The ultimate skill in sport detection is Sourcing. When a dog understand true sourcing, skills like working pooling, trapped, lofting odor or most any other challenging advanced skill becomes easy. Imagine calling "Alert" with confidence knowing that you are unlikely to hear the response, "Where".... Would't it be nice to just trust the dog's ability to get as close as possible to the hide?
You may be surprised but there is way more too this elusive skill than just putting the nose on the tin. Dogs who only know the two dimensional perspective of sourcing (nose on the tin), are way more likely to fringe alert away from source than dogs who have learned how to drive in and problem solve.
This class is intended to get your dog driving in to source. This training eliminates fringe (false) responses and creates a more efficient and effective searching dog. We will build all of the skills necessary to make your dog a Spectacular Sourcing Searcher!
Class content will help you to diagnose your Sourcing Issues and to setup drills, exercises, and searches to accomplish the course objectives.
In this course, we are going to address three things:
1. Building a solid foundation for green dogs to ensure good sourcing skills 2. Perfecting sourcing skills in advanced dogs in order to increase searching efficiency 3. Resolving sourcing problems
Sourcing is at its core, one of the MOST important skills that you can create with your searching dog. It’s the very essence of finding a hide. Sourcing skills are what separate a well trained dog from a dog that doesn’t really understand his job. This course is about driving efficiency into your searching!
Teaching Approach
This class will be both conceptual and experiential with lectures that will tell you the WHY and the HOW you can apply the concepts. Part of the assignments are prescriptive, however the learner will need to draw conclusion from the prescriptive practice in order to apply it to day to day training. Learners will also complete assignments based on adapting the concepts to their situation. Learners will be encouraged to experiment with these concepts in order to best help their dogs. Lectures will be a combination of written text and videos. Some videos are as short as 30s and up to 3 minutes, with the average between 1-2 minutes long. There will be on average 3 to 5 lectures per week, however the first week will have more. Gold students will be allowed 6:00 of video time per week and will be expected to keep track of their time usage in their threads. This course is best for students who enjoy concepts and adaptation to their situation.
This class will have a Teaching Assistant (TA) available in the Facebook discussion group to help the bronze and silver students! Directions for joining will be in the classroom after you register.
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Syllabus
Each week, we will cover an aspect that builds our Spectacular Sourcing Searchers in a way that layers on skills from start to finish.
Week 1: Getting Started
All about Sourcing... What is it and what contributes to Sourcing issues?
What do Sourcing issues look like?
Building the Foundations:
Independence
Marker Timing
Handling Skills for Responding to the Fringe Alert
Week 2: Drive to Source Basics with Directional Air Flow
Directional Air Flow Overview
Foundational Skills
Fan Drills
Blowing Odor
Glancing Odor
Working off of Vertical Surfaces
Week 3: Drive to Source Basics with Thermal Influence
Lofting
Directional Expansion of Scent Cone Away from Source
Pooling Away from Source
Week 4: Understanding Source
Pinpointing
Keeping or Losing the Trained Final Response
Building Fluency through Arousal Shifts
Week 5: Problem Solving & Drive Building
Spatial Problem Solving with Mazes
Spatial Problem Solving with Barriers
Pushing in with the Deep Accessible Hide
Week 6: Avoiding the Fringe and Advanced Setups
Advanced Blowing Odor combining concepts
Inaccessible Hides
Channeling
Prerequisites & Supplies
Teams should be fluently searching single hides and large search areas. In order to get the most out of Week 6, the team should be advanced enough to have already started working Inaccessible Hides and advanced hide challenges. This class will not teach how to introduce these skills but rather how to improve them.
This class is appropiate for dogs who are in the midst of building their foundations as well as more experienced dogs looking to improve (or fix) their sourcing capabilities.
Sample Lecture
In this course, we are going to address three things:
1. Building a solid foundation for green dogs to ensure good sourcing skills 2. Perfecting sourcing skills in advanced dogs in order to increase searching efficiency 3. Resolving sourcing problems
Sourcing is at its core, one of the MOST important skills that you can create with your searching dog. It’s the very essence of finding a hide. Sourcing skills are what separate a well trained dog from a dog that doesn’t really understand his job. This course is about driving efficiency into your searching!
What is Sourcing?
Sourcing is one of the most misunderstood concepts of Nosework. Many handlers consider sourcing to be the work of narrowing down to source and pinpointing the odor. Sure, that’s a piece of it, but it’s only the very end of the behavior chain.
If we think about Sourcing as a behavior chain, we realize that the narrowing down of the hide location begins WAY sooner. Sourcing involves the entire finding process from the moment that the dog encounters odor. In fact, we can definite Odor Obedience as the quality of the dog’s sourcing skills! Odor Obedience exists where DESIRE and CAPABILITY meet.
What are the components of quality sourcing?
They are simply:
Independence, Desire for Target Odor, Ability to Problem Solve, and Understanding of Source.
If you can build these four components, you will have excellent sourcing! If your dog lacks in one of these, you will have problems in sourcing. It’s THAT simple.
Independence
A dog who has built incredible independence will have a real “leg up” when it comes to sourcing. Why? Because humans impede the dog when the dog is working odor. Suggestions and even presentations can make sense prior to the dog encountering odor, however once the dog has registered that they are in the scent cone, an independent problem solver will get to the hide most effectively. (In a trial situation, a savvy handler CAN shortcut the time to solve but it can also increase risk of a fringe alert).
Independence is necessary in part because scent cones are not actually shaped like cones…. They are plumes. We call them “scent cones” in a very rudimentary and kind of awkward attempt at describing the shape of something that we as humans cannot see. However, what we usually miss is how unstable the actual shape of the plume can be. Plumes will have a prevailing directionality and elevation that is due to the prevailing wind or pressurized air flow and the thermal affects on air currects. Moment to moment however, can vary wildly.
Here’s an example of just how unstable a scent cone truly is. I’ve used a smoke bomb to simulate a scent cone. Watch how in a matter of seconds, the smoke changes direction completely!
Because of the instability of air currents, an independently working dog is CRITICAL.
Desire for Target Odor
DESIRE is directly related to the value that the dog has for the target odor. There is a direct correlation between Odor Obedience and Desire. As desire increases, the attraction to distractions decreases. And, as desire increases, the dog becomes more intense, resilient, focused, and relentless at getting to source. Who doesn’t want that?
This is where it get complicated…. The dog’s value of target odor does not directly equate to the value of the cookie or toy. Sure, that is a big piece of it…. However, you’ll find that a huge part of the desire for target odor is related to how interesting your searches are. This is a big piece that handlers neglect. We as humans see the cookie and assume that the dog is searching because they like what we have to offer. If your searches are boring, sure that might actually be the case, however if your searches are stimulating and challenging in all the right ways, searching will be intrinsically valuable and the cookie becomes the proverbial “cherry on top”.
Now I DO recommend always rewarding with a high value reward. I want that Cherry on Top to be REALLY special. However, the value of the reward should only give you an extra oomph in your search and should NOT be the main reason why your dog is searching.
Here’s an example of a hide setup where I made the hide INTERESTING. This is Joey, my 13.5 year old low drive Standard Poodle with little to no food or toy drive. Watch how his intensity in the search INCREASES as he solves this puzzle. The hide is located under the table top and the wind is moderate left to right. I start him downwind and let him work into the wind. These are the sorts of puzzles we will do when we work Blowing Odor and Problem Solving.
Wasn’t that the sweetest thing ever?
Ability to Problem Solve
When we are children and learn how to read, we first learn our letters and then use the knowledge of how our letters sound to sound out words. “D” Ddddd “o” oooo “g” ggggg becomes Dog. In the beginning, we have to put a lot of thought into each word. We aren’t very efficient readers and we certainly aren’t going to read “War and Peace” right away. Eventually though, our brain learns the pattern. Our reading gets more and more natural. It gets EASY and our brain only has to see the word and even if the letters are jumbled, we can still read it! THAT is how a dog learns to problem solve air currents.
The ability to encounter odor at point A and solve it to point B is the direct result of the dog’s brain learning patterns based on the information that the nose (and other senses) gathers. This is why hide placement and using air currents and forethought is the key to training dogs to search effectively.
Building that ability to quickly problem solve is where the dog learns speed in sourcing.
I love this video although it’s not a new video, that shows Brava working a HUGE area for a single hide. Here she shows incredible problem solving. First by moving through an area without odor and then by working air currents to identify a single elevated hide in a wide open pavilion. THIS is sourcing!
Understanding of Source
This is actually the part of sourcing that most handlers focus on. It’s about the ability to pinpoint source, getting ALL the way as close as possible to source. This is also where a lot of mistakes are made. If the dog focuses on the pin-pointing but lacks the drive in to source, you end up out of balance.
Well executed (short-term emphasis) Pin-pointing exercises have their place. Pin-pointing is only partly about putting the nose on the hide. It’s also about the dog realizing what the human considers to be correct. This is where the need for balance comes in… IF you over-emphasize this step, your dog will worry more about what you consider to be correct, than actually working to source. I see this so often as it results in the dog offering a final response on many, many objects in the vicinity of odor as he or she tries to guess where the handler will finally reward. (This results in the handler worrying about false alerts… and unfortunately also results in more pin-pointing exercises).
A dog who is focused on Pin-pointing becomes less precise as the hide conditions become more complex. Inaccessible hides for dogs trained to emphasize pin-pointing can be very stressful.
Pin-pointing DOES create clarity for the dog. But once you have that, Pin-pointing exercises need to be set aside, only to be brought out again briefly when needed.
The understanding of source is a coupling of driving into source and then receiving a reward. In training this, I like to mark what I call the “Ah-Ha Moment”, when the dog understands that they are at source, and make a clear cause and effect relationship between getting to source and receiving a reward.
This is where Desire for Target Odor and Problem Solving come into play. By emphasizing these components of Sourcing, we can raise up the DRIVE TO SOURCE aspect, giving our pin-pointing exercises a proverbial Power Boost.
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