gloves, you have to contaminate everything else. But you've just held the target odor with those gloves on. And if you then go and contaminate everything with your touch gloves, you're now contaminating your target. Yeah, really good finding else. So there's a strict process to setting up. It's like lab work. Yeah. You are now involved in the world of science and in training and you are a scientist. And what a lot of people don't understand, certainly I didn't until I delved deep into this and made mistakes with dogs and had them finding odd things, is that when you see someone working a dog and I'd seen before I had trained any detection, I'd seen loads of detection dogs working in the army, you don't have to be that careful with the dog that knows what it's doing. Once the dogs are in scent, people get sloppy and you can handle things and with a really good dog that knows he's sent and has been imprinted correctly, you don't need these such strict procedures. It's good if you can do it and you should. But the reality is a really good dog knows what it was looking for and finds it, no matter who's handled it, no matter how it's been done and you can contaminate and dogs figure out, especially with narcotic dogs. You just got to make sure you don't have any extinction processes in place. Exactly. Where the dog hasn't done it for such a long period of time, you've then got lazy and sloppy and you've developed some pretty bad routines. Especially you sit with narcotic dogs, people almost intentionally get a little bit sloppy because you don't want the dog indicating on trace elements because that's not worth your while to find it's a pain to ask to find actually. Whereas the explosives dog you want him indicating on no matter how small odor, no matter how small a trace element of finds, you do want to know about that. No, narcotics, you don't want to know about that. So some people can afford to get a bit sloppy. So when you're watching someone with a fully trained dog, they don't go through all this bullshit because they don't need to. They could and it would be better if they did, but they don't need to. So but when you're doing it for the very first time, when you're imprinting the odor, you need to remove every single possible variable, everything. Anything that is not what you want the dog to find either needs to be not there at all or on everything. Yep. And even your storage procedures, like I said, once you've got a like what we call a hot jar, okay, something that's contaminated, it needs to be stored independently. Yeah. However, if you then go and store that in a night, in a location that's got all different odors, then again, that initially that creates a problem for you. So then what I recommend people do is let's say for example, I've created something from Bunnings like a PVC receptacle. Okay. So I've created something like a sent tube. A sent tube. Oh, yeah. If you go to Facebook, look at the video, the photos, look at all photos of sent tubes, the ones that you've made from Bunnings, I've got a set of mics ones that are excellent. Yeah, they're really good. They're just different sites, fittings that you can't get in Australia. So I recommend getting them. They are worth getting from Mike. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to, if you want to get some for yourself, if you're really interested in doing it, go to Mike's web page, which is Logan House. Yeah, Logan House kennels or dog on all over. Logan House kennels, I think. You'll find it if you Google that and then to get us about HA US. We'll put a link up.
it anyway. To get him delivered to Australia, looking about 300 bucks for him. Yeah, and they're well worth it. They're really good stuff. And it looked to be honest, if you looked at the time it would cost you to go out into a hardware store, yeah, to find anything that was remarkably like that and create it and drill it and stuff like that, by the time you spent doing that and just ordered it off mic subtle, it would be, and while we're loving on mic, it comes with instructions on how to use as well, which you don't get anywhere else. And you can, there's a lot of YouTube clips on mic as well. So you can actually go on there and have a good look yourself. All right, so put Mike's pocket back inside of his pants. We'll stop holding onto that. Carry on. I actually know what that means. You know that one. Yep, I know that one. That reminds me of prison break when I think, yeah, talking about contamination. Oh yeah, contamination. So storing of your receptacle or your tube or whatever you're using. There's actually a good clip that I like to show students from a colleague Gary Jackson. When years ago Gary did a lot of cent work and he's still involved in it, but he had a bio-archeology dog that was detecting ancient Aboriginal bones and so forth. There are. Amigilou, I think the dog's name was. That dog was trained to actually go out and find ancient Aboriginal burial sites and find the bones. So yeah, he was interesting. Yeah, it was. It was very interesting. Gary's done koala conservation. Conservation, yeah. So bio-ecology or effectively comes under the conservation banner where he was looking for introduced species that were not supposed to be an Australia. So there's several people who have done it in Australia. Gary being one of them, but in particular, the reason I'm talking about Gary is because he did a video under multinational canine. If you look up old factory cent contamination, you'll find his video. We'll put this on our Facebook page anyway. So we reduce everyone having to look for it and not be able to find it. But it's a good video and it really, one of the things I'm impressed about it and I've spoken to Gary about this was he outlined in a simple practical thing where he dressed in like a hazmat suit and he had dye in his hands and he was as he was touching everything, he could show the pathway in where he was leaving this trail of dye all over the place. And this is what people don't realize when they're doing cent works. A lot of people who have never been shown well or explained to well, this is one of their areas where they really muck it up. And it's a simple thing, but often so badly overlooked by some really intelligent people. And it's not because they're dumb, it's just that they don't understand it. And they think to themselves, well, this should be fairly simple. And then it completely removes the dog's ability to identify what we've been talking about and we've made a good foundation in discussing this point, but it removes the dog's ability to identify I'm on this odor specific to what we're looking for. So the dog doesn't have the right idea of what it's looking for. It thinks I'm doing the right thing because that's what it's been shown to do. So I have this thing that I do with people. It's done a few times when people have asked me to help them get a dog started in nose works. We do a session where the dog's not there and the target odor is not there, but we set up how we're going to do everything. And I use dry ice. So I use a yeah, that's good. A portion of dry ice. And we say, okay, where are you going to keep these things when you're not using them? Where are they stored? So we set it all up and now into what's going to be the target odor vessel. Yep. We put a bit of dry ice and they watch what replicates pretty closely the scent where it goes and the travels and they get caught out of it. Yeah, it's climbed down and almost every time it contaminates their other articles, their other tubes and say, okay, now that this is not going to work. We need a better system. It needs to be lower. You know, you're just simple stuff like, you know, the molecules are likely going to fall. Yep. So your non-target tubes need to be in a place higher than your target tubes. Yep. Just a simple thing like that can totally change it. And we can then and with the dry ice experiment, you can see how scent pools and all that sorts of things. Well, anyone who's been to a nightclub and seen a smoke machine. Yeah, that's what scent looks like. Yeah. And that's effectively that's colored scent. Yeah. Okay, it's just showing you where it falls and how it like it travels around the room and when people walk through it, how it the air shifts and it changes and it moves in clumps and these are all factors affecting how well we're going to set up a scent scenario. So what even drafts in a room when we're doing things, we've got to realize is how strong is that draft? What's it doing with the scent? It's a worthwhile experiment. If you if you want to get into nose works or something like that and just so that you can understand like when you see a dog doing what we call like working a scent cone, like where you can see their on scent for the haven't found the source, it's worth doing a little experiment with like something you can see like dry ice or something like that so that you can understand how these things move around and you can visually see because there's no way you could detect that the way a dog can and imagine that that what you're seeing, the dog is also seeing but in a thing that you can't see when it's just scent. They can they can their interpretation. We think is probably similar when they're using their nose. They can feel the thickness of it in certain areas that same as you can perceive that with your eyes. Yep, with the smoke and they'll follow that around it. It's worth noting for anyone that will work a dog and if you're going to compete in nose works or whatever because you can see like all it pulls in corners and that kind of thing. So you see dogs that will will start sort of working a cone and then work out of it. I think the importance of what you're talking about is that paint a mental picture for you so you can actually perceive for see things from the dogs point of view for a little while. Yeah, yeah, it's worth doing I think. That's a most important thing not just in sent detection but but anything any area where we're trying to communicate with a dog. See one of the things that we've got to ourselves come to terms with is we don't smell anywhere near as intensified as what a dog does. No, no. So our our factory system is considerably limited to the power of what a dog does. So the way I like to try and explain it to people is the way that we think and have this but the way we think and have this ability of deductive reasoning and our our advanced cognitive abilities over other animals is the same way a dog smells. So it's a large part of its brain. It's all factory low. It's 10% of its brain where it's a house is like a like a minor percentage of that. So it's perceived and not fully understand but it's perceived that a dog can detect up the one part per trillion or more. So to my understanding of that correct me from wrong is that we can't replicate what a dog can smell so we don't actually know exactly how well they can detect. Correct. Right. Dr. David Abemmi, I think that's how you produce his last name who's the inventor of St. Logix. He gave a very good point at a lecture that I went to of his a while ago and I use this model because I think it's an excellent way of thinking about it. He said let's compare how we smell a hamburger. What is the most prominent smell and for most people it's the cook meat. So you smell the meat and often meat or sauce. To the dog the dog is smelling the sesame seeds, the actual yeast, the flour, the grain, each vegetable that was in it. What was used to clean the vegetables with any detergent that was used on it. So the dog goes through the individual line items of what's actually in that hamburger where we're just smelling the most common. The hamburger. Exactly. So we smell the prominent smell. The dog is smelling the individualism of it. There was an arson dog that I was watching footage of years and years ago where the dog was entering a building where they believed somebody had lit a fire which they had they proved that it did have. The dog was indicating at various different locations around the building and they had a problem with that because they couldn't actually find or they couldn't determine is this the point or origin point where the blade started or is it here or is it here because the dog was having multiple hits. So what they the guy who was the handler and this is when you know your dog and the start of the process I talked about people who pay attention. He said I know this dog and this dog is trained on this odor. It understands it very very well. I believe in this dog. So what they did was they took away sections of the carpet and the area where they found inside this where the dog was indicating inside this zone. So they took away sections of the floor and they analyzed the lab. What they found was some of the glues that we used to bind the carpet to the floor where some of the same in petrochemicals which we used in lighting the fire. So they actually found that the dog was indicating at an atomic level. So what they had to do was go back to the drawing board and train and isolate chemicals from the glue from petrochemicals so the dog in the future wouldn't be confused about what it was looking for. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. It's such a fascinating field and so I still think they're like I said, they still think the jury's out and that we're learning a lot from it. Yeah. I remember reading an article, it was many years ago now, so they probably solved this puzzle but they had a dog. I think it was in France, it was a malle that was indicating on prostate cancer. Yep. You're in samples and they were about to sort of call the programmer a flunk because a dog was consistently indicating on a sample that was a non-target sample and the dog kept doing it and they were like, well, something's going on and they retested and retested the guy who'd given the sample and he had no signs of cancer and the guy actually became so paranoid by the idea that he did, that he had a biopsy and he did have prostate cancer. Wow. So the dog was detecting it at a level before any other intervention could other than a actual biopsy. Yep. Which I think is pretty fascinating. And then what I think a lot of people missed and they only glossed over the articles like, I don't think we're ever going to have cancer detection dogs. I think the
The path for that is they're like, okay, that dog can tell these are cancer in this normal cell there. Yeah, what is it? And now we need to find a way to detect that artificially mechanically, however. Because I think the idea of having cancer detection dogs is probably unrealistic, but the proof of it was the dog can tell the difference at a level before we can in any current intervention. We need to figure out how he's doing that. What is it that he's smelling? What is the thing that we can isolate and test for ourselves? And at that time, I read this article a long time ago, they hadn't figured that out. One thing that we do know for sure, through once again paying attention and observation, is that dogs can track for kilometers looking for prey without any human intervention whatsoever. I mean, they've been genetically modified themselves. Yeah. Or what did we call that? We call it, um. Well, that's evolution. Evolution. So, yeah, so their evolution over hundreds and hundreds or thousands of years have determined that there's a lot of animals, dogs, pigs, anything that's a predatory type of animal can hunt and detect prey. I mean, look at, take, for example, polar bears that can hunt through sheets of ice in a climate which usually limits any type of odor whatsoever. They can actually find seals and penguins through half a meter of ice and smash down and grab them out of the water. So, we're talking about something that we have no comprehension on how that actually works. So, for us, we kind of look at sent detection ourselves as we can smell things, of course. We can smell all sorts of odors, one of our prominent centers, but nowhere near as prominent as what the dog sees. Yeah. All right, so, on. So, we understand that. We've spoken about how to imprint the odor, how to isolate the odor. Yep. So, you think your dog's on odor? You're all using his the tubes. He's sticking his head in non-target tubes and moving on quickly and then sticking his head in a target tube and carrying out the behavior that you've taught, whether whatever that is. Yep. What's the next step? So, the next step from there is once we have established that the dog is on odor and we know we can see that. So, various different receptacles are working. What we then need to do is start being clever about where we're actually putting the odor. For example, we wouldn't have something obvious sitting in the middle of a room like a scent tube or something like that where the dog is just running in and going, "Oh, stick my nose in one of these, it's bound to be in one of them." What we would then do is start making it tricky for the dog. So, we would hide it in a location, simple at first, and then start advancing that as we're starting to go along. For example, it's like what I always tell anybody, criminals or terrorists aren't stupid about what they do. They put some time and effort into thinking about where they're going to hide things and how they're going to mask it or camouflage it, because they're pretty aware that at some stage, somebody's going to bring a dog over this and there's a chance that it could spoil what I'm trying to do. Stop me from getting my drugs in, stop me from killing hundreds of people by blowing a bomb up. I know that's the morbid side of things. Even things like termites. Termites don't sit in scent tubes in the middle of your room. They're hiding in the wall somewhere. So, for a termite detection dog, same principle applies. It's just a no-da. One of the things I do tell people is that there's a lot of people out in the industry who build this mistake about what the dog is looking for. Like they try and make it like it's so different from everything else. Bullshit. Let's take the. This is like the Wizard of Oz, where once you draw away the curtain, there's a little guy standing there pushing levers and buttons. This magician, projector, that's all wise and wonderful up on a screen, but it's just a guy. It's the same thing. It's just odour. It's just a no-da. No matter what. No matter what. No matter what the odour. I mean, a good dog and a good handler is a good dog and a good handler. But once you pull the mistake away from it, the reality is, it's just a no-da. It doesn't matter if it's. You title it, you can call it the grand pu-bar of all odours that ever walk the earth. Like they do in the history of their. Hit Chikers Guide to the Galaxy. They ask this question, which is the all-meaning knowing question of the universe. And it's come back to 42. So the reality is, it's an odour. We're teaching the dog to look for an odour. And you can put. You can instill any odour that you can think of. Birch, cocaine, ammonium nitrate, which is an explosive, teramites, detergent, detergent, animals, seeds, whatever. Fire ants. Fire ants. Doesn't matter. Anything. Insert odour here. That's what we're talking to. I think I've made that point very clear. We've made that point clear. We're moving on now. The dog is now on odour. What we need to do is teach the dog that it's not going to be in a simple location. And now you need to start working for it. Now you need to really need to start hunting for it. So we start, like I said, elementary at first. Teach the dog basic finds. And we start making it different from there. So it could be in a corner of the room. It could be behind the door. It could be under a wheel arch. It could be under the floor. It could be under the earth. It could be up in the ceiling. It could be in one of the walls. It could be on a person walking by. What you then need to do is realize that it's not going to be in a location convenient to you. You have to go and actually actively find it. I.e. like a dog or a wolf would have to do. It was hunting something in nature. It's got to actively go out and search for it. So to be specific, I do that two ways. First is to get Mike's pocket back out and hang on to that again. Okay. Where he calls these point to point exercise. Yep. Which I think works awesome. And that's a great way of telling whether your dog is on scent or not, which is as simple as having your odor out in a location outside of a training session. Yep. And you're just walking the dog and you'll see immediately the dog goes, hey, yeah. Yeah. And you got to the wind's got to be correct. And there's more to this than I'm explaining. There is. But the wind has to be correct and you'll see the dog who's just on his own time. If he suddenly kicks into his detection mode and starts working that cent cone back towards a source. And the reward is then at the source when he gets there. Yep. And so setting that up as a point to point exercise and you just do that like once to and then you know it's a dog went through. Yeah. Okay. You're cool. The conditions were right. Everything worked. The dog found it. Okay. My dog's definitely on odor. He's going to identify its target scent outside of the tube. So it goes like, well, the sense away from the tube. This is this is different. And then for hiding an odor in a room, I actually, so when I'm using the tubes, I have those out in the like my training ground. It's in the open. There's nothing but the tubes. The dog knows I stick my head in these tubes. The correct sense going to be in one of them. And then what I do is in my room where I'm first going to hide the odor. I have a tube right next to the door. And that's my target tube and the dog gets rewarded in a different location in what's a populated room with things in it. I actually use my garage. Yep. The dog gets it right at the door of the garage. First thing straight away. We do a session of that. And now there's the next session is there's a tube. And then there's like a meter gap and there's another tube. And the dog goes checks the first tube. Nothing in there quickly goes to the next tube and there is something in there. And I do a couple of sessions like that. And then once I know my dog is now searching in what was like if I'm using my training area. It's like a giant skin of box. There's nothing else there. It's just these tubes that I'm looking at the tubes. And in this case, the dog now goes into the garage or the room and he's still just looking in tubes. I then do like a modified point-to-point type exercise where there's still the tubes. But they're empty neither of them are target tubes. Yep. The dog checks for the first one. Which is brilliant because it teaches the dog not to rely on these receptacles being answered to their question. But the tube becomes a bridge to the environment. So it goes, "Okay, I know I'm doing detection. I set it up for work." Yep. Yeah. Stix is head in the first one. Oh, it's not in this one. It must be in that other one that I can see. And now the tubes are like a meter or two apart. But my odor is hidden not far from the source. Yeah. Between those two tubes might use my source in a way that the dog's never experienced before. And it's a great tool. It starts establishing a working ethic. Yeah. So then I know my dog's on a note. I've done the point-to-point exercise and this is just a modified, closer-range version of that. And then I reward because the dog then works it and goes. And that's when I've seen, done that with numerous dogs, and they go, "Ah, this is, these tubes mean shit. It's not the tubes. It's the scent in the tubes." And now you can get rid of the tubes. Yep. But then I then say, "Now we're going to do car. I put the tube in the car." Or, "At the wheel of the car." Or whatever. The tube is always then my bridge. My scent tube is my bridge to the dog. Okay, this is detection. Yep. And it's a new environment that the dog goes, "Okay." And you really typically just do this in two environments. One in the room, one on a car. And you can eliminate that quickly by the introduction of a cue to say, "Yeah, yeah, I want to look for something." Totally, but that just becomes a little bridge to the dog's eye. It's a good bridge. And you just do it like it's one or two sessions max. That's good. Yeah, and the dog goes, "Okay, this is detection." And then very quickly the tube becomes irrelevant. The tube is not something I need to worry about. It could be anywhere and it's just the odor. There's nothing, but what I had trouble with in the past, with earlier dogs that have been involved with this, is the dog relying on finding the thing. And the dog will really ever find the thing because it will be hidden, like if a dog's looking for drugs, it will usually be hidden built into something. So they'll never actually get their hands on the bag of drugs. If a dog's looking for the birch, it's never going to actually get its nose onto the birch holding thing because that might be underneath to whatever. It's in the hubcap. It just gets as close as it can. Yeah. The explosives are going to be buried in the ground. It just gets as close to the sources it can and doesn't rely on actually watching it or making contact. Yeah. And seeing it. Yeah. That's where I had trouble in the past. You remember the first time I did that I had trouble with the dog. Actually, no, no, I need to find it. I've got to flip it over. I've got to put my nose to it to be sure.
and not trusting herself. And so that exercise was a good way in removing that. And that the dog finds it in between two tubes and then trusts that I don't actually need to get my nose onto it. - Yep, so that's a little step that I think it was great. - Yeah, it's great. The reality is that you need, like when you're in early learning phases with the dog, you need to do whatever you need to do in order for that dog to understand, because this is a form of communication. - Yeah. - And the process that, well, one of the things that people do need to do in this process is come to the conclusion and the understanding, like all other behaviors that we're doing with dogs when we're teaching it, is the dog is working for reinforcement. Even though the dog enjoys the work, as we talked about, Sapolsky's model of highest forms of dopamine is in the actual work itself. Dogs are excited about doing this work. Okay, they perpetually get enthusiastic about scent work because they know that ultimately it's gonna lead to a reinforcement. But they do love doing the work. They do really find great pleasure in doing the work. And I've seen tracking dogs that will track for case and case and case. You know, we had to train this FH when we were doing IPO. And dogs just loved it. They just got so involved in the enthusiasm of, you could put food down on the track forum at some stage and they'd walk over it. 'Cause they're just thinking, no, I've got to get to the end. I've got to see it through. And they get enthusiastic because they understand the model and it's been shown clearly to them how to get to the end of the process. And when a dog does that, you can see this elation in the dog. Like it's tail is wagging, it's ears are up. It's very, it's almost like the dog's going, here, hold my beer. You know, I'm into this. - There's a good time, I think, to talk about selection of dogs. I had a conversation with someone recently who was talking to me about getting a malief sort of similar bloodline to Remy for detection. And I was like, yep, totally. He can do it. Correct drives enthusiasm. But he will do detection for his reward. - Yep. - He'll do the work and then you'll need to, he likes to fight, the reward has to look in some way. I was trying to talk to him into getting a springer because the work is the reward, actually with the springer. And especially she wanted to do conservation detection. And I was like, this springer I have will do that for free. Like she will work all day with no encouragement, no reward looking for critters. That is the reward for her. So I think it's worth mentioning now, like if you intend to do some kind of detection work with your dog, put a, and you are gonna get a new dog to do it with. Put a bit of thought into the type of dog. Like a malief for sure, 100% is totally capable of doing detection work. There's loads of them doing it. But they will do it for the thing that they want. Whereas there are breeds of dogs, like my springer who is genetically engineered to find rabbits. She goes searching for them. In her free time, she looks for rabbits. - Yep. If you can put the value of that scent into something else, she in her free time will go looking for that scent. - Worth mentioning. - Absolutely. It's a very valid point. And one of the things that, from that point that you've just made is that canine selection for various forms of training that you're actually doing, depending on the seriousness of the role, is the first point of call. The amount of dogs, when I was doing explosive detection work, the amount of dogs that went through our selection process, it was just incredible. I'd be out looking at dogs, boy would be out looking at dogs. Another guy, Matt, was looking at dogs, another guy, Owen was looking at dogs. We're just looking at them all the time. So pretty much what people call us up and say, I've got this dog here. Would you like to have a look at it as a potential candidate for doing some detection work? You know, and we'd ask some questions straight off the bat. Does the dog do this? Does the dog do that? We didn't have the time to raise puppies in the selection work. We were actually getting welfare dogs, not rescue dogs. - Rescue dogs. So we were getting rescue dogs and using them in our program. So young dogs had to fit a certain type of criteria. If that criteria was met, we'd start doing a phone interview. Yes, yes, yes. Often you'd go out there, find it did none of those things. So it was half hour drive out to go and have a look at the dog spending a little bit of time with it. And people would say, oh, you're very hasty. As we'd say to them, because of the severity of this type of work, we have to be very selective about what we're taking in. Like you're taking in an Olympic athlete. That's what we're looking for. We're not just looking for somebody who does, what's the kids sport that they do? It's like Olympics for little kids. It's like. Olympics for little kids? Yeah, no, it's got a name for it. That's just something that neighborhood kids go and do. Like the Laflatics. Yeah, that's it. Little athletics. So we're not doing little athletics. We're actually in the Olympics. It's a high stakes game. It is a very high stakes game. There's no pardons with this. We actually need the right type of dog with it because your neck is on the line. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting one as well. Like right type of dog. It's about motivation, right? The dog has to be motivated for it. Like say with my personal dog, Valerie, because she has hunted rabbits and caught them, there is nothing higher value to that than her. Of course, I could strip her back to food and make that so existential that she searches for. Of course, that's possible. Yeah. But when she's out searching, if I were to take any of the nose works that I do with her seriously, if I was to really say, okay, like if I was to sell her as a bomb dog, I don't think I could ethically put my hand on my heart and do that because I think a lot of the times when she's out searching, if she's finding rabbits in, she's searching for rabbits. Yep. And I can't measure that, so therefore I can't control it. I don't know where there's been a rabbit and when she's nose to the ground searching, there's no way for me to know nothing I give her will be as high as a reward for finding explosives. Yep. Will be as high a value as catching a rabbit is to her. Yeah. That's what she was dreadful. So I can't be sure what she's like, she could be lying to me the whole time saying, yeah, I'm looking for explosives. I really want that Kong are gonna throw for me. Whereas in reality, it's like fuck that girl. I'm looking for rabbits. I'm gonna find her and I'm gonna kill it. So I think that's a tricky one. So she would be totally suitable had she never caught a rabbit. Yep. If she'd never had that success and never known that and I'd controlled that 'cause she's got brothers and sisters that are explosive detection dogs. But once they're unsurpassed, they're not. Yeah, that's right. In those type of things. Now, that leads me onto another thing because the question that people say to me is, I've got a pet dog and I don't need to train it for explosives. What's the difference? Well, the difference is is that in those works, no one dies if you miss the scene. That's right. Effectively, this is a game. Yeah, that's right. And a lot of people take it seriously, like it's a very competitive sport and it's branching out all over the world. It's becoming extremely popular. It's cool sport. I like it for a lot of people. It is a great sport. And there's a marina training that do it out here, do a fantastic job of it. They take it very, very seriously. They set it up very well. And even the competitors, they put a lot of time and effort into it. However, when we get back to the nitty-gritty of it, the foundations of teaching the dog the learning principles should almost be identical. Yeah. Well, the thing about nose works is it's almost a complete cut and paste of the North American Police Working Dog certification. It's the same thing. Developed by like-minded people. Yeah, it is the same thing. So the test looks exactly same. If your dog was on odor and they set up, you could pass the police dog test in the States if you could do the same thing if it was the same odor. So it's a cool sport. The thing I like about it as well is because I'm the opposite of a dog's nob. I like that they don't tell you what kind of dog you can use. That's right. It's open to everybody. You can have a three-legged dog that's got one ear and I mean, look, effectively, if you had a great bomb dog, the only reason they would say no to a three-legged dog is it probably couldn't get in locations at a four-legged dog to get into. No, but I mean, as far as sports that tell you no, you can only use a dog that's got this paper on it. I know, it's better care, which I like a lot. Mrs. Jones and her little lap dog. Yeah. They're welcome to go in and hurt undissixed mungrel though. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Go in and jump in and do it. And look, that's the great thing. There was last time I was judging. There was a lady in there and she's in her 80s and her dog's probably as old in dog ears as she was. And the dog just dodged us through and everything. But completes the work and does a great job. And I love it. I really get a kick out of rather than her saying arm too old and the dog's too old. She likes the work. She gets involved in the training. She comes out and actually puts her money where her mouth is and she enters trolls. And it's fantastic to see that families and anybody who's enthusiastic enough can actually go through the nose works process. Yeah, yeah. It's really cool. If you're talking about an explosive dog, well, the stakes are much different. Yeah. There are climates of selecting that dog. That, I mean, look, the dogs got to have pretty much live and breathe detecting explosives and nothing else. It can't be distracted by the dog. It can't have environmental sensitivities and so forth. It, you know, this dog has basically got a walk out and saying, yeah, just let's put the world on hold for a minute because I'm looking for bombs. Yeah. And there are one in a million really. They're so hard to come up with. The best ones are the unicorns. Yeah. The best bomb dog I've ever seen in real life was a dog's name was Tip Rat. So he was at the, so the special operations engineer regiment they had him as an explosive dog. He was a rescue. He was from a, he was just from a pound. Yeah. And he was named Tip Rat because that's what he looked like. He was this ugly, horrible looking, maungy little dog. Yeah. But lived to find bombs. Well, we say that. He lived for a tennis ball. Yep. And he was prepared to find bombs. That's right. And that's the, that's the thing at the end of the day. Yeah. Is that please don't confuse yourself that your dogs are just thinking, oh, cool. I'm, you know, I'm looking for bombs. Your dog's basically saying this is the mechanism to getting me into your three batch. To get this thing I want. Yeah. No, Tip Rat was phenomenal. And he was an escape artist too. Like you would just see Tip Rat kickin' around on the base. He's like, no, Tip Rat's gone on. Like your old dog, Ernie. Yeah. Just like the family dog. It's actually very sad. So Tip Rat killed himself. He, uh, in a scheme.
in one of his escapes, hung himself. - Oh, that's pretty shit. - Yeah, but to lose such a valuable dog, but I mean to lose a dog like that is traumatic. - Exactly, yeah. - But that's all. - But he was the best bomb dog I've ever seen in my life, work ever. And I think because he was such an aloof little dude, was he had a very large bubble, which is good for a bomb dog. He would work away from his handler a long way, which keeps everyone except him safe. - Yeah, he'll like it, especially in like a route clearance where the dog's just clearing the road ahead of you, he would happily work several hundred meters forward, which is phenomenal to do. Any dog that can work past 50 meters, usually people are pretty happy with 80 meters is really good, Tiprat didn't care. He'd just keep working no matter how far ahead, which means he's out there looking for bombs, and you're a long way from a bomb if he finds one. It's just very handy. The explosive detection ones are funny, I've not, I've no experience. It really explosive detection dogs, especially when I was in the army, that's a different unit that takes care of that. - Yep. - And even now that guys, their dogs, the dual purpose dogs are trained in explosives, but that's not their primary role. But I met a guy, and he's actually a Australian guy, I'd love to, I can't remember his name, and it was before I was into dogs, and he was a Australian guy contracting for the ODA, and he was at five base hikes, and he, so as a civilian, working for the US Special Forces, with his explosive detection dog. And I talked to him a little bit about the time, because I didn't really know too much about dogs, I wasn't that into it. But he had some really interesting shit to say that I wish I could have that conversation with him again now. Like he told me at the time, his dog had never had a live find, and he would never let it have a live find. So he, in exactly that role, I was talking about that root clearance role. If he saw his dog working his scent cone, he called it back, 'cause he said, my income, first of all, I like my dog, I don't want it to get injured or killed. - Yep. - My income is, I'm not a shooter, I don't perform a gunfighting function with these guys. So my income is reliant on my dog, and without my dog, I have no job, I'm getting sent home. - Yep. - But also, we don't have a bomb tech. So if he finds anything, what good is it to us? So I don't need to know exactly where it is, I only need to know that we're not going down that route. And I was like, that makes 100% total sense. So he's like, if I see my dog, if I think he's working at a scent cone, if it looks like he's on odor and he's trying to find a source, I call him straight back, I don't care about the source. I was like, wow, that's interesting. And I'd love to, man, I wish I could have a conversation with that guy again. Now that I'm into dog, at the time I was just like, maybe we can find him and do a podcast with him. - Yeah, that would be amazing. At the time I was just like, yeah, cool story, bro. - Not dog. - Well, we're kind of skinny, weird German chapters. - But you didn't have the relationship with scent work that you do now. - No, not at all. I was just like, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. And on that same trip, one of these white-sheet dogs, Saby had been lost, and that's why this guy was with us at the time. That's an interesting story that's probably worth it. That would be a good one to get Simo her hand, and the one who's learned at the time, if he is around and could talk to us, that would be an interesting part. - There's a lot of good people, like I said, with this entire episode, this is just a micro story in the story of scent work. - Yeah. - It really is an evolving story and process that people go, there's probably people who listen to it and go, oh, you know, you failed to mention this and you didn't go through this. Well, guys, I'm telling you, this is, there is a large process in doing this. It's easy to talk about it in a snapshot, but talking about it and doing it is two different things. - On that, I think with a lot of stuff we talk about in the podcast, it's just a four-in-foe. - It is, it's going out, then. - It's the wet your appetite. - Yeah. - And like I said, this is, and I tell the students when we're doing this in NDTF as well, 'cause I've got 'em for half a day. And I said, this is a tapestish. And what the whole point of a tapest is to say, this is small selections of our menu. If you like this, then we encourage you to investigate further and maybe take the main course next time. - Yeah. - And that's what I say to students when we're doing this course too, is that course, or even when I've learned from people, people have said to me, here is some basic information of it. If you want to develop a career in it, get studying. - Yeah. - You know, get off your butt and go and research more. - I think dog trainers in Australia, we are, because it's a small industry, and the way that the whole industry works here, I think that we don't have too many people who are super highly specialized in too much. I think most people here are sort of generalists, I think. Like certainly I am. I know a little bit about most. - That's changing. I, if we went back 10 years, I would say I absolutely agree with that. But that is changing where people are starting to become specialists in certain fields. - Yeah. - There's some. - The migration is happening. - Yeah. - It's to make a living. - I'll post a video, I'll have to get off in, there's a guy Peter or Peter, or have you pronounce as a Polish guy that trained bomb dogs in Poland, and that's what he does, just trained bomb dogs in Poland. - Yep. - And he's fucking unbelievable. Like I'll get that video, it's in a close group, you would have seen, but I'll get him to see it. - I know what the money you're talking about. - I'll get it, ask him to send it to me, so I can post it. - Yep. - Unbelievable sent work. Like a dog is inhaling metal, trying to breathe in the sand. It's fucking unbelievable. - Yep. - Amazing to watch. But that's his job, that's it. It's all day everyday, training bomb dogs. - Cool. - And making them as good as possible and making them exceptional. I wish that I was in a position to be able to specialise in just one thing like that, but to make money, you got to sort of be across everything. So there are, and have a lot of resources available to him. - Yeah, exactly. And so, I guess the reason that's sort of bringing it up is I am by no means an expert in sent detection, not by a long shot. I know how to do it, and I've done it plenty of times. You probably would be closer to being an expert, certainly than I am. But I wouldn't classify myself as an expert, but I have very detailed knowledge and I spent a long time being a handler and trainer. So I think what you've done that I have is you've trained start to finish a dog and use it. Like that I've done the field work. - That's where my gap lies. So I've trained start to finish dogs, but never then with that dog going out in the field and use the dog where people's fucking lives matter. - However, let me put a valid point up here, is this is like, there was an old guy that I did boxing work with years ago. He'd never been a champion. He'd been a pug fighter, but he trained a lot of big champions. And I said to him, did you need to be a champion to train champions? And he said, not really. He said, it made sense to me that I wasn't a really good fighter, but I knew what I had to do. I just didn't have the physical ability to do it. And he said, but I had the mental preparedness, and I knew what a person with a better body and more dedication could actually do. And he said, I could show them how to shape that. So I've seen that a lot in people as well, where they've never really had some practical knowledge on things, but have churned out some amazing results with people, because they actually know how to translate it. It's not that they're incapable of doing it. You can still create champions without being a champion yourself. - A boss of mine at work summarized that perfectly when he told me one day, even Tiger Woods has a coach. - Yeah. - Yeah, that's a good point. - Yeah, I think we should leave a rabbit there before we waffle. - Look, there's so much we could talk about, and we could go down different avenues, but look, if you enjoyed this show, and if you think there's anything else you'd like to hear us talk about in the realm of cent work, we will at from time to time, and we'll see what we can do. - Yeah, that's a very good point. - It's a very valid plan. - It is, yeah, yeah, really, really is. - Yeah. - Anyway, I think we should leave a rabbit there before we waffle. - Yeah, look, there's so much we could talk about, we will at from time to time, just to jump in there. We will have from time to time have somebody that's coming in to talk to us. I'm sure when people like Mike Suttle, and hopefully one day we'll get Randy out here and anyone else will have them on the show. We can get them on the show, and love to talk to them more about their processes, and a bit of a snapshot of their world. - Yeah, totally. - In between that, get your bums out to their seminars, like go and participate in what they're actually doing. - Yeah, that's right. - It's one thing to watch it on YouTube, it's another thing to actually be in a classroom with them, and actually pick their brain while you're doing it. Even when I started off prior to traveling and doing it as a job, I had the good fortune of spending time with people, and seeing the processes unfold before me, and it answered so many questions that were lacking in the video because you can't stop them and say, "Oh, what happens if this happens?" - I think it's worth bringing up as well, like we sort of wrapped up talking about high-stakes bomb dogs, and but I think that if you're into dog training, usually people get into dog training, and they get their obedience as good as it's gonna get sort of in a year or whatever. That doing some decent detection is an awesome next step, and it's a lot of fun you can have with your dog. So whether you plan to compete in those works or not, doesn't matter, and with whatever you want to teach your dog to find, it's actually a lot of fun to do, and dogs tend to enjoy doing it as well. - The nice work? - Well, any sort of detection work that you need to find anything you can think of. Even if you don't want to be competitive, just as a skill to learn more about yourself and more about your communication with your dog, I couldn't recommend anything that would improve the bond between you and your dog. - So I like my dog. - Better. - I missed the word better on the end of the day. My dog, Remi, I never intend to do any sent detection with him. - Compete, I mean. - Yep. - But he's on numerous sets. - Yes. - That I just do for fun, and because it improves your relationship. - Yeah, it's active, it's hunting, and it's almost, I've had it explained to me that doing sent detection or any kind of knows related activity is a little bit meditation for a dog. - I agree. - And so for a dog that you intend to like I do. - That's a good phrase. - Yeah, so I like it. - For a dog that I am responsible for making crazy and a lot of areas for biting and for various things, lets him expel some drive in a manner that he likes to and in that sent detection, and it's calm.
it literally is meditation for the dog. - Yep. - And so whether it's tracking or article indicate whatever, a little bit of nose works for a dog I think is healthy for it. - Yeah, yeah. - It's fun to teach and it's easy to teach. And if you are just teaching it on your dog for fun, and you totally get it all wrong and you teach it, and you end up teaching a dog to just find something that you have placed the hut by accident, at least you might identify that and have some fun doing it, and then go back and train something else. It is fun. - I've been enjoying watching some videos from Sarah, why some in Melbourne with her dog, Cheezle. - Yeah. - She's been named for a dog, I love it. - I love it. - And she's a great girl. She loves that show. She's a avid listener. She tells me she listens to it when she's in the bathroom and rushing, I know, I was thinking, good to say. (laughing) But yeah, she posts a lot of her videos up. She's good person at putting in money where her mouth is, because she'll put her videos up for critique to show people what she's doing. You know, she's got 20 boxes in the room and the dog's just coasting around in it until finally it goes, here it is. A good question that people have asked me over the years is how do I know when I'm reaching success in this? And to summarize it, I think I answered that before when you get the dog paraphrasing what I said before, is here, hold my beer. You know, when the dog looks like it's taking over from you and it just says, look, I'd thanks just sit in the background, let me do my thing. That's when you can see true success in it. Number one, you're getting two indications every time. You can't trick the dog anymore. And number two, the dog is just basically saying, yeah, I'll take over from here. Effectively, that's what you want in your dog. With my explosive dog, the best one that I ever worked with was a dog called Sonic that a friend of mine, Amelia, has got now, she's like 14 years old. She took her and rescued her after her career finished, lived a great life, been a very sport dog, but absolutely fantastic bomb dog. I mean, that dog, as soon as I got on site, that dog was jiggling around in the crate like a dog who was going to do bite work. She just couldn't wait to bust out of the crate. She was climbing all over pallets in, you know, we would do Daling Harbor, Pink and Bar. We were all up and down the eastern seaboard at the time. So I literally get off a plane and I'd be at a wharf and then I put the dog back on a plane and be at another wharf and that dog just couldn't wait to get out. She was just phenomenal to work with. Then that dog was very much like that. She'd just pretty much have the attitude of, thanks mate, just to hang onto the leash and enjoy the ride. And I couldn't trick her, never could. You know, we would take odor on the site with us all the time and get the wharfies to hide her, a stash for me at some stage and you'd run the dog pass. And she would pretty much have that indication style that you talk about what Suttled likes to see with these young puppies, where she'd be walking past to it. And you'd just be saying, oh, come on, let's go back to the car and all of a sudden, she'd snap your arm and go, hang on. I'm onto something, you know, and she'd find the odor straight away. I've seen that moment in Val and I knew she was enjoying it, was training my garage one day. She indicated on the odor, I marked. And she came back for the mark because it's a conditioned response but she grabbed the ball and the string. She grabbed it out of my hand, ran back and started indicating on the odor again with the ball in a mouth. Oh, that's awesome. That's really cool. I was like, I'm fucked, I don't know what to do. I legit didn't know what to do. I kind of stood there like Ricky Bobby, like, I don't know what to do. I'm not gonna tell me Tom Cruise. Tell me baby Jesus. I don't know what to do because they say, you know, it's a 100% reward, like, but she's got the reward in the mouth. I'm like, I don't know what to do. So I clicked and when she came back to get the best. She came back to get food and I grabbed the ball of the collar and I put her away and they're like, carried it back to the box. And I was like, I was panicking. I was like, I don't know what to do. Like, she's indicating with the reward in a mouth. I was like, oh, hang on. That's the whole point. It's like sneezing and farting at the same time. I was like, that's the whole point. She was enjoying breathing in the odour. She found that in itself reward. You didn't need more of her. Yeah, that's awesome. And that's the point where you want to get to your dog. That's a relationship you want your dog to be in that sense sort of thing. That the dog is thinking, this is, how good is this? Yeah. I think the term that you use before summarise it really well, it should be for like a form of meditation. But the dog, I mean, it's such an instinctive trait to the dog, such a strong instinctive trait. That we almost robbed them of by keeping them as pets. Well, a lot of times we kick their nose off the floor and tell them to stop sniffing. You know what I mean? It's seen as an annoyance for a lot of people. They're actually saying to the dog, stop doing that. Whereas this is a field where people start to say, factors affecting their ability to teach the dog to send is because for two years of their life, stop sniffing me, stop sniffing the floor, stop sniffing the kid, stop sniffing the other dog. So the dog is effectively told, stop using your nose. So the dog over time starts to become conditioned to turn its ability to send off. And then when you want to do a sport, and then you go, well, why aren't you sniffing anymore? It's so important to them. Like I know, because I interact with so many dogs during the day when I come home and I get the greeting from the dogs. And then it's-- Who did you touch today? Well, yeah, so it's the big greeting and then it's the interrogation. No, like they're all over your life. Where have you been? Where have you been? Where have you been? Where have you been? That's exactly right, right? Oh, I know this dog that you've been out like, fuck you had there. You were meant to be home with me. Have you seen that movie? I love you, man. Yeah, yeah. Have you seen the part where he's getting fitted in for-- he's wedding suit and the guy walks in and he goes, I-- he goes, I didn't just share a kiss with you. And he-- And he goes, it's the taste of betrayal. He goes, it's not the taste of betrayal. It's the taste of betrayal you fucking hold. [LAUGHS] Well, I remember most of the dogs I like. When you-- you've touched a dog. How dare you. That movie. Slumber to Burse, man. That's the one. That's the same one. All right, we've lost it. Yeah, we're off. Let's wrap it up there. OK, so that's it for another episode of the Can I and Paradigm. If you like what you're listening, tell a friend. And if you want to get in contact with us, you can do that via Facebook. Look us up the Can I and Paradigm. Send us a message. Give us any feedback, hints, or tips. So let us know what you'd like us to talk about. Now, I heard in 14 countries around the world. That's right. Good music. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The hosts discuss scent detection training for dogs, emphasizing the importance of a clean, clinical approach to avoid contamination and errors.
Teaching scent work involves shaping a dog’s behavior around a receptacle (e.g., a PVC vessel) and choosing between passive (e.g., sit, stare) or active (e.g., clawing, biting) indications, with passive being safer for explosives or evidence.
A glass jar method is recommended for initial imprinting
Scent contamination is a major pitfall—odors can spread like “an octopus,” leaching onto surfaces and confusing the dog; trainers must be fastidious in handling and cleaning equipment.
The hosts highlight experts like Mike Suttle and Randy Hare, who use systems such as imprinting scent in puppy feeding bowls to create early associations.
Summary:
In this episode of the K9 Paradigm, hosts Pat Stewart and Glenn Cook focus on scent detection training for dogs, sharing insights from their experience and industry leaders like Mike Suttle and Randy Hare. They stress that successful training begins with a clean, clinical environment to prevent scent contamination, where odors can spread and mislead the dog. , clawing) to avoid risks with explosives or evidence.
A practical technique involves using a glass jar to imprint the dog—shaping it to insert its nose and inhale, which allows trainers to mark the behavior on an inward breath and build a strong foundation. The hosts emphasize combining theory with hands-on practice, as dogs need to understand that a specific odor has value. They warn against common mistakes, such as mishandling scent vessels, which can cause the odor to leach onto other surfaces and ruin training.
Overall, the discussion provides actionable advice for novice and experienced trainers, highlighting the importance of precision, early imprinting, and a systematic approach to develop reliable scent detection skills.
FAQs
It covers the latest news, views, and expert opinions in the K9 industry, featuring interviews with leaders, experts, and trainers.
It is teaching dogs to identify and indicate the presence of a specific odor, such as birch oil, using methods like shaping behavior around a receptacle.
Scent contamination can confuse dogs by spreading odor to unintended areas, so handlers must be clinical to ensure dogs learn to focus on the target scent.
It involves using a glass jar with scent inside to shape the dog to stick its nose in and inhale, allowing handlers to see and hear the dog's breathing for precise training.
An active indication involves clawing or biting at the source, while a passive indication is a calm behavior like sitting or staring, which is safer for detecting explosives or evidence.
They should use clean vessels like PVC or glass, teach the dog to behave around receptacles first, and combine theory with practical training to prevent confusion.
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