E333: 줄리 사이몬스(Julie Symons) - 잃어버린 물건 찾기

Yeah, as far as I know, NASDA is the only organization that's offering these types of trials. They are available in the U.S. and in Canada. And it's making its way across the country, a lot of on the western states and southern states. And it's moving into the Midwest. And the one part that it actually hasn't come to is in my area of the Northeast. But it is growing. And, you know, every time I look at their dashboard of events, I see more and more states that are adding to it. So, you know, by bringing this visible to more people, then more people will think about, you know, hosting trials. Maybe myself also in my area. You're going to bring it single-handedly to the Northeast. Maybe, maybe. We'll see. I have a lot. They also have online titling options for loss item recovery, which is really nice. It almost seems to be the standard now for any organization that they offer something, you know, in that realm of online options. And they also, just a touch on it, the NASDA organization that has other classes, the loss item recovery, is just a small part of it. They have trailing and locating, which is tracking wildlife scents. They have a shed class, which is finding deer antlers. And they have an urban class, which is similar to barn hunt. So it's not in a field. It's in the, you know, human environment originating from where they used to have dogs try to find the rats, you know, in the cities and stuff to, you know, to get rid of the rat population. So those are some of the other scent sports that they're offering under the whole umbrella of really, you know, highlighting our dog's ability to scent and use the olfactory skills. Very cool. You mentioned you kind of start with handler scent. So when training this, is it problematic if we train at home? How does that work since our scent is kind of presumably everywhere? Yeah, we definitely start with our scent to teach the concept of finding human odor. It's what's used in AKC handler scent discrimination as well as the obedience scent article exercise that we often compare this to a little bit, right? It comes up a lot with the same skills are needed for that. And this is a question that I get a lot about, you know, how do you do this when our scent is all over the house? And I definitely experienced that, you know, concern when I when the AKC came out with their handler scent discrimination class, which is first locating a scented glove in a box and then eventually cotton balls scented in the interior and exterior areas. And it really is no issue at all.

The reason this works is because we're asking our dog to find an article in the loss item recovery. And it's it's kind of a clear cut context, right? It's finding an article. And we also use simple setups where it's a selection process where whether it's AKC handler scent discrimination, it's they're searching boxes for the handler scent or the steps that I will use is kind of a selection, like a pile, kind of like a like a scent article obedience pile. We'll start with a scent article pile or just simply searching for one item in a room. I think I only remembered one time that my dog stopped at the handle of a basket that I had moved in there to like create some stuff that they kind of like, oh, you know, and then they just move right on. So so it's it's just convenient to train at home. And it's it's just going to make trialing like that much easier because in trials, you're not going to have that issue whatsoever. So it's it's just not a concern. But it is it is a question I get asked a lot. Yeah. Can you can you talk a little more about the process when you start training your dog to search for somebody else's scent? How do you kind of introduce that concept of match to sample? Yeah. And that's something that I played around with earlier this year. It's it's all about the concepts. So what I what I laid out was first you teach your dog to find your sense, because that's usually where I find people get hung up. You know, whether it's for utility articles, that's usually just just a sticker point. And sometimes people don't get past that. So we want to work on that, build value for that. And then we're going to teach the match to sample with your scent so they understand the process. They know how to find your scent pretty easily. Like that alone, I find once you get past any, you know, trouble spots, it's pretty straightforward where you could your dog could almost even without a match to sample. They can find your sense. But I'm going to apply the match to sample first so that we can teach that process and then transfer it to a stranger stranger sense. And what I noticed when I was playing around with this is that the stranger sense really, really pops. I was on a walk with one of my friends and I said, hey, I need you to like scent some stuff I brought for you. She goes, oh, you know what? My socks have holes in them. Let me just take my socks off and stick her socks off and gave me her socks. And I went literally right home, gathered my dogs, went out to my training building and I just applied this match to sample with the stranger set.

I'd already done the previous stuff because I was working on it. And my dogs were like, whoa, like really, really sniffing, sniffing my friend's socks. So they were more smelly and they were very different because, yeah, they may not be interested to smell my stuff. They smell me all the time. So it just really fell into place nicely with the concept in place, getting a different scent that kind of popped to the dog. And it just stood out to them. And it just worked really, really well. We all need that kind of friend. We're like, let me just take off my socks. I was like, you're going to put your feet back in your shoes. OK. It was funny. Thinking about all of that, how does training for lost item recovery kind of compare to some of those other nosework sports? For example, searching for nosework odor or handler scent for obedience? Yeah. The nosework oils and odors are light and dispersed more quickly into the air. Handler scent is heavier and it's going to fall. So in some ways, that can be easier to locate a human odor because it's going to stay closer to source. But it won't be as easy to necessarily pick it up as far away as you can pick up some nosework odor. So definitely training to find our scent will carry over very well to obedience scent articles. I actually had a lot of people take one of the AKC classes that I taught for the handler scent to kind of help people to train for the eventual obedience scent articles. Because it's just really about teaching your dog to how to find your scent among other items. And again, as I said earlier, teaching scent article exercises has historically been tricky. Or I found that with some teams, you know, dogs are often thinking about retrieving. So they have an arousal for retrieving and they're not using their nose. They're not scenting. And they make mistakes because of that. Yeah. So I really, really like the idea of teaching handler scent away from the scent article, you know, formality. And to just really help with the process of them understanding to use their nose. And then they could put the obedience and the retrieve back into that picture. An area that I found the most beneficial to this activity I've been playing around with is tracking. You know, I can look back and say that I mostly taught or I felt that I was really teaching my dog to follow ground disturbance. You know, to follow crushed vegetation and crushed insects. You know, there's always a debate about whether how much is the dog tracking the disturbance or are they tracking, truly tracking, you know, handler odor.

And often when I'm doing, when we're training for tracking, we're laying our own tracks. We don't always have somebody to help us lay our tracks. So we're not even teaching them to find a stranger scent. They're tracking us. And so here's a little factoid. Every minute of the day, we shed about 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells off the surface of our skin. And I remember sometimes when I was a track layer recently and it was like cold and I'm like, oh, my God, all my skin is covered. You know, so you try to just like, I'm not going to wear gloves and, you know, I'm not going to wear a scarf or something. I'm just going to try to hopefully get my skin cells out there because they just, they're just dropping by the thousands, you know, when you're laying a track. So there's definitely that disturbance. And how I learned about that, this is a little side note, is when you're doing tracking and you're turning on a corner, if you stand there for a little bit and you purposely stand there for a little bit, kind of make more of a disturbance, your dog will notice that corner a little bit more. Same within like a nose work trial. If dogs false in a particular place, you'll get the next five to ten dogs false there because there's been a disturbance by, you know, hormones that we put out, by our smell, whether it's a dog or the handler, and there's just excretions that we make that a dog is going to pick up. So our dogs are, of course, learning to track human scents that's deposited on the track. But the aspect of stranger scent is not always there in our training. So when I started playing around with this loss on recovery, I found this kind of renewed understanding by my dogs to sniff this article and then track that scent. Because I was using my friend's sock or my husband's or my son's. And I recently earned my dog Drax TDX title a couple weeks ago, actually. And I had, honestly, I went in, I had a cold going into it. I heard the site was very challenging. And I looked up last year and nobody had passed. And, you know, TDX pass rates are usually pretty low. But I'm like, well, I've done the training. I'm going to do it. And I had to, you know, pull that start article out. For those who aren't familiar with tracking, there's a start article that there is a track layer who lays four articles on the track. And the first article you pick up, you pick up all the articles. But the first article you're going to use to, like, help your dog resent. And I've done that. You know, I've been doing tracking for, gosh, I don't know, 20 years. But across only maybe, like, four dogs.

So it's like every five years I start it again, you know. So it's not like I'm tracking that long every day. But it's sporadic. And I've always tried to resent my dogs on that article. And they just look at me like, I don't know. I don't know what you want me to do, whatever. Because I think they're, again, I always felt like they're just really following, like, a crushed trail. And, of course, some sense. But so I did that with Drac. And we had a tough time. It was a tough track. It was raining a lot. And it was flooded on the fields. And then we got through it. And we passed. And when I pulled that article out, he sniffed it. He literally sniffed it. And I can say that my dogs have never done that before with my handful of tracking titles. I've either been able to get through it without having to resent their article or whatever. So this match to sample that I was playing around with for this last item recovery was just a direct benefit to tracking. And it was just something that I realized I had not properly trained. I had not properly trained that because I relied on the other parts of a track, right? The other parts of a dog following a track and not that specific part of a kind of a match to sample. So I think the answer here is maybe a little clear at this point. But if somebody is already training for those other sports, right, nose work odor or AKC obedience or tracking even, is there any risk of confusing the dog introducing loss item recovery or any tips maybe if somebody wants to kind of do all the things? Yeah. You know, it will not confuse the dogs. I might not start them on the same day. I usually tell people don't say, oh, I want to start nose work today. And I want to go start loss item recovery or a handler center or whatever. I wouldn't do it on the exact same day. And that oddly would just never happen, right? I just don't think that we have enough time in our day to start a new skill. Multiple sports. Yeah. Multiple sports on the same day. But I actually have, and I don't do this a lot. I always felt like if somebody was watching me, would they think I was crazy? Like if you laid a track, it has to age for hours. I'd be like, well, what am I going to do? So I would go set some nose work searches. And it wasn't a problem because I find that, number one, our dogs thrive off of this work. And they can switch gears very, very easily. And our dogs are experts at understanding contacts. I mean, you'll hear that a lot. In fact, training multiple scent sports is going to build stronger skills and your teamwork. The skills transfer very, very nicely. Like problem solving, like scent.

There's always scent puzzles in any of these that we've talked about. How a dog indicates that they find something is common across them. And as handlers, we become better at reading or scenting dogs. And that actually is a big, big portion of it. You know, we get into our heads. People who say do tracking will say, I did this with track. I thought I could, I thought it kept going straight. And I almost didn't trust them on a turn. I also, in nose work, we think, oh, there's got to be a hide over here. And we keep our dogs there. So by doing more, whether you call them sports or we call them activities that we do with our dogs, we're going to learn how our dog works odor. And we're going to kind of stay out of it. You know, we're going to stay out of it a little bit more. We're going to observe them. We're going to be their teammate. But we're going to rely more heavily on them. Do you use different cues? That's a very good question. I do use different cues. Tracking is definitely a different cue. But there's so many contextual cues, right, environmental cues as well. But I'm going to use a different cue. For nose work, I use a different cue for nose work searching. And for handler odor, I'm going to use a different cue. So when it came to this lost item recovery, I was like, okay, when my dog is going to search for my lost personal item in level one, I'm going to say, find mine. And then I'm like, okay, so now I've got to teach my dog, like, a different cue to find a stranger scent. And I'm like, maybe that's just cutting that too finely, right? So that's why I am deciding that whether it's my scent for this lost item recovery or strangers, it's going to be a matched sample. And I did confirm that with the organization and with the rulebook that when they are searching for my scent, I can have another item on me and then have them sample it before they go into the search area. I am kind of a little bit generically right now just using like a find it, whether it's, you know, my scent or a stranger scent for the lost item recovery. Super interesting stuff. It is. So you've got a class coming up on lost item recovery in December. Do you want to talk a little bit about kind of what you'll cover in the class and maybe who should consider signing up? Yeah. So I do have a class coming up in December. It's actually opening soon. And I am splitting the class up in the two halves. So like the first three weeks, I will be focusing on teaching our scents because that's going to be more familiar. We can, you know, learn all the processes with working for our scent.

And then troubleshooting, you know, there's going to be some troubleshooting needed for dogs who struggle, aren't using their nose or whatever. And then we're going to teach the match to sample with our own scents before moving into the second half of the class. And, you know, I may split that a little earlier, a little later, depending on how everybody's doing in the class. I don't want to delay too much of the stranger scent because I think that's what a lot of people are very interested in and the match to sample. But the match to sample concept is going to come in very early in that six weeks. And then near the end of the course, we're going to touch on the distractions that can be out there. Primarily, it's another human scent. So how it works is, let's say a steward is going to have, we're searching for one of the stewards scented item. Then they're going to have another person's scented item out there in levels two and above. But they also can use the standard later on in the higher levels, you know, like food or toys or other, you know, distractors out there. And so, yeah, so that's kind of what I've laid out the class as it is right now. Of course, being a new class, you know, we'll see how that goes and what might be changed. So do students need any existing kind of nose work knowledge or are there any prereqs maybe they need to kind of take for the class? Nope, there isn't. It's very similar to how we would start like nose work 101 for nose work. We start very much from the beginning with the first steps that you need to do to build value for the target odor that we're working on. Awesome. And then just because I'm sure you'll get this question at least once, if people want to work on AKC handler scent discrimination, can they bronze and kind of pick up some of the steps in the early lectures? Is that like a thing? Absolutely. There's definitely some overlap with some of the other material that I have worked on. I think it's going to be advantageous for, you know, people who want to play around this for tracking, people who are working in obedience and, you know, working toward the utility exercises. I've also found there's a lot of interest from some either seasoned or retired nose work dogs that are ready to try something new, right? They've already kind of done the nose work track. Of course, they're still either competing in it or there are dogs who aren't able to go to live trials. They want to try something new with their dogs.

They may have a newer dog that they're starting on their, you know, nose or track and they want to have something for their other dog to do. So that's kind of the stuff that I'm finding. And I just think anybody who's looking to expand into more sports activities, I've got a lot of good feedback and a lot of interest for this class. Cool. Super exciting. So any final thoughts or key points you want to maybe just leave listeners with? Just that this is a ton of fun for me to play with. You know, I hadn't mentioned earlier, but the items that we're searching for are your personal items, you know, their keys, their wallets, their digital items, credit cards. That's what makes it a little different, right? I could say that I'm in my training for whatever I've done so far. I pretty much don't train outside the rules. You know, I got a lot going on. If I'm training, you know, some articles for obedience, I'm just working with those metal and leather and articles. And I don't go outside too much of that. But this was just super fun for me to have my dog find my keys and find my wallet and to just know that they can find something as small as a credit card. So to me, that's actually very exciting. And, you know, I was able to apply my past experience across obedience and tracking and nose work to come up with a really fun layout for training on this concept. Some of it will be already generalized by a lot of teams out there. So teams are coming in with some previous experience. They're going to be able to generalize this pretty quickly. And for teams, like I said earlier, who have struggled with teaching Handler Scent, you know, the Scent articles, this is a really fun new way to play with it. And, you know, really can break that down again and, you know, maybe come at it from a different angle. And just my last statement will be just to see how well our dogs can perform these various kinds of searches with personal items and match the sample. It's just really amazing. Like I really did have more fun than I thought I would have with it. Awesome. So, so cool. And it's such a cool concept. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast to chat about it, Julie. You're very welcome. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast.

Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Body. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Music