As we creep tentatively from the bunker to see if it is safe to come out again, it seems long overdue to write some updates.
The lock-down persisted through the opening few months of the year with the first sniff of any kind of easement happening in April. As mentioned below, both Mountain Rescue and SARDA were permitted to continue training under agreements with the powers that be in order to maintain emergency service capability. However, by this, our third lockdown, there was perhaps something of a loss of appetite to get out there, and much of the MR training moved back online. Dogs, it seems, do not fare so well on Zoom.
Venn and I were perhaps fortunate in that we didn’t need much assistance in terms of people laying trails etc. but we did need expert advice to help navigate the problems we were encountering, and to be honest, a bit of encouragement to keep us going. We had hit a bit of a wall having returned to the scent box exercises ( a series of 3 boxes, one of which is marked by the target scent). Venn had learnt that the reward came when she went to a box, so got lazy and instead of using her nose to find the correct scent-marked box, she would go to the first box she saw and indicate to see if she got a reward. If she didn’t get a reward she would just move on to the next box she saw, and try again.
To try and address the issue of the boxes themselves becoming a visual cue, we replaced them with scent-marked stones that could not be seen from any distance. They were laid out exactly in the same way as boxes, and the exercise was run in the same way from my perspective. The only difference was that any visual targets had been removed, so Venn was forced back to using her nose. Fortunately, this seemed to do the trick nicely, and she seemed to enjoy the added challenge of finding the target.
Trainee search dogs have to be assessed, or at least ‘signed-off’ by a trainer at each stage in order to move on to the next. The Stage said “scent boxes” and that wasn’t what we were doing anymore. The next Stage was to get rid of the boxes, which was what we were doing. In addressing a problem, we had bypassed a sign-off point. This might not seem that big a deal, but for trainers trying to follow progress remotely, and who had not seen Venn work for perhaps 12 months, there was concern that we were shortcutting the process, a course that has historically given problems further down the line.
Given the problems that had developed from using the boxes, I was keen not to take her back there again, but the onus was on us to demonstrate that we were achieving the ‘spirit’ of the training stage in terms of what the dog was doing, if not the exact letter of the description. In the end, the fact that she had previously been seen working well with boxes, the unusual training circumstances brought about by Covid, and of course some really nice observed runs onto a line of scent stones laid out like boxes meant that her work was deemed acceptable.
The next stage was to search for hidden scent items. As this was effectively what we had been doing at the end of the ‘box’ stage, this was plain sailing for Venn, and we quickly transferred from using domestic scents (spices, shampoo etc) to human scent swabs. Again the transition was seamless, and we were able to work in increasingly distracting and challenging environments. The supermarket carpark was a favourite spot, though I did feel a little conspicuous wandering around puffing white powder into the air (to work out air currents) and hiding small items on the floor.
The way we went about it, the transition from boxes to hidden scent items to hidden human scent items were not huge steps, and Venn was capable of finding small amounts of the target scent against an increasingly ‘busy’ background. However, she did not yet know she was looking for a person; at this point the target could have been anything. The next stage, a line-up of 3 people would change all that. This time we were expecting her not only to find the target scent, but work out that the person at the end of it was important.
There are a couple of challenges with this stage. Firstly, having become very good at finding very small traces of scent on a swab search, a person standing in one place for any length of time would create a massive down-wind scent pool by comparison. Secondly, the scent from a standing, clothed person will come mainly from the head, and depending on the wind, it may be some distance downwind before it drops to dog-nose height. As such the dog wants to indicate some distance from the target, and needs to be encouraged in. I suppose the third challenge, certainly during lockdown, was getting three people, ideally from different household, together in one place to try this out.
On our first attempts, Venn seemed unfocussed and distracted, and exhibited little behaviour that could be encouraged and shaped to the correct response. Having reviewed the videos, it looks like she was overwhelmed by the downwind scent-pool and working at its margins trying to make sense of it all. One of our trainers suggested we try working her from the up-wind side of the line (where there is little or no scent) and allowing Venn to get a little downwind of each person in turn, and this seemed to do the trick in helping her understand the game. With much repetition whenever three people gather (friends, family, team mates, customers, tradesmen) we have made good progress, working with or against the wind. If we can maintain this level of practice, we should be in good shape to demonstrate this at our next formal training.
Comments