Training scent discrimination and searching
- Thread starter Romy
- Start date
I never gave it much though, but it does make sense that SAR would have the court issues as well. 
Using tennis balls is kind of frowned upon with narc dogs as much as food is. I suppose to some extent it all depends on what the dogs are going to be doing. With narc dogs, it's common to be searching vehicles or school lockers or other such places where people might have their lunch or if they are a tennis player they might have tennis balls and that can make it way too easy for them to question the alert. And when the alert is the basis for probable cause for a search, the legality of the search then is questionable.
Using tennis balls is kind of frowned upon with narc dogs as much as food is. I suppose to some extent it all depends on what the dogs are going to be doing. With narc dogs, it's common to be searching vehicles or school lockers or other such places where people might have their lunch or if they are a tennis player they might have tennis balls and that can make it way too easy for them to question the alert. And when the alert is the basis for probable cause for a search, the legality of the search then is questionable.
Nothing to add on the scent training (though great read )
But I find it odd that trilliums are a rare plant where you are. Here you go to any forest in the spring/early summer and they are EVERYWHERE. But then again it is our provincial flower.
)But I find it odd that trilliums are a rare plant where you are. Here you go to any forest in the spring/early summer and they are EVERYWHERE. But then again it is our provincial flower.
We've got ovatum, which is a bit more common. And then we've got parviflorum, which is extremely hard to find and rare because they only like growing under old white oak, and there's very little white oak forest left in western WA. It's sad that people are building on the little bit left. The other sad thing about trilliums is they take a very long time to reach maturity. Most won't flower until their 7th or 8th year. Some of the very large clusters with multiple flowers are 60-80 years old or more.
A big part of what the group does is take the plants and keep them in beds grouped by locale, and kept for enough apart to prevent cross pollination. When you're losing huge blocks of a population like this, the genetic diversity goes completely down the toilet. Part of the goal is to preserve that. We try to document the soil types, what other plants were growing around them etc. We also collect seed samples from healthy, safe wild populations and grow those.
Eventually there are other plants we'd like to try and develop a way to salvage. Some of the epiphytes are extremely rare, as are calypso orchids, but those require symbiotic bacteria and fungi to survive and usually die if you transplant them. Having a dog already trained to search that could learn to search for their smell specifically would be really helpful finding them in that case.
M
I never gave it much though, but it does make sense that SAR would have the court issues as well.
Using tennis balls is kind of frowned upon with narc dogs as much as food is. I suppose to some extent it all depends on what the dogs are going to be doing. With narc dogs, it's common to be searching vehicles or school lockers or other such places where people might have their lunch or if they are a tennis player they might have tennis balls and that can make it way too easy for them to question the alert. And when the alert is the basis for probable cause for a search, the legality of the search then is questionable.
Using tennis balls is kind of frowned upon with narc dogs as much as food is. I suppose to some extent it all depends on what the dogs are going to be doing. With narc dogs, it's common to be searching vehicles or school lockers or other such places where people might have their lunch or if they are a tennis player they might have tennis balls and that can make it way too easy for them to question the alert. And when the alert is the basis for probable cause for a search, the legality of the search then is questionable.
I'm curious, though. Are you talking about alerting on the smell of food? Because it's not the same when you use it as a reward. I've never had a problem with the dogs alerting ON the reward instead of for it, be it food or toy.
ETA: I should add that we train regularly with food and toys and all manner of distractions littering the search areas, so it could be due to that. Now I'm curious, though, whether or not they would naturally try to alert on the reward in order to get the reward if they weren't taught early on to ignore those kinds of things in the field. Seems like it would make sense.
Meh...I suppose it all depends on preference, and most of the narc people I've worked with all know each other and share similar views on the subject.
I've never met anyone training explosives, so I can't say much, but it does seem a bit strange to me too.
Using it when training the odor. Like one video clip I saw about training detection dogs where they had a small container with food and another with the odor and they hid them together initially in order for the dog to pair the finding the specific odor with finding food. The hiding of food is quickly phased out, but most of the people I've talked to seem to think that doing it at all risks the dog alerting to food as well. Same with tennis balls, because they have a strong odor of their own, that it runs the risk of the dog learning to search for tennis ball odor in addition to whatever it's scented with.
Could very well be. We added stuff like food and toys as distractions in the search areas considerably later in training.
I've never met anyone training explosives, so I can't say much, but it does seem a bit strange to me too.
Using it when training the odor. Like one video clip I saw about training detection dogs where they had a small container with food and another with the odor and they hid them together initially in order for the dog to pair the finding the specific odor with finding food. The hiding of food is quickly phased out, but most of the people I've talked to seem to think that doing it at all risks the dog alerting to food as well. Same with tennis balls, because they have a strong odor of their own, that it runs the risk of the dog learning to search for tennis ball odor in addition to whatever it's scented with.
Could very well be. We added stuff like food and toys as distractions in the search areas considerably later in training.
Do you do this with your rewards? Put them in with the odor? I know the narc guys here do. But we've never done that for that exact reason. It's so interesting to hear about different training methods.
It's not that the dog might hit on a tennis ball, it's that the person who owns the locker might try to claim that the dog falsed on a tennis ball, then when you're in court defending your dog's work and it comes up that tennis balls were used in training it can get iffy, fast.
My uncle trains narc dogs for WA state and they use tennis balls exclusively as rewards. He said a lot of their prospects come from shelters, some are donations, but each and every one is selected based on their nose drive and ball drive.
Wish he had time to give me advice. I tried asking him how to train a dog for the type of thing I want to do and he looked at me like I had two heads.:rofl1:
Wish he had time to give me advice. I tried asking him how to train a dog for the type of thing I want to do and he looked at me like I had two heads.:rofl1:
I don't know, he's my uncle. To be fair to him, he didn't have any background in dog training before becoming a K9 detection trainer. He worked in corrections, got promoted a bunch and they offered him the job. There's a lady, I don't know her name, who wrote the curriculum for the WA state narc dogs. They train the trainers and dogs by that. I kind of think he honestly might not know how to use non toy reward or think it might be a bad thing, depending on how they train their trainers.
Earlier in the thread I blabbed a lot about what I want to train, starting in post #4 I think.
It seems like what might work best for Kaia is following the technique in the link Myhorse posted. With the scent article inside the containers, and clicking/rewarding her for touching the right one. I think she'll pick up on it really fast, it'll mostly be a matter of motivating her just right so she'll want to do it when I ask her to.
Earlier in the thread I blabbed a lot about what I want to train, starting in post #4 I think.
It seems like what might work best for Kaia is following the technique in the link Myhorse posted. With the scent article inside the containers, and clicking/rewarding her for touching the right one. I think she'll pick up on it really fast, it'll mostly be a matter of motivating her just right so she'll want to do it when I ask her to.
Oh! I see. I'm so embarrassed. Almost always I read the whole thread when I come in late. But sometimes there are so many I've missed that are pages and pages. So, this time, I skipped the most important part....the beginning. I'm so sorry. Anyhow, now I see and that would be very cool to teach that. I bet Kaia would catch on in a snap. You'll have to let us know how it all goes.
I can imagine or understand that the narc dogs or other specialized training needs to be zeroed in on and needs to be taught expediently to the trainers. And they don't necessarily have to have a global kind of understanding about training or behavior...just what they're specializing in.
I can imagine or understand that the narc dogs or other specialized training needs to be zeroed in on and needs to be taught expediently to the trainers. And they don't necessarily have to have a global kind of understanding about training or behavior...just what they're specializing in.
I don't myself train my dogs for anything other than various sport work. I do train with two retired cops currently who train bomb. cadaver and drug dogs and select patrol dogs. I've also worked with others, but not currently. They all use containers that are wire or plastic with whatever scent they are working inside. Everything from decaying flesh, to human bones and drugs.
It all starts with touch and mark/click then build to where they have to go touch and click, then find click, then teach the indicating behavior they want and back up a few steps and connect them, then on to full on searches. all the "scent" articles are kept free from human contact, so all sorts of latex gloves and such are used and the articles are kept in a pretty secure box so they aren't "contaminated" by other scents, but mainly in the beginning so it's not confused with live human scent or handler scent. I usually do all the hides for them.
Not many hide a reward with what they're searching for, but sometimes will if the dog needs it, but it is quickly faded. all manners of rewards are used. Whatever gets the dog fired up the most, food of all sorts of balls of all sorts, tug toys, fluffy stuffed bears they can shred, etc. Whatever they like best, but most are more than willing to work for a ball or food, so it makes it pretty easy.
I didn't read the link, but it sounds like it's similiar to what most i know do.
It all starts with touch and mark/click then build to where they have to go touch and click, then find click, then teach the indicating behavior they want and back up a few steps and connect them, then on to full on searches. all the "scent" articles are kept free from human contact, so all sorts of latex gloves and such are used and the articles are kept in a pretty secure box so they aren't "contaminated" by other scents, but mainly in the beginning so it's not confused with live human scent or handler scent. I usually do all the hides for them.
Not many hide a reward with what they're searching for, but sometimes will if the dog needs it, but it is quickly faded. all manners of rewards are used. Whatever gets the dog fired up the most, food of all sorts of balls of all sorts, tug toys, fluffy stuffed bears they can shred, etc. Whatever they like best, but most are more than willing to work for a ball or food, so it makes it pretty easy.
I didn't read the link, but it sounds like it's similiar to what most i know do.