by Stacy Barnett
Training dogs in Nosework is a bit different than training dogs for other sports. In Nosework, the hides primarily train the dog, and the handler emphasizes what gets reinforced. Hide placement shapes a dog’s searching behaviors, which means that how you set your hides will affect how your dog will search in the future.
Dogs Learn through Patterns
Dogs will repeat what was successful in the past. This means that how you set your hides will sculpt your dog’s expectations. Your dog’s expectations will affect how they approach the search. For example, if you were to do five searches with the hide on the left, on the 6th search, the dog is liable to start searching on the left. The more that the pattern is reinforced, the more hard-wired it becomes in the dog’s search patterns.
Like it or not, we tend to set hides in patterns
Just like our dogs, we too are pattern driven! Your hide placement may have minute patterns built in that you aren’t even aware of! Some of these patterns may be side influenced (whether you are left or right handed). Some may be due to types of hides you tend to set…. maybe you set hides on chairs or wheeled objects as examples.
This means that when setting hides you want to keep them non-obvious
In NW TEAM, one of our requirements is that the hide location is not directly in front of the start line or on an object that is the only obvious obstacle in the search area. The reason is patterning! Dogs understand that objects frequently have odor on them and a savvy dog might be visually drawn to an object before even starting to search.
When a dog searches, they use both their eyes and their nose. The two senses are constantly working together to problem solve when searching. This is very smart of the dog to do! However, in Nosework training, we want the dog to emphasize use of the nose. When the dog is too strong visually, you might find that the dog “fringe alerts”, meaning alerts away from source, by catching odor, seeing the object, and then drawing an (incorrect) conclusion.
In NW TEAM, we test the dog’s training by assessing the dog with various hide placements
Hide placement challenges in NW TEAM have been chosen so as to check your dog’s flexibility in problem solving. In some cases, we specify certain objects in part because we know that those objects are easily available, therefore making the search easy to set up. In all cases, the team is asked to showcase their training.
Curious? Let’s walk through a few NW TEAM examples!
Exercise 1-1: Interior Threshold Hide Under Chair
In this exercise, the hide placement tests whether your dog will pay attention to the area near the start line. If you have placed most of your hides deep into the search area, this exercise will be more difficult. We use a chair for this exercise to help by providing context (hides are often on chairs), however the chair is to be set in a non-obvious way so the dog still needs to use their nose to work the area.
Exercise 2-3: Corner Container Hide
In this exercise, the dog works an “L” container setup with the hide on the corner. This hide placement tests how methodically the dog works containers. Very often, we see dogs (and handlers!) cut corners when searching. We can use this exercise to encourage the dog to be more methodical by increasing the value of the containers on the edges of the dog’s natural path of motion. We do that through hide placement!
Exercise 3-4: Deep Accessible
This exercise really challenges the dog’s sourcing skills. Through hide placement, the dog is encouraged to continue to push into the search area and work until reaching the hide. We test the dog’s understanding of source with this exercise as dogs who don’t truly understand sourcing are liable to alert before reaching the hide. This is truly an exercise in trusting the nose! By working these sorts of setups, our dogs start to work harder to get to source and the team’s confidence increases as a result.
Exercise 4-5: Exterior Ground Crack Hide
In our newest level, Level 4, the challenges get even more, well... Challenging! In this exercise, we really test the dog’s use of their nose rather than searching with the eyes. When a hide is set in a crack in the ground, the dog will react to odor and then have to problem solve, using only the nose, to find source on a non-object. This is an excellent test of the dog’s understanding of driving into a scent cone!