NW445: Rising to the Nosework Challenge: 6 weeks of Setups

What Makes a Search Challenging?

What makes a search challenging is a combination of the search environment (the things in the search) and the scenting conditions relative to hide placement.  What can be easy one moment can actually become rather challenging the next, simply by a change in air movement.  In this lecture, we will talk about a few of the factors that drive challenge level.  You will want to use this information in order to dial up or down the setups to make them perfect for your individual dog.  In the next lecture, we will talk about what our dog is telling us and how we know if the search is too difficult.

Air Flow Considerations

No two searches are ever the same.  What that means is that our dogs benefit from working a variety of scenting conditions throughout their training.  You should strive to give them as much variety as you can....  just because scenting conditions might be challenging doesn't mean you should shy away from setting hides...  what it DOES mean is that you might want to simply your search a little.

When people think of challenging air flow, they usually think about wind.  Wind CAN make things challenging but we expect that it would.  When wind is twisted around and deflected by objects, we can get swirling.  Air moving in eddies is far more complicated than straight line wind, regardless of wind speed.  If you have wind, your challenge is greatest when you are near walls, buildings, alcoves, large objects...  anything that can bend or deflect wind.

The sun is a bit more devious in its impact on air currents.  The sun's impact on air currents is more subtle.  We can't feel it.  The warmth from the sun will cause a scent cone to expand and lift.  The important thing to know though is that because the sun's impact is subtle, the impact of wind can overpower the impact of the sun.  So instead of a scent cone lofting and expanding, a solid breeze will blow the scent cone more dramatically.  Indoors however, warmth from heat sources such as sunny windows (and even off of lightbulbs) can be a primary driver of air flow and can make a seemingly easy hide turn into a very challenging hide.  In general, odor will move towards the heat source.  This is a good thing to keep in mind when you set your hides.

Weather and climate can play a role in challenge level.  In high altitudes, odor generally lifts more easily.  If the climate is also dry and the hide is in direct sun, the odor may not be easily caught by the dog's nose.  Cooler weather and humid conditions can encourage more pooling of odor.  This can also happen on warmer days in the humidity when there are shady areas in the search area.  Odor will readily pool in the shady areas.

Search Area Considerations

When you think about challenge level with your search area, consider where the odor will go...  will it get trapped anywhere or will it dump into a cluttered area?  Clutter can be a sourcing challenge.  Wide open search areas can also be a challenge unless the dog understands how to seek out scent cones.

In general, larger areas without odor will be more challenging that smaller areas with prevalent odor.  Working larger unproductive or blank areas is a skill that you will want to work on.  You can always add that aspect into a setup in order to practice moving through blank portions of a search area (that would increase the challenge level).

Areas that are tighter will be more challenging for certain dogs.  Some dogs are more easily impacted by pressure applied by the environment and it can affect how effectively the dog sources.  The tightness of the area can also mean that the dog may not be able to find an "edge" to the scent cone.  So if you have a dog that prefers to work to the outer edge of a scent cone in order to work back in towards the hide, a tighter space may be more challenging.

Certainly, some areas are naturally more distracting than others.  The more distracting the search area is to YOUR dog, the more challenging the search will be.  What distracts your personal dog may not distract another dog.  For instance, some dogs can search on grass quite easily while others may find that grass is very distracting.  Humidity can increase the distraction level.  Novel odors will be more prevalent in humid conditions.

Hide Number and Proximity

In general, more hide is more challenging.  However, I can tell you that I can easily set a very challenging single hide and a very easy multiple hide search.  Hide number plays a role in difficulty but only when you also consider the scenting conditions and the search area.

If you have a challenging hide and an easier hide nearby, the easier hide will actually make the more difficult hide even more difficult.  The easier hide becomes much more enticing to a dog when a challenging hide is nearby.  There is really very little incentive for a dog to find the challenging hide at all unless the dog has learned that the easy hide is out of play once it's been found.

Proximity of hides CAN be a predictor of challenge.  Converging odor occurs when scent cones touch and co-mingle to a certain degree.  When the scent cones are heavily overlapped, the search is much more challenging, regardless if the scent cones are the same scent.  Keep in mind though that heavy overlap can occur at a distance if air currents are strong.

Overlap of scent cones can be made more challenging if the hides are set at the same height.  Conversely, they can also be very challenging if one hide is excessively higher than the other because the dog may not explore both layer of air.  Hides at moderate but different heights are a little less challenging.

As you work through this course

This course has a large degree of experimentation in it.  I encourage all of you to experiment A LOT...  think of odor as something to play with...  experiment with air currents and hide placements.  Your dog will tell you if you made something too difficult to find.  (Be okay with stopping the search). I promise you though that you will learn more through experimentation than you will from replicating searches verbatim.  I encourage you to find inspiration in these setups but still make them your own!

In the next lecture, we will talk about what to do if the search is too difficult....  and how to know that it is!

Setup1: Containers....  Sort Of

Search Description

In this setup, we will play a little with the expansion of scent cones due to the sun and the dog's assumptions about what to search.  You can modify the setup as you need to based on the areas that you can find to search around. 

In this setup, you will want to find a line of vehicles in the sun next to a long narrow paved section.  The example video was shot at a parking lot at an outlet mall.  You can also look for sidewalks on quiet street next to parallel parked cars or other quiet parking lots.  You will want a sunny day to set this up in order for the scent cone to expand.  Low wind is preferable however a light wind might make this really challenging!

Set up a container search in the vicinity of the vehicles.  The scent cones from the containers will lift, expand, and drift onto the vehicles.

Some Potential Variations

You can play with this in terms of where you want to start the dog.  To make it more challenging, you might to include the vehicles in your search and set the start line so that the vehicles are encountered first.

Use of cardboard boxes for the hides will add challenge because of the way cardboard soaks up odor.  The scent cone coming off of a cardboard box is generally larger than a toolbox.  You can also experiment using metal paint cans on warmer days and see if there is a difference in your scent cone.

To make this search easier, set one hide.  To make it harder, use two.

If you want to expand on this theme, you can set the containers to be blank and put a hide on the vehicle!  Get creative!!

Example Videos

Here's Prize (green dog) working the setup with 2 hot containers.  You can see that she isn't quite sure that it's a container search!  This is a super exercise to teach her to trust her nose.  There is a little breeze in this search though the hides were in the sun.  Aging was only about 5 minutes here.  You can experiment with aging.  If you run into challenges aging your hides, make sure you at least "cook" the hides in the containers for about 30 minutes.  Once you set the containers in the pattern, being that it's outside, minimal aging in place is necessary to achieve the correct effect.

Here's Brava (Elite dog) doing the same setup.  I left the first few seconds in the video to show how I handled her initial distractibility.  When I ask her to search, an interesting smell caught her focus off the start line.  Notice that I did not re-cue at that moment and have that built into her search.  I disengaged her from the distraction odor and reset her on the start line.  Once I released her the second time, her search was gorgeous.  Perfectly focused, precise, and efficient.  She did not chase the scent cones as Prize did a bit.  If I were to repeat this setup, I might make the search blank and then towards the end of the line, set a hide on a license plate on one of the cars so that it would blow on the last box.  My intent in doing that would be to have her understand that the odor is not coming from the box itself and to work it back to source.