NW215: Air Flow Superpowers for the Developing Dog

Excerpt from Week 3....

In our previous lecture we talked about how air is "bendy".  Remember that although your prevailing wind may seem straight line, once it hits a surface, the air will bend and follow the path of the surface.  In the case of outside corners, air will have some turbulence which will give the dog a little more information.  Dogs need to encounter odor in air flow in order to respond to it.  turbulence like the circular air patterns that occur as air bends around a corner provides a perfect vehicle to bring information about a target odor to a point where it is easily available to the dog.  Remember that with the type of searching that we do the dogs are "air scenting" which means that they encounter and read the air currents in order to get information about the location of source.  They don't get much information directly against surfaces because odor travels in air....  it doesn't creep along a surface of an object, or anything for that matter!

This is a fairly simplistic drawing of air movement around an outside corner:

In this assignment, we will seek out and experiment with setting hides using outside corners in order to learn how our dogs work odor.  This setup not only teaches our dog about scent theory but it also helps us to understand odor movement based on the picture being painted by the dog.

In this setup, I encountered a perfect building to demonstrate this concept.  I love these corners!!

I set a hide on the bench that you can see on the right hand side of the building.  Let's take a closer look at that bench location from another view point:

It can be a little confusing to look at the pictures.  The layout of the building and hide location if you looked at this building from above would look like:

Because of the direction of the wind, we can choose a starting point that gives us a little information about the dog's searching behavior.  In this case I chose to start the dogs on the right hand side.  I could have started them pointing towards the chair as an alternative and I would have gotten different information!

Let's see how different dogs solved this hide!

Here is Why's search:

This is the path that Why followed.  

Here is Darwin's search:

This is the path that Darwin followed.  Pay particular attention to some notable behavior changes.  Watch how when he encounters the flat surface of the wall... he does a very slight head or chin lift.  He does this because the air is turbulent on the downwind side of the tower.  He is using the bending air!  Then at the corner, he hesitates momentarily.  At that moment in time, he is deciding odor directionality and working through the information provided by the corner of the building.

Here is Flynn's search:

This is the path that Flynn followed.  Watch how Flynn came off the corners of the tower.  When he was off the far corner, there was some very mild acknowledgement of novel odor (probably dog pee!) but he came off of the corners initially because of the turbulence coming around the corner.  He showed that same searching pattern of circling on both corners.  Interesting!!

For your homework I would like you to seek out corners of buildings....  see if you can predict the air flow BEFORE you run it.  Where you correct?