With a sense that we really needed to be ready for an autumn assessment, we approached the summer with a vengeance. Performances improved and confidence grew, just in time for the next “flight of fancy” on a blind trail where we went massively off course, and we came crashing back down again. It was clear that I (yes, me again!) was still missing key “tells” in Venn’s body language, both for when she was “on scent” but perhaps more importantly when she had lost it, and was searching around hoping to re-find it.
In a bad miscalculation we arranged holiday commitments on what turned out to be July’s SARDA training weekend and with August being a break in the training schedule, we were looking at a couple of months away from formal training; a bad situation when we were trying to up our game. Despite our best efforts we failed to entice anyone to come out to play with us for some out-of school activities, so it was just down to us. Well just me really, as Venn is not much of a strategist.
We really needed to be ready for the October pre-assessments, and suddenly that didn’t seem too far away. With no clear plan of how to break the deadlock things didn’t look great.
I set out by trying to create a Venn-handbook: a list of behaviours that I thought she displayed when she was working on scent, another of what she did when there was weak or no scent, and a final small list of things that repeatedly happened, but I wasn’t sure which pile if any to put them in. I then turned to t’internet to see if I could find similar examples from other handlers. My search terms might have been poor, but for a while I didn’t turn up much at all and I was starting to give up hope when I turned up an old document about bloodhounds from 1996.
Written by Kevin Kocher, an American Police trailing-dog handler, it was a short article detailing negative indications. I was not convinced that there was going to be much in common between bloodhounds and a small cocker-collie cross, but at least it was dealing with the matter at hand. The premise of the short article was that when a dog is trailing straight ahead, it is constantly rejecting incorrect options or negatives to either side with a series of head flicks or slight crescent-shaped detours into a junction or driveway, before returning to the correct line. The suggestion was that if you see a long sequence of these negatives, then by inference, if the dog is still working, then each time it is returning to a positive scent trail. So a good sign! Some of these traits I had seen in Venn already, but all of them were present when I subsequently watched her trail. What might look like distractions, but were actually evidence to suggest she was working well, were happening every 10-20 seconds. So that was a nice start.
However, although a nice start it wasn’t the complete answer either. Venn was working beautifully on known trails, but on blind trails where I had to read her, we were still quite likely to crash and burn. I needed to get fresh eyes on what was happening, because I was clearly still influencing the process in some way.
In my searches for inspiration, I happened across Mantrailing. Mantrailing is a sport version of trailing in the same way that Scentwork is a sport version of what a drug-detection dog does. In the Venn-diagram of operational trailing and Mantrailing, there are some significant differences in emphasis at either edge, but at the core, the dog handling skills overlap significantly; operational dogs still see it all as a big game that they enjoy playing and they have no real sense of the seriousness of the search. Instantly off on a tangent, I wondered if a conversation with one of the sport instructors might get new insight on the situation. There were no classes in the area, but Kathryn, one of Mantrailing UK’s senior instructors was based in the Welsh borders. We arranged a meeting by phone, and in a strange twist of fate she mentioned that the training method they used was heavily influenced the Kocher method; the same Kevin Kocher whose short article kicked off this phase of the journey.
Anyway, needless to say, the training was not based on that short article from 1996 but on an extensive piece of work updated and developed in the intervening years. Having found that the descriptions in the short article fitted Venn nicely, a quick kindle purchase later saw me wading through the latest version of his handbook.
The Kocher Method differs quite significantly from that used by SARDA in some respects, and I had no desire to start changing the core of the way we operate, but the book did have some rather nice short drills (“component trails”) for training specific skills that were very appealing. We mixed some of these in with our usual trails and they seemed very popular both with Venn, and with our Bodies; being short drills the bodies got many more interactions with the dog per session.
Another interesting spin-off from my conversation with Kathryn, was an insight into the peculiarities of trailing with spaniels. Things that I thought were frustrating idiosyncrasies of Venn, like keeping hunting for scent long after it has run out, turn out to be common traits across the breed. It didn’t necessarily make then any less frustrating, but I realized that at least I wasn’t alone in this.
Kathryn very generously offered to come over and watch us work, as videos only work so far, and of course only tell part of the story. We started with a known trail, which worked well as usual, and showcased Venn’s core skills. It also turned up an inconsistency in the way I was working a junction where Venn was on the correct option versus when she was on an incorrect one. Not only would this have the potential to influence the dog, in terms of making the right choice, but also maintain in her the idea that I know what the answer is. This was reinforced by the observation that Venn often made eye-contact before making a decision, or stopped and waited for me to encourage her onwards, both looking like she was seeking affirmation rather than being confident in her choice.
Over the course of a few short trails these observations were confirmed, and we set about putting in place some corrective mechanisms with the aim of handing the power and confidence back to the one with the best nose.
Mixing in component trail sessions with our usual training trails, we were able to prepare for specific situations, like a walking casualty, an elevated casualty, a 24 h old trail, a car pick-up (trail ends suddenly) and more. It added colour and variety, could be set up quite easily, and Venn loved it.
With a new found confidence, we looked forwards to the next SARDA training to show off our new improved performance.
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