E388: 줄리 사이몬스(Julie Symons) - 노즈워크의 장점 및 시작하는 방법

sidelined from agility and that's how we got started or happened to be this class going on and i was surprised how much i enjoyed it and that's usually what i find from people who started from coming in from other sports i had already definitely enjoyed teaching set articles because i had a couple of obedience dogs and i had done some tracking beforehand um but what i liked about it was that it was kind of different from anything else i had done it allowed the dog to do you know kind of more of the work and it was that it was less handler driven and i found that it was a sport that this is where you weren't able to do that with like if you're doing like agility and obedience it was you know a lot of a lot of cue based um movements and stuff like that i also like it because there are times when your dogs can't do those other sports they're they're sidelined from agility but they can do nose work or or whatever there's always things you can do with nose work but on a small scale that you can do if your dog isn't able to compete in other sports and i really like that aspect of it it's just a variety but but mainly it's just that the dogs and myself like teaching different things and i feel like that cross training is always very important so they don't either get bored with one thing or they just kind of learn more skills that strengthen all the other ones can you talk about that just a little bit more kind of what crossover what carryover it has for your other sports what do you see kind of come out of training nose work it builds a lot of autonomy in their work some confidence and independence you know we all know the benefits of you know stiffy sports is something that really you know motivates them and makes them feel better and confident in new places they learn how to kind of use their nose to explore the world and and like feel safe you know in novel locations and it's been the most easiest sport to take to novel locations so i remember debuting in an obedience trial or something and it was always hard in a very novel space or um and your agility venue or whatever but nose work you can kind of train in the type of novel locations you're going to search in so i found that that just gave them a lot more confidence like i my dog started just going to any building and just like pulling me to go into doors like they love to go through doors and i just had somebody a student of mine trialing this week and they said i don't know why that my dog just left the pole to this door and they were doing an outside search but i think we've

just built this value for going in to new places and using the nose so i think that transfers a lot to the other sports can you talk specifically maybe about the benefits of nose work for dogs who for lack of a better term maybe struggle a little bit in other sports like those dealing with reactivity or fear or shyness or just kind of that general lack of confidence yeah absolutely um i see this more and more and it's not just for you know the extreme cases of reactivity or shyness but just the act of sniffing just engages certain parts of their brain that releases a dopamine effect and makes them feel better you know i'd look this up a while ago how the dog's brain is dedicated to the olfactory system um they estimate that like 33 percent of the brain is devoted to processing smells and that's a huge chunk of of their processing um and that's why it's so therapeutic and valuable for dogs or just it helps them you know understand the world around them so it can calm them it can soothe them it affects their neural pathways and it makes them feel good it uses what they term the seeking system in the brain which is responsible for motivation and desire and um and the really cool part about that function is it makes them look forward to doing something good and it's not just the end result of getting the reward but the anticipation of it and so that motivates them to go find the things and you could really see that in the dogs we've always said there's a therapeutic role you can see dogs come out of their shell who are shy um even dogs who are reactive can learn to work in trial-like environments um with some management with more management and not with more management but with some management and also older dogs um really have a dramatic cognitive benefit from using their nose because like i said they're using their nose it goes through a big part of the brain so they're keeping themselves you know active i think of like you know older people they want you to do crossword puzzles right and those kind of games to keep your mind sharp and it does the same thing does the same thing for the dogs for those who haven't trained nose work before i think sometimes it can feel i guess complex is the word i'm looking for right like a lot of people think they need to worry about you know managing odor making sure they don't contaminate the wrong things they're unclear maybe on how to teach a dog a skill that dogs are kind of born knowing more than we do right they know how to use their nose uh so can you talk a little bit

about kind of those points and maybe any other holdups that you find people sometimes have when deciding whether to to train this yeah i we definitely realize um the three of us that teach the intro classes sometimes the equipment list um or the initial lectures can seem a little overwhelming we've definitely scaled that back um so the equipment list is short and actually of any sport i can think of you really don't have a lot of equipment for nose work but starting out we use a lot of props and stuff to help them learn it but they're usually things you can just find around your house and i do get that question about contamination a lot and i would not even give it a second worry about we're more likely to have issues later on when you know you're doing other searches and people leave old and old hideout or you're actually dealing with multiple you know sleeves and and 10 vessels that you're carrying around and you may drop some or the q-tips might fall out but when you're working with just one dog and one odor vessel um and usually just one odor there's really not much you can do wrong um as long as you're not super sloppy and you wear gloves when you are maybe making more odor or you know just wash your hands after you put more q-tips or new q-tips in your tin um you're gonna be just fine once the q-tips are in my tin i just hold it in my hand i don't always wear gloves um you know we say you should wear gloves but honestly that just gets old pretty quickly because you're also well you're just adding a lot of gloves to the landfill you know the trash so you just don't really need to do that to be quite honest um yeah you don't want to drop an open jar of oil like that i'd have people have said that that's happened they've spilled it on the carpet or or or whatever and that's bad but that's a pretty rare incident and it could happen to really anybody so i had just never known a dog to have issues on contamination early in this stage so i would just not not even be concerned about that not worry about it yeah i know that you know in your nose work class and kind of the approach that fenty takes you kind of start dogs on odor on day one can you talk a little bit about that approach and maybe why it's the one that you use with students yeah i could talk a lot about this go for it go for so first i find that a majority of dogs do really well um starting on odor and especially for dogs that come from other training backgrounds most dogs these days have a lot of operant conditioning experience and they know you know the cause and effect and what leads to reinforcement so i find

that those dogs just pick up on the type of you know training that we do um easily um but even for new new dog trainers you know pet dog owners it can totally be taught i personally am not motivated to have my dogs hunt for food and you know maybe my technique is wrong although i don't mind doing a few weeks of some you know treat scatters and having my dog a young dog or a new dog get practice you know finding treats to to get comfortable in a new environment or to get comfortable going through tight spaces so i'll do i'll use food for things that i i want to um test their bravery you know make sure that they're okay with these kind of things um and i actually did try to start with some food searching with my new puppy and i just didn't see the excitement in her i didn't see i you know it wasn't doing anything for her and then once i added odor to the picture the light bulb just went on well actually once she started actually hunting for the odor it it was amazing it was it was just it made so much sense to her and of course when we're teaching our dogs the odor so how we teach the dog the new odor um we condition it by by pairing it in a sense we but the odor is out and the dog checks it out and then while they're checking it out we drop treats um and we're like in a bowl or a colander or even a pie pie dish and then we care if you're like holding it in your hand um they're getting reinforced for being near that odor and that that does click with them and it does um make um you know it does make an impression on them and they definitely learned that you know good things are occurring around this new funny odor and i also find that well i don't find is that our target odor is very salient like birch or anise or clove we usually start with birch or a lot of us are doing a cocktail now so you put all the scents together it's very salient whereas i just actually was was it was mentioned to me recently and i didn't even realize if i was trying to do the food searching with my puppy and i was using like string cheese and string cheese just doesn't disperse that far into the air there's not a big odor plume with string cheese and um and it just made a lot of sense to me that maybe that was just you know it wasn't as interesting for her but once i started using this essential oil that really dispersed into the air and she understood the value of it it kind of um clicked for her a question that i often get a lot i'm getting right now in my nose work one-on-one class is they're doing their conditioning homework in week one and they're like how do i know that

they're learning this how do i know they're just eating food out of the bowl i think you'd have the same question if you were searching for if you were searching for food first and then pairing your hides and they're searching for paired you know odor it's the same question i know you'd have the same uncertainty how do they know that it's um finding the odor not the food that's paired with it um or they're only going to the right bowl because we dropped treats in it so it definitely is um a question you don't know until you get to week two of of the next steps of of some hunting games where you're hiding the odor a little bit the big bowl somewhere or you're doing some discrimination and then you're going to really know um if your dog is understanding that the odor pays and you know i i have thought a lot about you know why starting an odor it works for me or why i think it makes more sense to people and i just recently um put together um a couple bullets for my handling class um which is all about kind of odor driven you know creating and having dogs be odor driven so the handler will do would do their following and and respond to their dog um but if the dogs are casting out there were some teams are having trouble they said well my dog is used to me stepping out with them or taking them places so they actually can't practice these handling moves um so i you know put out a series of of exercises to to work on this and one of the suggestions was you know i said you know put a lot more essential oil out there because you just make it a you know make it a odor bomb you could use the wind or a fan to boost it and again that talks earlier to where i said i think the the odor is so salient the ducks can't miss it and then i mentioned about you know food pairing and i i do use it sometimes for some dogs and i thought well why why why am i not liking that method and i just find it kind of becomes a lure and it and it creates a neutral uh response to the dog whether versus a motivated response because as i mentioned earlier when a dog is doing some operant conditioning and i'm making choices there's a dopamine effect and that triggers their motivation and so if it's just if they're really only searching for the food part of a pairing are they really motivate as motivated if they're actually kind of goal oriented to find this to find this thing that they've learned to do right um because again it's not about the the consumption but it's about the anticipating you know getting a reward for finding it and um i also

find that if your parent hides or using just food you're not helping a dog learn to work odor threads in the air like that's how when you get to the higher levels of training and that's what we're working on in my handling classes we need to teach these dogs not to be object focus not to be hammer focus and hammer led but to learn to find odor in the air to source those highs and i just find starting from odor at the very very beginning just sets the stage for everything that i want to teach in my program and so that they don't have these problems later on and we're already starting from the salient picture um working odor in the air and having this cause and effect of i can find this thing and then i get reinforced for it so it works for me and like i said i tried um a little bit of um other ways and just decided that this this is what works for me and i'm sticking with it makes sense since uh nose work is a you know dog focused sport i think a lot of the times you're talking about handling in there i think a lot of times people don't consider that impact right they don't consider their role in the dog's competition success or even just you know an individual searches success can you talk a little more about the handling factors that impact a dog search yeah and i mentioned earlier right that the reason i kind of liked it when i got started was it was less handler driven you know it was just that the dog does all the work um but we definitely learned on the way that it's a team like any sport that we do with our dogs and um there is handling involved and we do want them to work independently um of us that's why it's important that we know what our body language is doing so it's more about what is our body language saying and what happens is a lot of times people will have one handling thing mean two different things like if you talk about agility i don't know if that's probably a really good example um the dog will know a d cell means they should maybe be collecting but you can't d cell if you want them to to um you know drive out further you can't have it mean two things so our dogs and agility get get learned very well what our our body cues are telling so in nose work um two examples i can think of is uh people like to stay in one spot to give their dog independence but really anchoring in one spot is a way that we can say oh i don't want you to go any further you're going out of bounds so i'm gonna hold you here and you can keep working but you can't go any further so i can't mean i want

to hold you in a spot which it which is what a anchoring or a d cell would normally mean to a dog and of course some dogs are like don't need to care what their hand is doing um right that that is true so a lot of those teams don't have to worry about you know the um ins and outs of some of the details of handling but i you can't but again it's just the messages you can't use the same thing to mean two different things so another example would be um if you outpace your dog sometimes we outpace our dogs so meaning our dog is starting to slow down but you're like in a hurry you're impatient you're they're not finding anything so you're kind of like passing your dog and what you're going to do is you're going to take your dog right off of working a potential hide i mean you don't know in a trial but there might be other times where we say i really do need to get my dog over to this whole other room we haven't been to so i'm going to take over and outpace my dog which means i'm just going to go go past their shoulder line to take them somewhere else so i can't mean i want you to keep working while i outpace you and then no i really mean for you to come with me because i want to take you somewhere else and that's kind of right that makes sense yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah and i'm just you know i'm really just trying to simplify it because i don't want this to be this whole like handling system thing or anything because it's so dynamic like every search um every day with your every different dog is different right you know that the older picture is different how you're feeling how the dog's feeling um is all different so we're having to make a lot of um you know decisions and those few minutes that we have and um we're not trying to be perfect but we are just trying not to interrupt the dog right because that's what happens the most is people aren't observing what the dog's doing and they're in their head about whatever happened yesterday or where they want to take their dog or they're worried about something and they're not observing their dog the dog is actually working a hive in the hand that pulls them off i see it all the time i see it like every week in my in-person classes um and so what i'm trying to help people is to learn to be present to be patient to learn how to observe and yeah you can you can take over you can make suggestions you can handle with intent but just know what you're doing when you're not doing that and be very careful when you are taking over that you're not um you're not you know going to pull them off a hide or make a mistake because of that so that's

kind of what i'm i'm trying um to teach and it's kind of another example proofing we used i used to do this i have videos i'm sharing it in my class where i didn't trust my dog so i start walking back and forth proofing circling like like i'm the i'm the you know scavenger bird like circling you know pray or something and and and so now i taught my dog oh if i walk past you and circle you i want you to stay but if i walk past you i sometimes want you to leave you know so we're just we're just adding in all these complicated things for our dogs to figure out what we're trying to do like we're making it hard for our dogs to like read our cues to like use us to their manners like yeah okay i need to go with you i'm gonna come with you now but we could just make it so confusing and that they don't know what to do and then what they do is they become very handler reliant because we are not teaching we're not giving them the autonomy and we're not um efficiently you know taking over at the right times and and and it's just the it's just the progression you know it's it's it's a journey i guess of improving and it's taken me years to really understand you know how i want to handle my dogs and actually it's a fully funny story i was doing my tribute for sad and eat when she passed away and i was putting in a nose work clip i couldn't find one that i didn't look horrible as my handler like i'm like oh my god i can't use that i was doing all this weird handling stuff you know but that but that just shows you know evolution and and back then i thought i was like you know the cat's meow of nose work handling right and i probably was pretty good in the day but uh we just learned a lot more about our dog's abilities and how we can train them and and that's just what i'm trying to get across of how wide handling is important and we're not a dope on the road you know it's it's it's it's a teamwork it definitely is teamwork once you've kind of built those patterns though i mean if you're in a pattern of doing you know xyz when your dog does you know this then it can be incredibly hard to like look at your own video recognize what's going on and actually change it do you have tips for either like looking at your own handling and analyzing it like in a helpful way instead of maybe just a critical way or um you know actually enacting that change kind of retraining yourself sure sure uh video video video so of course you want to video yourself and everybody should know that everybody should be nodding their head when they're listening to this because i still have

people in my classes that don't bring me the camera to video and people who don't want to buy the the trial video um so that's number one you should definitely video because otherwise you won't know right and those people who don't video do tend to make the same the same handling errors um but a really good tip is to speed up the video because you're gonna see those fast movements so if you're doing some wonky handling it's gonna be really exaggerated and it's actually kind of like it's kind of hilarious like you just see you know us like dancing our feet or like circling the dog or you know just backing up 10 paces you know behind our dog and so that's one tip is to review the video and uh speed it up and uh just look just just look how how that looks and then and then of course you have to evaluate you know is something hindering your dog or or not making a difference at all and and my class right now we're saying you know what this is i wouldn't have done that but to be honest it didn't impact your dog at all right so we're gonna also decide yeah like for certain dogs you know that's something that you need to worry about and so how you would try to retrain that is pick one thing and this is so cool because uh somebody just posted today and they said okay here's a search i did today and all i did was practice not backing up and that's what they did you know or another person said i'm gonna make sure my my leash isn't slacked i'm gonna make sure my leash is a little bit tight and um or i'm gonna make sure i um don't crowd my dogs don't walk in too close i'll i'll stop and another thing is people like a goal is they fail to follow the anchor so they're anchoring too much and they're laying their dog you know and i'm like and they catch this oh i'm gonna just not i'm gonna match my dog's pace i'm gonna i'm gonna follow them when they move um and they're practicing that one thing and so that's actually really fun because it's a different class for me because the first couple weeks are on just reflection and reviewing their old or in current videos and then having like a plan how to um you know either build the odor driving your dogs or to work on on your handling um and one of the homework was to just on a walk with your dog just walk with your dog and orient and and follow them like you would in a search like it can be a little bit more relaxed you don't have to be perfect and never and ever most everybody did it and they said this was kind of interesting and and it's like that you know letting the dog sniff a little longer because normally

we're like pulling them along not letting them sniff and because we're in a hurry to get somewhere and and that was a real fun exercise for everybody to just put that practice outside of nose work and so that's some of the fun stuff that we're working on i imagine that when you're thinking about that like you're thinking about okay i'm not going to back up this time i'm not going to back up this time over and over again to retrain yourself you're also because you're slightly distracted because now suddenly you're thinking about something other than just kind of the dog's behavior that creates a much more trial-like scenario for your dog i would think right you know that's a really good point yeah yeah and you know just like if people work out in the public you you're nervous with people looking at work or something yeah so anything yeah anything that you can do that kind of almost takes your mind off to practice like a real like nerves of a trial um that's a really good point i don't think i've really highlighted that in the material but yeah yeah yeah it kind of you're talking about it and i was like that seems really realistic for trials uh so we've mentioned both the intro class and the uh nose work handling class that you're offering this term do you want to just talk a little more about kind of what's in each class maybe who should consider them yeah so of course the um intro to nose work is pretty straightforward and it's introducing your dog to the sport and we're going to introduce odor on day one we also have some non-odor drills just to work on some handling it on the flat away from odor um and we are we basically focus on you know hunt skills and staying at source skills and and i do introduce handling to them as well i want to get them when they're young get these new noser people you know learning about their um handling on this is um one of my i viewed a a homework assignment today and and they are practicing they're doing some mini searches already and they were already practicing where they would have normally just stood stood them in place and they caught themselves because there's not really their dogs aren't really moving a whole lot but some of these spaces are getting a little bigger now and they're realizing that and in this one case this handler was was forgot forgot to follow her dog and the dog was it was going toward where the hide was and it turned around and came back to her the handler because the dog was like already just naturally they they they're masters at reading our body language they're like oh you must want me to

come back to you because you didn't follow you know you didn't support me and the breakfast i was blowing so that's really exciting to bring that into my nose one i've always had it there but i was able to update the lecture um last of this week actually because i'm doing the hammond class and i've you know kind of improved the the the talk track on that and was able to just you know you know copy some of that information over it's amazing how much creating a new class really makes you kind of think critically about a new topic and you're like oh let me actually introduce that a little earlier in the students learning journey oh absolutely it absolutely does it's actually take it a lot i'm still writing i'm still writing a lot of pressures for this class yeah and i think i already already mentioned the first couple weeks of the handling class is about reflect reflection and and and and also just make knowing what makes sense to you you know i'm not to say that my way is right um of course i'm gonna influence people um but i don't have all the answers um but i want teams to really determine what makes sense for them and so far everybody is is listening and open to ideas and we're having a really good time in both classes and sometimes i forget which to be honest i forget which class i'm in i mean they're they're very different but then i'm in a sense working on some of the foundation stuff in the handling class if the teams need that and then the intro to nose work i'm working on handling and actually have somebody on both of them the same team is on both of them because because the one team did the lost item recovery so she's already searching you know humans um sense so she's taking the handler class for that i mean and then she's taking the she's never done nose rip oil so she's taking nose rip one for oil so it's just kind of neat i never interesting yeah yeah that's a whole different uh approach there huh i know it just asked i mean the the odds of having somebody just needing both of them at the same time was kind of ironic yeah absolutely any final thoughts or maybe key points that you want to leave um yeah i think that i would just uh say i think we need to be open-minded and listen to what people have to offer with ideas because stuff i've done today i didn't do before i know there'll be things i do in the future that i would never have thought i would do today um we don't have to criticize other methods and instead we can focus on you know what's going to make sense to us that's actually been like a constant message

in my handling class is whatever method you use has got to make sense because if it doesn't make sense to you then you're not going to implement it correctly and maybe that's why my food searching didn't work for me and katniss because i just i just it just didn't make sense to me right there's nothing wrong with the method it just it just like i couldn't relate to it um and i also think you know people should be resourceful i you should work with other instructors um i don't i don't want to be somebody's only voice point i guess um um other instructors have different strengths and areas that they're going to focus on and they're going to see something different that i don't see but i always i'm cautioning people because i this is a this is a problem there's a lot of you know those are people out there teaching a lot of great great instructors and experts and we have different opinions and it could be black and white and people can get very confused they don't know what to do and i think that can be confusing for your dog if you keep changing you know it could be as simple as do you cue your dog to find another or do you be quiet you know we we have reasons you know for that and i have a lecture that a short lecture that covers this in my handling class um but my advice for people is be open-minded if you're paying somebody for their advice you have to listen to them right you've got to respect that and listen to them you toss out what doesn't make sense to you try out some things that sound interesting different but interesting try them out we're not gonna hurt we're not gonna ruin our dogs our dogs are very you know resilient and then keep what makes sense to you and and that's that's the advice i've been giving people but you want to be careful not to get 10 people's input because you're just gonna get yourself you know tied up in a whatever um so just kind of you know find those few people that you really resonate with um have different strengths in different areas um and i think we need to kind of be well or we need to ask questions like i get a lot of people who um said well so and so said when you do this i said oh well why and they didn't know and and that happens to me i've been at seminars on the working spot and i i'm so overwhelmed that i don't even i just i hear what they tell me and i have no idea why they tell me that like i didn't even know enough to know what to ask like you know right that happens to all of us so i'm not even criticizing anybody but i'm reminding people that you have to you know if you're not

even if you thought you knew what it meant and it's not to be defensive but just say can you tell me why you suggest that and then when you find out why you're like oh i i don't really that doesn't make sense to me or oh my gosh that makes total sense i'm really i'm good i'm sold i'm sold on this method you know so that's kind of my takeaway because it's been hard teaching um or it's been hard creating this new class because i know there's different thoughts on this and i i'm i'm not trying to say this is the only way i'm trying to you know you know find the key points that i think will be helpful but not controversial you know um so it's been fun it's been really really fun and and i'm happy to see the students in both classes really embracing the knowledge and trying it out you know trying it out awesome all right well thank you so much julie for coming on the podcast well thank you very much you're welcome very much and thanks to all our listeners for tuning in we'll be back next week don't miss it if you haven't already subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available today's show is brought to you by the fenzy dog sports academy special thanks to denise fenzy for supporting this podcast music provided royalty free by bensound.com the track featured here is called buddy audio editing provided by chris lang thanks again for tuning in and happy training you