Podcasts about barn hunt

This week we are talking with Marissa who is known on socials as @kotaspen.  She is a dog mom and sport handler of two adopted dogs, Kota and Aspen.  Marissa has experience in Dock Diving, Barn Hunt, Rally/Obedience, Agility and FastCat with her dogs.  Additionally, she co-teaches group training classes on the weekends along with offering some day training.  We wanted to bring on this well-rounded guest for so many reasons, including her vast experience in so many different sports, as well as being able to showcase how owners of rescue dogs can compete in dog sports just like owners of purebred dogs.  Marissa highlights how training for and competing in dog sports has helped grow the relationship she has with her own dogs, and how the confidence in both dogs has grown.  We also dive into some of the costs associated with competing and training.  Overall, we think you will walk away from this episode feeling the joy and excitement sports have to offer for dogs of all backgrounds and their owners.   Don't forget to review, subscribe, and share! Follow us on IG: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@sometimestheressideeye | Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Entre sa croisade contre les usines à chiots et ses prouesses en Barn Hunt, Mélanie est l'Indiana Jones du monde animal, sans le fouet mais avec une passion inébranlable. Elle nous embarque dans son aventure peu commune, de la salle d'opération à la salle de classe, tout en partageant son amour pour l'histoire qui, selon elle, peut être aussi surprenante que la découverte d'un os enterré dans le jardin. Nous remericions notre partenaire Purina pour leur support. Cet épisode est un cocktail rafraîchissant de rires, d'apprentissages et de moments touchants. Si vous pensiez que la médecine vétérinaire était juste une affaire sérieuse, préparez-vous à être détrompé.  Tout le contenu en audio et vidéo de la web-série Du Coq À l'Âne est disponible via le lien ici: https://linktr.ee/ducoqalane ******

Today we are talking to Cosette from @going.super.nova ! Cosette lives with her boyfriend, Dylan, and their two dogs, Nova, a 2 year old rescue German Shepherd mix, and Odin, a one year old Australian Shepherd. They also have two cats who are littermate brothers, Vladimir and Milo! Last time I had Cosette on the podcast, she was still a grad school student - she is happy to announce that she has finally finished her Master's program! She is so excited to start the next journey with her family! They are currently doing a few dog sports including FastCAT/CAT, Barn Hunt, and agility. Cosette is hoping to try out more sports this year, such as bitework with Nova, and dock diving and herding lessons with Odin! PLUS, Cosette also just launched her own podcast with a friend all about dog sports called The Dog Bitches! Celebrate the one year anniversary of launching the DMM shirts with me!! Thursday, May 4, the Train & Play hearts shirt will be 25% off and Friday, May 5, the Bad Dog Mom Shirt will be 25% off. There is also a GIVEAWAY to celebrate happening on Instagram! I am now offering free connection sessions to hold space for others and share from lived experience as a human with anxiety, depression and a sometimes difficult dog. This is currently exclusive for podcast listeners. I can't wait to hear from you! Book a session here. Support the showGrowing & Heeling is officially out - get your copy here! Check out these *FREEBIES* for a journal prompt on navigating stress with your dog, mindfulness practices you can do as a dog owner and a mood tracker for you and your dog! Find Karoline and Layla on Instagram @dogmommentality.Find Karoline and Layla on TikTok @dogmommentality.This series is for fun, but if you would like to support me hosting it on podcast platforms ( & support Layla's frisbee fund) check out our Buy Me A Coffee.Intro song: Let You Go (feat. Tara Flanagan) (Instrumental) by Spectrum https://spoti.fi/2ZLAORn Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/_let-you-go Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/of6rlIM0AZAPodcast artwork: Nicole Everlith @moth_folkPodcast editing: Elisa Dyer @elisaann.va

In this episode, I'm talking about my rescue dog, Burt, starting with the journey to adopt him. One of the reasons Burt was in the shelter for over a year is that he has epilepsy and requires daily medication. Since bringing him into our family and improving his lifestyle, I've been able to reduce his meds significantly and he's only had two seizures in the last five years.  In addition to his health journey, I also talk about Burt's unique personality and some of his early mischief. That mischief is ongoing, of course! At 11 years old, Burt proves that you're never too old to get into good trouble! Finally, learn about Burt's hobbies and preferences, such as his favorite sport, Barn Hunt. I also share Burt and Lucy's differences and the special bond they share. Learn more about Burt in this love story I wrote after adopting him.   

This week we are talking to Autumn from @autumnal.aussies! Autumn is a dog bather and daycare handler living in Washington State with her husband, Timothy, and their 4 Australian Shepherds: Camo, Skittles, Rand and Xayah! Ranging from 15 months to 12 years old, they mainly do off leash hikes in the forests in their area, but Autumn also dabbles in sports with them to varying degrees as their budget and mental health allows. Autumn focuses on accessible, affordable sports that don't require rigorous repetitions or commitment to a class schedule, because of her ADHD, and taps into her dogs' natural drives. Barn Hunt, Herding, Parkour, and Bikejoring are her main focuses at the moment!Autumn says she can definitely emphasize with her reactive dogs' struggles with impulse control, emotional regulation and overstimulation because she lives with ADHD. Dog training has given her a way to cope and has provided grounding strategies, which is what we are going to talk about today! Support the showGrowing & Heeling is officially out - get your copy here! Check out these *FREEBIES* for a journal prompt on navigating stress with your dog, mindfulness practices you can do as a dog owner and a mood tracker for you and your dog! Find Karoline and Layla on Instagram @dogmommentality.Find Karoline and Layla on TikTok @dogmommentality.This series is for fun, but if you would like to support me hosting it on podcast platforms ( & support Layla's frisbee fund) check out our Buy Me A Coffee.Intro song: Let You Go (feat. Tara Flanagan) (Instrumental) by Spectrum https://spoti.fi/2ZLAORn Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/_let-you-go Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/of6rlIM0AZAPodcast artwork: Nicole Everlith @moth_folkPodcast editing: Elisa Dyer @elisaann.va

If you haven't been to a Barn Hunt trial, we're here to tell you what to expect along with some helpful tips we've learned from other generous Barn Hunt enthusiasts!To learn all bout Barn Hunt, check out this video: https://youtu.be/juP_6SdPNhITo register your dog for Barn Hunt or to search for local clubs and events, visit: https://www.barnhunt.com/index.htmlIf you would like to support our work, you can do so here:Books: https://rileycarsonseries.com/Find us online at http://dognerdshow.com​​​Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dognerdshowFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DogNerdShow/

Today's Topic: When you're dealing with a fearful or anxious dog, it can sometimes feel like you've hit a wall, and the traditional tools that you're using are only getting you so far, resulting in a relationship with your dog that can feel belabored, frustrating, or just plain, UN-FUN.  That's why we invited the founder and creator of "The Play Way", a new therapeutic approach for resolving behavior issues through social interaction and dog empowerment, Dr. Amy Cook, to the pod, to discuss how playing with your dog can help you better assess whether your dog is at or near their threshold, where she sees the "The Play Way" living among the more traditional tools available to treat fearful and anxious dogs, how to start playing with your dog in an appropriate and safe way, the pitfalls of "monologuing", how this methodology fits into what she calls "positive dog training 2.0", and so much more!Guest Bio: Dr. Amy Cook is an Applied Animal Behaviorist, a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant with the IAABC, a longstanding professional member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers (APDT), and was one of the first trainers nationally to become a Certified Professional Dog Trainer through independent evaluation. Dr. Cook received her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley, with her research focusing on the dog-human relationship and the impact that social support can have on stress. Dr. Cook is the founder and creator of the Play Way, a therapeutic approach for resolving behavior issues in dogs through social interaction and dog empowerment, and she is a popular instructor for the online school The Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, where she also teaches a course in active management games for dogs, and in a play-based approach to resolving sound sensitivity.  She has been training dogs for over 30 years, and has specialized in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 20 years. Amy has worked for the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society, the San Francisco Animal Care and Control, has provided behavioral evaluations for shelters and rescues throughout the Bay Area of California, and was a member of the anti-cruelty team for the ASPCA, working in triage sheltering and rehabilitation for large rescue cases. Amy gives seminars all over the country and is a frequent conference presenter. She also competes in sports with her dogs, and has titled in Competition Obedience, Rally, Agility, Barn Hunt, and Nosework.Connect With Dr. Amy Cook:WebsiteInstagramOnline Courses w/ Dr. Amy Cook

In today's episode, we chat with Nancy Griffith of Valley Dog Sports about the fast-growing canine sport of Barn Hunt! A long-time competitor and co-owner of Valley Dog Sports, Nancy shares with us all about how barn hunt works, what the dogs need to know, how to prepare to play the game, and more. If you're interested in learning more about Barn Hunt, you can visit www.barnhunt.com, the US sanctioning organization for the sport. If you're located within the Pacific Northwest and want to know more about Nancy and her teachings, find her at www.valleydogsports.com or on Facebook. Like the podcast? Be sure to give us a like and a great review, and share it with your friends! Want to hear about a specific topic? Send us a note and visit our website at www.caninehighjinks.com.

After trying barn hunt, a dog sport, for the first time with Pippin today, I got to thinking about comparisons between sports for dogs and sports for kids. Sometimes adults try to promote their own agenda when it comes to choosing family activities. But if I learned anything today, it was clear that the passion of the participant is one of the biggest factors we should consider when choosing a sport.The Pooch Parenting Coach Collective - a membership for dog professionals who want to build their confidence so they can take on more clients who have childrenThe Pooch Parenting Society - a supportive membership for parents with dogsThe Barn Hunt AssociationBarn Hunt - American Kennel Club

This week we are talking to Michelle from @tmistick and @wearwagrepeat! Tori's dogs are Burt and Lucy, two 10 year old chocolate labradors and they all live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lucy's favorite activity in the whole world is swimming and she tries to get completely drenched at least once a day (even in January). In 2018, Lucy earned her Therapy Dogs International certification and in 2019 she earned an AKC Trick Dog Novice title. While Tori has had Lucy since she was 8 weeks old, Burt is a more recent addition to the family! He was adopted in September 2018. Burt has epilepsy, but has been nearly seizure free since being adopted. He brings a new meaning to the term “Lab Tested” and enjoys pushing the limits of every new dog product Tori brings home to blog about. Together, Tori and Burt have discovered a love of Barn Hunt and Burt is working on his Novice Title this year. Tori is your go-to person for all things dogs on her social media, blog and podcast, Wear Wag Repeat! You can find her courses, blogs and podcasts on Facebook, Pinterest and at wearwagrepeat.com, This week's episode is part 4 of 4 of a series talking about how dogs have inspired career paths and businesses!Try Open free for 30 days with code DMM30! Open is a mindfulness studio and app with meditation, breathwork, and movement classes.  Did you know I am developing a journal specifically for dog owners? Help me help you by filling out my survey!Find Karoline and Layla on Instagram @dogmommentalityThis series is for fun, but if you would like to support me hosting it on podcast platforms ( & support Layla's frisbee fund) check out our Buy Me A Coffee Sign up for the DMM newsletter! Intro song: Let You Go (feat. Tara Flanagan) (Instrumental) by Spectrum https://spoti.fi/2ZLAORn Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/_let-you-go Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/of6rlIM0AZA Podcast artwork: Nicole Everlith @moth_folkPodcast editing: Elisa Dyer  @elisaann.vaSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DogMomMentality )

On this solo episode, I'm going to be sharing with you some thoughts and brainstorms I've been working on for the past 6 months or so in my own pet business. I've been thinking about starting a new dog walking business. But there are a lot of moving parts to that, so I'm letting you in on my thought process around this potential new venture. I've been a dog blogger for almost 9 years and I like to try new things to keep my business fresh. I've done over $100,000 in brand sponsored campaigns, I have my online shop, this podcast, online courses and my membership Wear Wag Repeat Society. Not to mention working with Lucy as a Therapy Dog volunteer team and training Burt in Barn Hunt. Oh yeah, and having a life. A lot of people ask me how I do it all. I think it has a lot to do with always being excited about my work. So, in this episode I'm going to be really honest and share with you where I haven't been feeling excited lately and what I'm doing to change that. Could it be starting a new dog walking business? I'm not 100% sure yet, but I want to let you in on my thought process and how I go about deciding to add on a new element of Wear Wag Repeat. The rest of the shownotes can be found at wearwagrepeat.com/podcast

We sit down with dog trainer Karen Quinlan to discuss separation anxiety in dogs, the sport of the show is Barn Hunt, in Tigipedia we answer a question about diet change for hind gut ulcer horses, and in coffee klatch Jennifer shares her best road trip stories.Co-Hosts:  Tigger Montague from BiostarUS and Pati Pieucci from from Pierucci DressagePhoto source Pawsibilities Dog TrainingGuest:  Karen QuinlanAsk Hedwig FacebookSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=87421)

We sit down with dog trainer Karen Quinlan to discuss separation anxiety in dogs, the sport of the show is Barn Hunt, in Tigipedia we answer a question about diet change for hind gut ulcer horses, and in coffee klatch Jennifer shares her best road trip stories.Co-Hosts:  Tigger Montague from BiostarUS and Pati Pieucci from from Pierucci DressagePhoto source Pawsibilities Dog TrainingGuest:  Karen QuinlanAsk Hedwig FacebookSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=87421)

In this episode, Laura Reeves talks about things you can do to keep your dogs active and engaged. She starts off by talking to the founder of the Barn Hunt Association, Robin Nuttall. Barn Hunt is a quickly-growing sport that both AKC and non-AKC dogs can participate in. The sport focuses on testing the working instinct of vermin-hunting dogs, but all dogs are welcome to join in. Robin describes the rules of the game and how it has become a gateway sport for many dog owners - due to this, it's hugely important for Robin to make Barn Hunt a positive experience for both beginners and experts, and to encourage broader participation in the sporting world. The best part of the Barn Hunt is watching how excited the owners/handlers get while watching their dogs have fun in this sport. If you'd like to learn more or want to know how you can participate, visit the http://www.barnhunt.com/index.html (Barn Hunt Association). The next guest Laura talks to is Chelsea Murray, an expert in dryland mushing. Dryland mushing involves having a dog (or team of dogs) pull a human across a surface (other than snow or ice). This sport is great because you can participate in it year round, and it's great exercise for both humans and dogs. The barrier to entry is quite low, as there are many different ways you can participate: whether you're on foot running behind the dog, or being pulled on a bike. Chelsea discusses the required skills and training to participate in dryland mushing. The final guest Laura speaks to is Jon Sarabia. Jon is a retired military dog trainer based in Missouri, who is now active in the scent work as a competitor and judge. Scent work is an event in which dogs are tasked with locating the sources of certain scents (in practice, these are usually different kinds of essential oils). This is a fast-growing sport in the dog world that allows dogs of all breeds to participate. Listen to learn more about how you can get involved!

Barn Hunt is one of the fastest growing sports for dogs and is a fun activity to do with your dog that will work its nose and brain. Barn Hunt is a way to test your dog's hunting ability using rats hidden on a course. We cover all the basics and the levels of achievement in Barn Hunt. The cool thing about Barn Hunt is that any dog of any breed may participate!We attended a lovely event in Ellijay, Georgia hosted by the North Georgia Kennel Club at Rambo's Barn. A special thanks to all who put on the event, the volunteers, amazing judge, Darla Lacey, and the host, Heather Anderson. What a fun time we had watching various breeds try their noses at hunting!For the full rules, more info, and local events, be sure to visit:https://www.barnhunt.com/index.htmlHave you tried Barn Hunt? Let us know in the comments!Find us online at http://dognerdshow.com​​​Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dognerdshowFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DogNerdShow/​​​Shop at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/houndandthistle

Welcome Corgi Confident listeners! This is a new series that I call Friday Funday! Where we talk about fun things like dog sports and how corgis do in them. Today's sport is Barn Hunt! What is it, what does it require, and most importantly, are corgis good at it? Want more corgi content? Follow @maslowthetrickcorgi on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Have a questions? Email the show at

Marcella Ward has participated in dog sports for over 14 years. Today, she shares her tips for joining in with confidence and where you can find resources to help you get started. These are the websites she recommends looking at to get into dog sports: AKC: https://www.akc.org/ USDAA: https://www.usdaa.com/ NADAC: https://www.nadac.com/ UpDog: https://updogchallenge.com/ K9 Toss & Fetch: https://tossandfetch.com/ Barn Hunt: https://www.barnhunt.com/index.html You can reach out to her www.dogsspeakdogtraining.weebly.com. Facebook: Dogs Speak Dog Training. Instagram: @dogsspeakdogtraining About the Host: Ines McNeil the founder of The Modern Dog Trainer blog, The Crossover Trainer blog, and her own local dog training business, All Positive Dog Training in New York. She is a certified professional dog trainer (CPDT-KA) and also has a background in digital marketing strategy and business consulting. She is able to mix her expertise in each field to provide the most relevant and actionable tips for dog trainers and their businesses. She has been studying and working with dogs for over 10 years and enjoys helping people regain tranquility in their lives with modern dog training techniques. Now, she helps modern dog trainers establish successful businesses so that they in-turn can help more dog owners and dogs live happy, enriched lives together. The Modern Dog Trainer Podcast provides the best dog training business tips for modern dog trainers. Learn alongside the industry's leading professionals as we discuss relevant dog training news, dog behavior theories, business practices, and more! Visit our website for articles, courses, and FREE templates and downloads for your training business: TheModernDogTrainer.net

What every owner needs to know about Barn Hunt rules! In this brand new interview, Megan Ritchie and Barn Hunt instructor Monkia Hoyer reveal everything you need to know about what the rule book says? Find out what you need to know to compete and excel at your next Barn Hunt trial. Download this episode now to get started!

Michael Vorkapich is an agility handler from Washington who runs with Collies. He and his dogs have been involved with many dog activities including Agility, Treibball, Carting, Obedience, Barn Hunt, Rally, Rally Freestyle, and Trick Dog. We discuss some of these plus his activities with Rainier Agility team, Sno-King Agility Club, and Hoofs N Paws 4-H club. His dog D'Argo has agility titles in CPE, NADAC, AKC, UKC, UKI, ASCA, AAC, USDAA. I also ask a bit about his time in the US Navy as a Radioman on a nuclear Submarine.  Feedback and comments are welcomed at our email of Offcourse@optimum.net

About Dr. Chris Zink: Previously named Veterinarian of the Year by the AVMA, Dr. Chris Zink is an award-winning author of numerous books and co-editor of the first ever book on Canine Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, Co-Founder of Avidog-Zink Ventures, and a world-renowned expert in canine sports medicine and rehabilitation, with over 125 titles in Agility, Obedience, Conformation, Tracking, Hunt Tests, Barn Hunt, Nosework, Coursing, and Rally on dogs from the Sporting, Hound, Working, Terrier and Herding groups. Dr. Zink was also instrumental in establishing the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation as the newest specialty in veterinary medicine. Dr. Zink discusses the Fit for Life program with Laura. The program was developed in response to seeing a lot of dogs with a lot of injuries, combined with the knowledge that being at a certain weight and fitness level can help prevent these injuries. Dr. Zink started to see that most people have no idea that dogs need to be conditioned and fit just like humans do to improve their health spans. There's a lack of focus on our dogs' healthy weights - added weight has a lot of negative effects for dogs - it affects everything about our dogs' lives, including leading to things like increased chance of arthritis, which affects mobility issues. Laura and Dr. Zink discuss the importance of starting your dogs right - chubby puppies are set up for a lifetime of trouble, so it's important to start conditioning and health monitoring young. Fit for Life outlines many low-impact exercises that you can do at home with little effort; Dr. Zink gives an example of a rear-leg strength exercise that's featured in the program. Laura and Dr. Zink talk about the importance of repetitions and how you can use reps to get to overload. Fit for Life lets you know how to observe your dog as it exercises, so that you know when they are getting to that ‘overload' point. Getting to overload is the important thing, not the number of reps or the amount of weight. Dr. Zink then gives the background behind the Fit to be Tied program and how important it is that breeding dogs be fit. The program applies specific criteria to each stage of the breeding process (what you should and shouldn't do). While you want your breeding dogs to be fit, you don't want them as thin as you would want a performance dog. In short, why is conditioning important? 1: Dogs that are weak are more likely to be injured, and injuries are expensive. 2: Fitness equates to longevity - who doesn't want their dogs to live longer?

If you want to keep your dog quiet in the Barn Hunt blind, not disturb other competitors, and have the most success when competing then let Megan Ritchie and Barn Hunt expert Monika Hoyer show you how to have your dog calm and ready to work when leaving the blind. Download this episode now to get started!

Laura De La Cruz is a teacher, a dog trainer and judge, and an international best-selling author of over 400 herding and dog training books and journals. Laura has been herding for 15 years and has trained, trialed and/or titled a variety of dogs. She also trains and competes in Trick Dog, Rally/Obedience, Scentwork and Barn Hunt. She is a CGC Evaluator and Trick Dog Evaluator for AKC. She is also a Certified Trick Dog Instructor and Evaluator for Do More With Your Dog, as well as a Stunt Dog Judge.

Laney is joined by the mother of a Ferrari- rotten Spaten the German Shepherd Dog. Spaten is the current #1 GSD in NADD dock diving, he took 2nd place at the barn hunt 2019 Grand National, and has a full serving of alphabet soup when it comes to his many other titles in a variety of dog sports (rally, trick dog, FCAT, and more). Hollie has triumphed with Spaten as he grew from a wild puppy into the top performer she has created. And if you think behind every great dog there is an even better handler, you would be right. Hollie shares so much wonderful insight into the world of BARN HUNT, dog sports, and dog ownership in general, in addition to her personal life. She even shares fantastic dog dental care tips. This is a CANNOT-MISS episode as Laney couldn’t even bear to hang up the phone. Tune in to hear about Hollie and her dog. Special thanks to the book “Barn Hunt: A Game of Hide and Seek for Dogs” by Raczka and Eldredge. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Sunland Acres In this episode, Lynn Lamoureux discusses the importance of finding a safe and clean environment to board your pet. Lynn is a Jacksonville native and has been involved in the Pet Industry since 1976; she loves making a difference for pets and their people! Lynn has a team of animal lovers; they give her the flexibility to be out for short periods. For example, her husband, James Lamoureux is an Internationally Certified Professional Animal Care Provider. He took a series of classes learning things about infectious diseases, animal management, and nutrition. Each of her team members is CPR certified and know the signs to look for when an animal is in distress. The best part of working with Sunland Acres is seeing people reunite with their fur babies after being on vacation. Lynn highly recommends having your pet come and visit the kennel before booking a stay. At Sunland Acres, they do not charge for your first daytime stay because it will let the dog get acquainted with the facility. People drop off their pets because of business trips, home remodels, and when company is in town. Some things you should look for when choosing a kennel is knowing who exactly will be taking care of your pet, where they are going to stay, and how will the animals be treated. Then, Lynn discusses the importance of adopting and fostering pets. If you are unable to home a pet of your own, there are lots of organizations that could use financial donations to keep their businesses running. Later, Lynn reveals her plan for expanding Sunland Kennels. There are a lot of dog events and sports she plans on working with to help people engage with their pets. One thing coming up is called a Barn Hunt, it will be held right in their garage on June 9th. Live rats will be placed inside of a cylinder tube with air holes, the dog has to find the tube hidden inside of hay bales. As the dogs move up in the competition, it gets even more challenging! Enjoy the show! IN THIS EPISODE: [02:20] How Lynn got into the kennel business [04:25] Becoming an Internationally Certified Professional Animal Care Provider [06:25] Have your pet get acquainted with the kennel before staying [08:10] What to look for when choosing a kennel [09:55] The humanization of dogs [11:30] Rescuing dogs from the shelter [15:50] Get a tour of the kennel before you stay [17:55] Plans for expanding Sunland Kennels RESOURCES MENTIONED: Green Dog Spa Sunland Acres American Kennel Club Barn Hunt at Sunland Acres QUOTES: “I combined my business passion with my love for animals.” “Dogs have a whole language of their own. If you watch them closely, you can tell what signals they are giving off.” “Before booking a kennel, make sure they are passionate about dogs.”

Strap in and get ready for some real talk! In this episode, we share the confessions of a nervous competitor...who also happens to be a professional trainer and a trial official. "What, they are not perfect?!" Nope. By sharing her story, the hope is this will help fellow competitors who are also nervous about competing. This could be their battle with self-doubt, fears of not being flawless when they compete, or their obsession with outside forces that have nothing to do with the quality of their training (what other people think, etc.). Being open and honest about these things will hopefully be a launching point for future conversations we can all have as a community. ----more---- Scent Work University is an online dog training platform focused on all things Scent Work. SWU courses and webinars are not only for those who are interested in competition, but also for those dog owners who are simply looking for something fun and engaging to do with their dogs. Check out Scent Work University today! Interested in another dog sport, or looking for help getting your dog to learn some manners? Dog Sport University is sister online dog training platform, give it a peek and see what it has to offer you and your dog. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the All About Scent Work Podcast. This is where we're going to be talking about halting Scent Work. We'll be giving you a behind the scenes look as far as what's your instructor or trial officials may be going through giving you training tips and much more. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what it's like to be a nervous competitor, particularly when you're already a professional trainer and you've actually worked for a competition organization before and how that could be a little challenging. Before we start diving into the podcast, allow me to do a very quick introduction of myself. My name is Dianna Santos, I'm the Owner and Lead Instructor for both Scent Work University and Dog Sport University. These are online dog training platforms that are designed to provide outstanding instruction to as many people as possible regardless of whether they're near a dog trainer or not. I've also been a trial official with United States Canine Scent Sports as well as AKC Scent Work. I'm a Certified Nose Work Instructor through the NACSW and I've been teaching group classes since 2011. So now you know a little bit more about me, let's get started in the podcast. Now, I don't think that being nervous when you're competing is a rare thing. I think that a lot of people can relate to the fact that you could become nervous when it's your time to step up to the line. Are you going to do well? Is there something you were going to forget? What about your long line? Are you going to be doing patterns? What if you say something incorrect? There's a lot of reasons why you would be nervous, but when you're an instructor and a trial official, I think there's an added level of stress. So in this podcast, what I wanted to do was just to document how I feel about the whole thing and the challenges that I faced that are all put on by myself, no one is causing this to happen to me. This all a personal thing that I'm going through. But I don't think that it's a strange thing. I don't think that it's an anomaly. I think it's actually fairly common. So my goal is to hopefully help someone else not feel so nervous to realize just how much weight we give to trials and it's not to say the trials aren't important. Is that to say that I'm trying to diminish anyone's training, but at the end of the day, this is a game and if you don't pass a particular trial, it's not the end of the world. Your life is not going to come to an end. It may feel like that at the time, but that's not really the case. So again, the point of this podcast is just to really let you know how I'm dealing with this stuff and try to give you some ideas of how you could avoid some of the pitfalls I've put in for myself because there's no point in me going through stuff and then having you do the same exact thing. So just for full disclosure, I am a professional trainer. I have been for a while. I have worked for a Scent Work Organization. I am an approved official. I have officiated, I've worked in score room, I've done a variety of different things within Scent Work. I do not think that I am the end all and be all of Scent Work, far from it, but I do feel I know my stuff to a certain degree as much as anyone can know anything, especially related to dog training. If you ever hear someone who says, "I know all the answers", you should take that with a grain of salt. With that being said, I have not trialed as much or as often as some. There are some people who you look at their trialing schedule and you're like, "Wow, that's amazing". I have a love/hate relationship with trialing and a lot of it has to do with the fact that quite frankly, I'm a sore loser, I will readily admit. It is not something that I'm proud of, it's something that I've had since I was a child, so I don't like the way that it feels when I lose or I don't get a Q. But is also a lot of judgment that I've placed on myself and again, there's no outside force that's doing this. It's all in my head. But I also tend to believe that I'm not the only one who's going through this. So I'll tell you a little bit about my journey as far as Scent Work trialing and where I am right now. So, my very first trial that I ever did in Scent Work was years and years and years ago, and it was with my first Doberman and it was really my first foray into a dog sport at all. I wasn't a professional dog trainer yet. I was in the process of thinking of becoming one and I had no idea about this whole dogs sport thing. I was completely green, I was like a deer in headlights. So I think I was just so new, I didn't even have an opportunity to be nervous, I was just doing it. I showed up for the ORT with a dog who never should have went to that ORT and I give a lot of props to the people who hosted the trial. They were very welcoming, they were very understanding, they answered a lot of questions, they made sure everything was safe and my dog happened to pass all three ORTs in that day, which was great. Then we determined this is not a good idea. He's not reactive, he's aggressive. It put him back in his training. It was just not a good idea to do. But that was my first taste of actually trialing. Then from there, I started my professional dog training career and I was doing training for Scent Work. But when I started trialing again, it was actually for Barn Hunt with my new Doberman who is very social and very happy and very wonderful. We did very well in Barn Hunt, he just seemed to take to it like a fish to water. So that went nicely, "Oh, Q's are good. Q's are fun. Trialing is fun, the ribbons are fun. Oh look, he has little letters behind his name now. That's exciting". I did an ORT and he missed one odor, which was fine. Then we went back and we did it again, which was perfectly fine. Up to this point I'm feeling okay, I'm not feeling too bad yet. We then do our NW1 and he passes it on his very first go and I was elated. I was so excited and there was a woman sitting next to me in the parking lot and she came out and she was so upset because her dog had missed a hide and she was visibly upset, angry upset. Then she just went into this whole meltdown of first she was angry at life, then she was angry at the officials and then she was angry at herself and she apologized to this dog for the remainder of the day. I think this was her second search that she missed the hide. So basically for a NW1 that means that you're done, you miss a hide, you're all set. That has really seared into my brain that I never wanted to be that person. It's not that I think that she's bad or wrong, I felt bad. I felt really sad for her that she was going through all of this because here I am with my brilliant little dog. We happened to pass everything and we had fun and there she is and she's distraught and I felt awful. It was just gross. It was like, "I hope that that's never me." I hope that I'd never get to that point because in what's the ... Why would I be doing this trialing thing if it made me miserable? Well, fast forward to, I go to my NW2 and in between that time period, I had done trialing with some other organizations and he had done well. There were searches that several USCSS for instance, you're able to keep all the cues that you earn. So if you miss a search is not the end of the world. But if you pass your others, you still walk away with something, which is really great. It's a great confidence booster. It's just a different dynamic. But for NACSW, it's all or nothing. So we go in for our NW2 and at this point my body is already a mess. I can barely walk. I'm a mess and we go to do our exterior search and it's down a couple, maybe three or four steps and then you get to your start line, then you can go. So I hobbled down the steps and then I released him for his start line. My long line is all tangled, so he pulls me a little bit and he is not hunting for odor, but there is probably a lizard or something similar within this little garden area and I'm like, "Oh, dear Lord". Now mind you at this point, I'm a professional trainer, I'm a official with another organization, I'm a CNWI, so I'm a certified instructor with NACSW. The person who is judging me is a co-founder of NACSW. I have photographers that I've seen other trials that I was either officiating or I was working with. I have clients who are sitting there and they are volunteering at this trial. Can we say pressure? It's not pressure that any of these people are putting on me. Not one of these people were looking at me saying, "Well, you had better get that hide or I'm going to hate you." But that's what I'm thinking in my head. So now that he is in lizard mode, I'm thinking "That's it, we're done." So I'm trying to get him to other parts of the search area to make sure at least we covered the whole thing. In my mind, lizard time took 15 hours. When you watch the video, it took a whole of like maybe 15 seconds if that, and right next to that garden area, was a garden hose off by itself and that's where the hide was. Do you think that my dog went to that area or tried to multiple times? Of course he did. Do you think that his mother would let him check that out? Of course she didn't. So we looked at all this other stuff and I timed out and then when they told me where the hide was, I honestly never even saw that garden hose. I was so up in my head about all this other stuff that I wasn't even in the moment. I was so concerned about, "Oh, now he's going to be just on the lizards. All these people think I don't know what I'm doing. They're going to take away my instructor status". Like none of this is going to happen, but it's what I thought and "Oh, by the way, it's on video. Awesome, I'll make sure that I buy that". So from there, we then go into our container search. Same judge, same co-founder of NACSW, same photographer, and even more people that I know who are volunteering. I'm like, "Great" and it's in a gymnasium and the containers were a collection of different kinds of boxes, but the things that are the most important to the story, are metal lunchboxes. I set my dog up at the start line, I release him, and he immediately launches himself on top of one the metal lunchboxes and slides down to the very middle part of the gymnasium as he's riding this lunchbox and I know damn well that's not the hide, but I'm so concerned that he's going to destroy this entire search area that I just call it and the judge said "No, but he's having a really great time." So I know I'm done. Like there's no fixing this, we are so not into doing this NW2. But good grief, we then go on because we still have to do everything else. We have an interior search and our interior search is two rooms and I elect to have him off leash for both rooms. So the first room, there's going to be two highs and the second room, there's going to be one hide and they were classroomish kind of things. So I release him to go for the very first room and he buzzes around looking like he's not doing a whole lot of anything. He's just running around, which is a wonderful thing to see. At this point I'm feeling just resigned to the fact that we haven't passed and kind of just enjoying him being joyful. But then he comes up to a garbage can that has wheels and he sniffs that wheel and in my head, I call alert, but my mouth doesn't say anything and he leaves. Now I'm stuck with this debate of, "Oh no, I was supposed to say alert and I didn't. What do I do? How do I get him back and all?" He's just like ... It's just, it's a mess at this point. We then go to the middle of the room and he's able to work on a hide that was on a chair. Brilliant. Actually called alert for that one. Feed him, fabulous. We got back to where the garbage can is. Do you think that I motioned near the garbage candy? Do you think that I did anything to help my dog? Of course I didn't. So now he's like, "Well clearly you didn't like that hide when I told you about last time. I'm going to go bounce around and go see what other stuff I can find". So I called alert on some sink or something where it would never be in a million years and the poor judge was like, "No". You could just like hear it in her voice like "What are you doing?" That was where I had the soul crushing feeling of "They're going to take my official card away. I'm not going to be able to be an instructor anymore. I can't be a trial official anymore. They may take my dog away". I mean, none of this is true at all, but it's everything that you're thinking in the moment. So I collect my dog and was like, "Oh, what a good little honey". Here, that's where it was. Like, "Yeah, I know that's where it was" and we do the second room and I have to say, even though everything has been a mess up to this point, he really rocked that second room. It was an inaccessible hide and he told me that it was inaccessible hide, he was bracketing it like it was crazy. So, wouldn't you know, I actually called it and we got a yes. "Woo, yay". Then we had our vehicle search for our very last search. Once again, our judge is a co-founder for NACSW and there's a bunch of people again that I can recognize who are either filming or they're volunteering. The start line, I believe the vehicle was in something like a tennis court or something similar to that, though was surrounded by fencing. The start line was at the opening of when the gates, but the vehicles are inside. Again, we're in Southern California, it's summertime, so it's hot. Do you think that I would just after they told me that I could go, would walk up to the vehicles and then let him search? Of course not. Why would I do that? That wouldn't make sense. So I released him from the start line, nowhere near the vehicles. Then eventually we got to the vehicles and he told me about the hide pretty quickly. Do you think that I called it? of course I didn't call it. So now my poor black dog in the middle of Southern California summer is in sweltering heat and burning pause and it's just a mess going around and around and around and finally, he shows me again and I say alert and I get the where and I point and I actually get a yes. Now mind you, this is NW2. Do you think that I said finish? I mean, watching the videos from this trial for me personally is hysterical because it's just such a mess. It's just awful. But even so, the world didn't end on that day. It was a learning experience. These are all things that I took away saying, you know what? We probably weren't ready for this trial to begin with. He probably is fine, I need help clearly. But it's not that big of a deal and just because these people are there, I'm sure that they would have been delighted to have celebrated in our success if we were successful and I'm sure that some of them were like, "Oh, that's so sad that it didn't go well". We did get called out during the debriefing of the judge for the interior search. The first search said, "Oh yeah, and the lady with the Doberman. That Doberman, what he likes to do is run around, stir the odor up, and then find where the hides are. It's really interesting and fun to watch". It's like, "Yay...". But the point being is that with that trial, I have not been rushing to go back into another NW2. I've actually been putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and putting it off some more. Well, I finally entered one thinking because it's in the town that I live in, there's no way I'm going to get into it. We did and I'm like, "Oh God, this is going to be a great opportunity for me to show that I don't know what I'm doing again". The thing is that, it's not that I don't know what I'm doing, I do. I have a lot of years under my belt. My dog is really good. I'm not the best handler in the face of the earth, I know that. My body doesn't cooperate really well and my brain, my mind does not help. The lack of self confidence really becomes glaringly obvious and worrying about all these other things. Particularly now that I've launched these two online platforms, my concern is, "What do you mean you don't have your NW2 yet? That's awful. I'm never going to work with you. You have no idea what you're doing, you sucked". It's not true, I actually do know what to do but I am a poster child for what happens when you let all these thoughts get away from you. So I'm hoping with this podcast by sharing and being very open and honest about the stuff, cause I'm not shy about sharing it at all. Then hopefully I can help somebody else realizes that that's all really silly and are there people out there who will say that, who will think that, who will talk among their little circle and say? "Oh, she's such a joke. She can't ... She doesn't even have her NW2 yet. I can't believe that people give her money." Sure, there very well maybe. But that's not the majority of people and even if they do, so what? I don't have someone banging down my door saying "You are no longer allowed to be an instructor. You may not be an official. You're no longer allowed to own your dog because you haven't titled to the level that we think is appropriate". Like it's just ridiculous. But that's exactly what I think a lot of the time, and I don't think that I'm alone. While this is for people who are officials or who are trainers, I think that there are people who also have those issues when they are just competitors. They're worried about the other competitors think, they're worried what their classmates think, they're worried about their instructor thinks. It's a very natural thing for people to go through. But I can tell you it doesn't help you. It's not a motivator. All it does is muddy the picture for you. So again, my NW2 is this weekend and I can quite honestly tell you I'm not looking forward to it, which is silly and I just have to have a really good assessment with myself of why am I doing this? It has nothing to do with the organization because I can tell you I've tried with a number of different organizations and every single time that we trial, it's more stressful than fun and it's just because I'm worried about these other things that no one else cares about. So I need to determine is there a way that I can compartmentalize? Is there a way that I can fix the way that I'm looking at this, so it is actually enjoyable? But if it's not, then we probably shouldn't be trialing. There's no reason to put myself and my dog in that kind of situation and particularly for my fellow super nervous and self conscious competitors, just know that there's no way that you can be there for your dog as a teammate that you need to be if you're not mentally in the game and that's easier said than done. Something that I struggle with clearly and I haven't found the perfect solution to it. I know the things that I should be doing about this as far as how I could change my thinking about it and I just go, "Oh, that's just so hard, we'll deal with that later. I'll go do some other project before I have to worry about that". But if you're finding yourself constantly concerning yourself about what other people think, is going to take away from you building these memories with your dog and from you performing well. Even if performing well doesn't mean a cue, is still means that you and your dog are jelling together as a team. I've seen this happen with other people and I go, "Ugh, if you would just get out of your own way, you would be fine". Then I'm always expecting them to turn around and be like, "Hello, kettle, how are you?" So it's easy for many of us to say to other people, "Oh, this is what you should do", and "Oh, here's a solution to your problem" when really you're struggling with it yourself. As far as some real life tangible things that you could take away from this podcast, just know that for me personally, if I had a client or a colleague who went to a trial and they did not qualify, I do not have a little black book that I'm keeping track of all that stuff. I'm not waiting to pounce on them and say, "Ha ha, you are not as good as you thought you are". That's not what I do. Instead, I would always celebrate the things that they did do and they did well at that trial. Even for my NW2 that I just described, that wasn't really all that great at all. I can still hold on to the fact that while that container search was for all intents and purposes on a professional standpoint could be deemed as a disaster, it was hilarious. That's very funny. He was having a grand ole time. We weren't going to cue, I hope that he doesn't do it again, but it was funny in the moment. That will be a memory that I will hold onto the entire length of time that I am blessed to have him. That's something, so if you're having difficulty finding joy in trialing and you're nervous about it, but you're not nervous about whether or not your training is where it should be, but you're nervous about all these other outside factors. The one thing I can tell you from personal experience, being someone who I honestly an instructor and an official would be more exposed to potential backlash. It's overblown, it's not true, it's not real. It really is all in your head and there will be some people who are detractors. There will be some people who are negative, but the vast majority of people are not. The vast majority of people are very supportive within this community and they understand that you're a person, that you're a human being and you're not a robot. You're not a machine. You're not perfect and neither is your dog. People happen to like humility and they like honesty and being authentic. Being vulnerable is all those things, being where you're admitting to say I'm a little nervous. I'm not nervous that we can do well, if I can just get my head in the right space. If I think about this right then I think we'll be fine. But I get in my own way because I'm worried about all these other things. The key point is that you're not alone. There's a lot of people who think that, particularly if you happen to be a professional trainer and even more so if you also happen to be a trial official. Now that this rambling podcast has gone on, you may be asking yourself, "Okay, well little miss teacher lady, what are you doing to help yourself where that NW2 that is coming up?" The main thing is I'm just trying to not load my schedule up with too much other stuff cause that tends to be what I do when I'm stressed. I try to put on tons and tons of other projects so that I can constantly keep myself busy. But what's going to happen is as that day approaches and then I say, "Oh no, that day is eating into my schedule, maybe I'll just skip it", which would be bad. So I'm trying to keep a balance. We're doing short little training sessions leading up to it. Nothing major, but just making sure we're keeping it really nice and fun and high octane for both of us. I'm just trying to keep my expectations realistic. All I'm looking for going into this is to have a good time and I know that sounds incredibly cliche. "Of course you'll have a good time if you qualify", but I can tell you there have been times that I've gone to trials for other organizations that had nothing to do with the organization per se, but just the way that I was conducting myself at the trial where my dog did great, he would get five out of five or six out of six or whatever the case may be, and I didn't have a good time at all. I was stressed to the nines, I was trying to do too many things at once. I was working at the trial the same time I was running him. I was doing a million things at once and it was miserable. I didn't like it at all. I'm looking to not have that experience again. For this NW2, if we don't pass anything but we together as a team have fun, that's all I care about. I mean sincere, true, real life fun. If he wants to dance on containers without destroying them or whatever else, okay. I not promoting that, but it's the change in mindset of "I'm okay if we don't Q as long as we're having a good time together." But if we can't even do that, then I just don't think that trialing is a good choice for me. That's just got to be a choice that I'd have to make at some point because right now it's ... I'm at a fork in the road where there have been some experiences have been really pleasant. Obviously the ones that you could win, more of those are in that camp. But like I said, there have been times when we've killed it and I didn't have fun at all. It was miserable. So I changed some things so that I'm no longer trying to do 20 million things at once when I'm trialing and I'm hoping that they'll make a difference. But I honestly don't know if it will, because I'm still expecting myself to have this little voice in the back of my head that are saying, "You have to be perfect. How are you not perfect? Now no one's going to listen to you. No one's going to buy your courses. You're going to go out of business, AHHH". What's the joy in that? That's miserable, that's awful. So a lot of this is going to hinge on my ability to quiet those voices that aren't overly helpful, to focus on the training and the knowledge that I have, the amazing ability that my dog has and not get stuck in those circular patterns of thinking that are quite unhelpful. If we're able to do that and we're able to have fun, then we may continue trialing. But if we don't, meaning I'm not able to do that, then we may just need to take a break for awhile and that may include never going for an NW2 again and who knows? He's five, we have plenty of time. What I'm hoping that people can get from this rambling of a podcast, is that there is no absolute way of how you need to do this. I know people personally who have done dog sports for a long time and they just burned out. They took a long break as more talking like 5, 10, 15 years. They didn't do anything and then they came across another dog that they thought would do well and it piqued their interest a little bit. Then maybe try a different dog sport and they take it in stride and they make sure that it's fun and they prepare ahead of time so they're not just winging it. They're going in when they're prepared and they are just coming at it from a better perspective where they're able to go in, realize this is just a game. It's an opportunity to make memories with their dog. They're prepared to do well and they don't Q every time, but they have fun every time and that's something that I aspire to be. I don't know if that's possible for me personally, but I'm hoping that people can understand is that your journey doesn't have to stay linear. You can change your mind at any point. So even if I were to turn around tomorrow and say, "You know what, I don't think this trial thing is for me". That may just be for now, it's not as though I'm handing in some card that says I'm never allowed to trial again. It may just be that I trial at a later date. So if anyone else is battling nerves, self doubt, they're concerned that the world is glaring at them, they're not going up the levels as fast as they thought that they should. Their dog doesn't have as many letters behind their name. They don't have as many accolades, particularly if you're an official or an instructor. Just know that first of all, no one cares. Really, no one's keeping track of these things. The people who are quite honestly, their opinion doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Just don't get bogged down in that stuff. If you're really are struggling, it probably is best to just take a break. Your pocket book will thank you. Trialing is expensive and if you're not having a good time, which is going to translate to your dog not having a good time, it reaches and make a whole lot of sense. So just take a break to reassess and then maybe you only do certain things. Maybe only trial so much, and then maybe we're able to turn a corner and you're just a trialing fanatic and you have fun every single time and that would be great. But the main thing that I'm hoping that everyone can understand is that you don't have to be stuck doing anything. All of this is a choice and it should be a choice you make individualized for you and your dog and that can change over the life of your dog. That can change if you were to get another dog, that can change between having different dogs in your household. But whether or not you trial or not, doesn't define who you are as a person and that's coming from someone who struggles with that very thought. I know intellectually it's true, but it's difficult for you to admit, particularly when you're a professional. So I hope this podcast was able to help anyone else out there who has been described as a nervous competitor because of outside forces. You're not alone, it's actually fairly common. But just try to reassess so you can figure out the best way that you can find, joy again for both you and your dog. I hope you find this podcast helpful. Happy training and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Summary: Stacy Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com. Next Episode:  To be released 10/12/2018, an interview with Nancy Gagliardi Little on agility startlines and obedience. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be talking to Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com — nw is for nosework. I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anybody who is interested. Hi Stacy, welcome back to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. How are you? Melissa Breau: Good. I’m excited to chat. It’s morning for us now, so good morning. Stacy Barnett: Oh, I don’t even know what time it is. I flew in from Reno last night, and I was in Sweden right before that, so my body’s very confused. So if you tell me it’s morning, I’ll just believe you. I’ve got a little bit of jetlag going on. Melissa Breau: All different sorts of time zones. Stacy Barnett: Yes. Melissa Breau: To get us started, do you want to just remind listeners a little bit about who the dogs are that you share your life with? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’ve got four hooligans that live in my house and that I love and that I work with. Joey is my senior poodle. He is turning 11, I think this week. He’s at the NW 3 level, which is the third level. Then I have a 7-year-old miniature American Shepherd, or mini Aussie. He’s at the NW 2 level. Then I have two Labradors. They’re my primary nosework competition dogs. I have Judd. Judd is my 9-year-old. He is a Summit title holder, which puts him at the top of his sport. It’s really, really exciting. That happened recently. And an 18-month-old Labrador female named Brava. She’s full of vinegar. Really, really a fun dog, high, high drive, and she’s really teaching me a lot about arousal. Melissa Breau: I want to do a deep dive on nosework today — starting with some of the science-y stuff. What is it about a dog, biologically, that really allows them to excel when it comes to identifying a scent and then tracking it to the source? Stacy Barnett: I love the science behind this. This is probably one of the reasons why I love nosework so much is I’m a little bit of a geek and I have a scientific background. But what I love about this is that there’s a lot of history here. Dogs evolved from wolves. Wolves, if you think about it, have to travel long distances in order to find their prey. They go over miles and miles and miles and miles to find that large prey, and to do that, they have to use their noses, and they have to be able to track, and they have to be able to hunt. Dogs have inherited that ability, and if you look at them from a biological perspective, they all have that ability. Twelve-and-a-half percent of their brain is dedicated to olfaction, so the olfactory lobe is 12-and-a-half percent, it’s one-eighth of their brain. The other part of it is that the nose itself. They have the ability to scent directionally. You and I have the ability to hear directionally, so if I’m standing in front of you, you know I’m standing in front of you, because we have space between our ears, and this space is what allows us to hear in stereo. Dogs can smell in stereo because they have space between their nostrils. It has to do with what they call aerodynamic reach. The difference between the space in the nostrils and aerodynamic reach, it’s kind of technical, but it’s one of the reasons why they can scent directionally. Every breed can do this. Every breed, from a Chihuahua up to a Great Dane, it doesn’t matter how big or small their nose is, they still have that space between their nostrils. So there’s that, and they also have the ability, when they sniff in and they blow out, they have these slits on the side of their nose, so the air blows out of the side of their nose, and it doesn’t disturb the scent that’s being pulled in in the next sniff. It’s fascinating. Melissa Breau: It is pretty neat, especially thinking about the directional piece of it. I imagine it plays such a big role when you’re doing something like scentwork. Stacy Barnett: Oh, totally. Totally. Melissa Breau: Obviously, our noses can’t even come close … so when we’re teaching a dog nosework, once a team is past the basics, what factors influence the difficulty of that search? Stacy Barnett: There’s so many factors. Airflow is a big part of it. From an airflow perspective, airflow is caused by air pressure differentials, which means that there’s differences in air pressure. Air will move from a high-pressure area to a low-pressure area, so that causes air to flow. Air also moves because of temperature differentials. We all know hot air rises and cool air falls, so if you get an area that’s more in the sun, the air is going to rise and it’s going to fall in a shady area. So there’s that. You also have the aspect of how long the hides have been in the area. We call that aging. That is basically, because of the process of diffusion, the longer the hide is aged, the larger the scent cone is going to be. What you’re going to find is that it also depends on how many hides you have and what proximity those hides are to each other, and if you have high hides, if you have low hides, and how the hides interact, because it becomes exponentially more difficult when you have more than one hide out. The other thing is if you have a change in slope, so if you’re scenting and you’re on a slope, that can make a big difference. Standing water, moisture, rain, really the possibilities are endless, and it’s one of the coolest things about this sport, because every time you go to do a search, it’s different. You can never duplicate the same search. It’s always different, it’s always cool, it’s always fresh. It’s always fun. Melissa Breau: I want to talk about some of that terminology for a minute — can you just talk us through that? I know you mentioned airflow and aging and scent cones. Can you define what some of those things are, if people are new to this? Stacy Barnett: Think about a scent cone. We call it a scent cone. People often think in their head, they think of an ice cream cone, but it’s really not that accurate. The scent cone is the plume of odor that we can’t see, but it’s out there because the odor has diffused, or the molecules have left the source, and it becomes like a plume in the air that the dog is following. A scent cone looks like, if you look at a smokestack, and with a smokestack you can kind of see the plume and it goes in the direction that the air is flowing. So if the wind is going from north to south, your plume is going to go from north to south. That’s going to be more what a scent cone actually looks like. If you think about it, when you have less airflow, it’s not quite as windy, your scent cone is going to be a little bit wider, and when you get a windy condition, you get a narrow scent cone, which is more like if you had a water hose and you were to put it on high pressure. So that scent cone is going to go farther and it’s going to be narrower, so where the dog intersects is going to be different. Aging has to do with … we call it aging, and it’s essentially how long the hide has been out and sitting out, because it changes how the dog has to work the hide. Then we have things like pooling odor. Pooling odor is, if you think about a pool of water, that’s exactly what happens. That odor pools in an area and it collects in an area. That’s a lot of fun too. Melissa Breau: Since we can’t “see” scent, and obviously we don’t smell it, how do we really know all this about the way that scents travel? How do we know what we know? Stacy Barnett: We call it scent theory, and we call it scent theory for a reason: because it’s theory. My own background is I have a chemical engineering degree. I pull from my understanding of fluid flow dynamics in order to really understand odor. Air is just another fluid. It’s a gas, but gas is just a fluid in a different state. It all follows fluid flow mechanics. But I think the easiest way to think about it is to think about water. If you think about how water flows, like water in a stream, you can understand turbulence, there’s eddies, all these things happen with air. You get turbulence, you get eddies, because when water hits a rock in a stream, you get the turbulence before and after the rock. The same thing happens with air. So if we can understand how air flows, we know how the odor is carried on that air. Again, it’s theory, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of it. I like to think about that, or think about a smokestack or something like that, to give a visual, because if we can understand a visual, we can start to figure out what it’s actually doing. We can’t smell it the way that the dogs can smell it, but if we can have a visual, I think it helps us. Melissa Breau: Thinking through that for a minute, if there are multiple hides in a room, and you get multiple scent cones, and some of those maybe even overlap … how do you begin to teach the dog this idea that there are multiple hides, and OK, they found one, they need to go find another one. I feel like that’s a complex concept, and maybe they even have to return to where they started in order to trace it to source. Stacy Barnett: That is all about converging odor. That’s what we call it, where you have different scent cones and the scent cones overlap. It’s very complicated for the dog to find it, but they’re absolutely capable of doing this. What I usually do is I start with the hides fairly far apart, and then I start to set a situation up where the scent cones start to overlap. But what’s hard is that the dog has to … oh, and when they go from one hide and to help them move to another, you can actually help move with your body. And I cue them with a word. I say, “Find another.” “Find another” means “That hide is done, it’s finished, let’s go find another hide.” And the body motion helps to move the dog into a new area, because they’re going to follow your body motion. So that really helps. You also have to start realizing dogs are hardwired for “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” So they’re going to be hardwired to ignore another hide for the hide that they’re already at, so you have to start to figure out your reward schedules and whether or not you’re going to re-feed at that hide if they come back to it. What’s easy in the beginning is to work the dog on leash, so that you can use the leash to help them stay, to not return to the original hide. From a re-feeding perspective, I do always re-feed the hide if the dog has confidence or motivation issues or if the dog is very green. Once I know the dog is confident and motivated and the dog is not as green, I start not re-feeding the hide because I want them to know that that hide is finished and they have to find the next one. Melissa Breau: I think it’s an interesting process where you don’t want to erode your confidence, so sometimes you do want to reward them for finding it, but it definitely depends on the dog and the experience level. That makes sense. Stacy Barnett: And sometimes the dog actually has to go back to that hide in order to find the next hide because of the way that the scent cones overlap. They can get information at that hide, and we call it anchoring. So they can go back to that hide and they can say, “Oh wow, there’s another scent cone,” and they can go from that hide to the next hide by getting the information for the second hide at the first hide. Melissa Breau: When there is something pooling odor, or the scent cones intersect, how are you building those things gradually? I know you mentioned usually you start with two hides far apart and you move them closer together. What are some of the other things you do to build those skills gradually and set the dog up for success? Stacy Barnett: It’s all about hide placement, because if you have two hides, and you have two difficult hides, that’s going to be a lot harder than if you have two easy hides. So I like to do things systematically, especially when I teach converging odor. And pooling odor, if you add pooling odor with converging odor, that’s really challenging. So I try to avoid the pooling odor aspect when I’m introducing converging odor, and when I’m doing converging odor I try to be very systematic so that the dog understands how to solve these problems. I want to keep it simple in the beginning and not make it terribly complex, so I make sure that the dog understands and learns how to source different permutations of accessible hides, inaccessible hides, elevated hides, low hides, two hides, three hides. I try to get very systematic about it. Melissa Breau: I know confidence is a really big piece of what you do and what you train for, so I’d love to talk about that in trialing a little bit. When trialing and you have a dog who isn’t super confident, how can you tell when it’s just that they’re working something that’s more complex versus when they are struggling because of stress or because of a lack of confidence? Stacy Barnett: You really need to pay attention to your dog. You have to look for the dog’s enthusiasm level, and you have to really look for the stress signals that they’re giving you. If you look at the enthusiasm level, if the enthusiasm stays up, then they’re not stressed out and they can continue to work. But if you start seeing waning enthusiasm, or the dog is starting to check out, or the dog starts getting distracted, or the dog starts sniffing the ground, or the dog scratches or shakes off, these can be different indications that maybe the dog is a little frustrated or a little confused, and both frustration and confusion can help to lower confidence, which is not what we want. We want to try to work the dog in a state where they’re not confused and they’re not frustrated, so that they can build up their own self-confidence and their own skill set, and ultimately they’ll be more successful and you’ll be able to keep their focus a little bit more. Melissa Breau: If you have a dog that isn’t super confident and you’re in that competition environment, what can you do to make sure you’re supporting them or helping them, and set them up for success even at a trial or in that kind of a situation? Stacy Barnett: I think you also need to know your dog. Nosework really is a confidence-building skill. However, it’s a confidence-building activity. It doesn’t mean that trialing is confidence-building. So in preparation for that trial, you need to get the dog into a situation that you know they’re prepared going into it. It’s just like any other sport. We certainly wouldn’t want to take a dog who has just learned how to heel, and all of a sudden take them into an obedience trial, or take a dog that has never run a course before and take them into an agility trial. Training is really necessary in this sport, and I think sometimes we forget that because the dog has an innate ability to sniff. So generalization is really the key. But if you’re in the moment and your dog is starting to stress a little bit, you have to figure out is it salvageable? Is it a little bit of light stress or is it heavy stress? If it’s just a little bit of light stress and the dog’s got a little distracted, maybe, I give the dog a cookie. I call it a confidence cookie. What that does is it lowers the arousal of the dog, and then that way the dog’s lowered arousal state allows him to relax a little bit, and then they can usually be successful. And you can feed really at any time during your search. The other thing, though, if the stress gets to be too high, call it quits. There’s no point in going for the cue. I’ve been in this situation before with Why, my mini Aussie. He’s a very, very stress-y dog. I had a trial just a couple of months ago where I thought he was too stressed and I said to the judge, “I’m really sorry, but I’m going to excuse myself,” and she completely agreed with my thoughts on that. You want to look at the long-term game. It’s not just a short-term cue. That’s the biggest advice I can give on that. Melissa Breau: You mentioned innate skills in there, and I’m curious: When it comes to something like covering an entire search area and doing it efficiently and quickly, how much of that is innate, how much of that is training, how much is handling? Can you talk us through that piece? Stacy Barnett: It’s probably balanced in-between innate skills, training, and handling. I think all three are really important. If you’re talking a really large search area, there is a degree of talent that comes into play, and that has to do with a dog’s natural hunt drive. If you have a dog with a certain degree of hunt drive, they’re going to want to go out there and find that odor. If you have a dog that doesn’t have that strong of a hunt drive, you have to try to build that a little bit. You can build that through different activities and different motivation games and that sort of thing. So there is definitely an aspect of training. The other thing is training actually helps the dog to become efficient. It really helps them to connect the dots, although I always try to say our dogs do come to us with a Harvard education in olfaction, but with training they become rocket scientists. They learn how to connect those dots. The other thing, I also think about it in terms of you know when you learned how to read and you had to sound out your words? You had to sound them out and it was challenging. Your brain is hardwired to be able to read language, but you still had to learn how to do it. And now when you read, you don’t even actually look at the whole word. The brain doesn’t look at the whole word. The brain may look at the beginning and the end and connects the dots and you know exactly what you’re reading. So it’s kind of the same thing with sniffing. So all these different things really come into play. Handling is a big piece of it because you can help or hinder. You can also help your dog get through a search area. This really becomes super important, especially when your search areas get really big, like at the Elite or Summit level. Handling is huge there. So training, talent, handling — it’s all part of the puzzle. Melissa Breau: The other piece that I wanted to talk about a little bit was startline routines. I know that that’s something that you talk about a lot, but what are some of the different types of routines or some of the options that people have? How can a handler begin to parse those things and decide which routine they need for their dog? Stacy Barnett: The key to this is arousal. Arousal is like the secret sauce of nosework. If you can have a good startline, it’s going to predict how good your search is, and if you have the right arousal state, that will predict how good your startline is. So you need to have the right arousal state coming in, and some dogs tend to be on the low arousal side of it and some dogs tend to be on the high arousal. With Judd, who was slightly to the left of the curve — and we’re talking the Yerkes-Dodson Law — he’s not always in drive. He comes in at a slightly low arousal, or at least he used to, and I conditioned it. But with a slightly low arousal I might use a little opposition reflex on the harness and rev him up a little bit, like “ready, ready, ready, ready.” I might do something like that to help him get into a higher state of arousal. If you have a dog that is a little on the anxious side, or just your high arousal dog, like Brava, she comes into the search area on her hind legs. She really does. It’s kind of funny, she sashays, it’s cute, and she’s still effective, which is amazing. So if you have a high arousal dog, you need to lower that arousal. Things like food actually lower arousal. With dogs like that, if you feed on the startline, if they’re not handler-focused, it can get them right where they need to be. There’s different tips and techniques that you can do, but it all comes down to arousal states, so whatever you can do to modify that arousal state to get the dog in drive, that is going to be the key to the success of your search. Melissa Breau: So I know a lot of this is covered in a lot more detail by some of the nosework classes that are on the schedule at FDSA this term. Do you want to share what you have on the October calendar and what’s covered in which class? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’m teaching three classes. I have NW 120, which is Introduction to Nosework Elements. That is a class … it’s a follow on from our Introduction to Odor. We teach the dogs how to search interiors, exteriors, vehicles, containers, although we start containers and interiors in NW 101. We also introduce buried, which is an AKC element. So we introduce that. Then I’m teaching NW 241, which is Nosework Challenges Series 2. That is actually a whole class, soup to nuts, on converging odor. We take converging odor and we start with the preliminary skills and we systematically help the dog learn how to work through converging odor puzzles so that they get from the very, very beginning of converging odor to the elements that are necessary to them to be able to be really effective at solving converging odor. The last class, which is NW 250, which is NW 3 prep, I’ve actually folded the Path to Elite class, which I was going to teach that in December, I took all that information and I pulled that into NW 250. So NW 250 covers both NW 3 and Elite, and it’s all about how do you prepare for these levels and how to be successful at them. So it’s covering a whole lot this term. I’m really, really excited about it. Melissa Breau: Lots of different levels. Lots of different students. Stacy Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. Melissa Breau: Alright, so my last question — what’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Stacy Barnett: Trust. I wrote a blog on this recently, and I think one of the instructor quotes that came out, my instructor quote was, “Yes, but does your dog trust you?” We always talk about “Trust your dog” in nosework, and I like the term, but in a lot of ways I don’t because it’s so one-sided. It’s so important for the dog to trust the handler. Trust is mutual, and the dog has to be able to trust the handler in order to be able to be self-confident in what they’re doing and in order to have teamwork. Teamwork happens when you have trust between the dog, when it’s not just you trusting the dog, but it’s the dog trusting you. Melissa Breau: I think that’s a great note to round things out on. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Stacy! Stacy Barnett: Oh, I’m thrilled to be here. This was a lot of fun. This was a lot of fun, and I’m going to try to still figure out what time it is... This was a blast. Thank you so much Melissa. I really enjoyed it. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Nancy Gagliardi Little to talk about the other two big topics in the dog sports world: agility and obedience. 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. CREDITS: Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi 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!

Do you teach Scent Work classes and/or provide private consultations? Then this episode is for you. We discuss a variety topics many instructors oftentimes overlook. Such as how you can help ensure your students (both canine and human) are successful in your classes and consultations, what you can do to feel fulfilled and happy with what you do as an instructor and common pitfalls to avoid. ----more---- Scent Work University is an online dog training platform focused on all things Scent Work. SWU courses and webinars are not only for those who are interested in competiton, but also for those dog owners who are simply looking for something fun and engaging to do with their dogs. Check out Scent Work University today! Interested in another dog sport, or looking for help getting your dog to learn some manners? Dog Sport University is sister online dog training platform, give it a peek and see what it has to offer you and your dog. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the All About Scent Work Podcast. In this podcast, we'll be talking about all things Scent Work. This includes the behind the scenes look for how trials are conducted, what your instructor may be going through, training tips and other helpful information that we can provide. In this episode, we'll be talking about what it takes to be a good Scent Work instructor. This will include tips for success, pitfalls to avoid, things that some people don't consider, and just understanding how influential you really are. Before we start diving into the podcast, let me just quickly introduce myself. My name is Dianna Santos, I'm the Owner and Lead instructor for both Scent Work University and Dog Sport University. These are online dog training platforms that are designed to provide high quality instruction, incredible convenience and flexible learning options. We offer online courses, webinars and seminars. So if you have any questions about those, you're always more than welcome to contact me. All right, without further ado, let's dive in. In this episode, I want to talk about what goes into that being a good Scent Work instructor. This can be a touchy subject because initially people are going to assume, "Well, that all depends on the type of instructing that you're going to be doing as far as the school of thought." And I don't want to dive into those weeds. There are lots of different schools of thought as far as how it is that you should go about teaching Scent Work, what I want to discuss is how it is that you can go about being just a good instructor as in a good teacher. And this can be subjective, absolutely, I don't proclaim to be an authority in this matter. A lot of this is going to be common sense and making certain that we do not get lost as instructors in forgetting what it feels like to be a student, and also realizing just how much clout we have. How heavy our words are as well as our actions and how much influence they can actually hold over our students, both actual students, past students and potential students. Even people who may not have signed up with us yet, but may be viewing our information that's on social media for instance. So I hope that it makes sense kind of where this podcast is going, this isn't a debate about how it is that you should be teaching Scent Work. It's more of the manner in which you carry yourself when you're teaching Scent Work. Now, some of these things are going to apply across the board, they're going to apply regardless of the subject matter that you are teaching when it comes to dog training. But I think with Scent Work, we have to be even more especially aware of the potential pitfalls because with this activity it is inviting a certain class of dogs that are going to require a certain extra level of attention. Meaning dogs that are reactive and dogs that are fearful and dogs that have stranger danger and you may also just be incorporating this into your behavior modification programs. With that in mind, you have to, as an instructor, know how to keep everything safe, know how to ensure that your students both canine and human are progressing the way that they should, and know also how to keep expectations reasonable. All of that is really super important and there are things that I think that we do as instructors maybe outside of the actual class or private lesson that can actually hurt that effort, and that we can create an aura that is just not attainable in reality. And I'm hoping that with this podcast we can at least be more aware of those potential pitfalls, so that we can maybe temper the way that we talk about things, or at least put them in more of a realistic light, where if someone were to read it and to say, "Okay, this person achieved this with that dog in this situation." And maybe myself and my dog will not be able to achieve that, but that doesn't make us lesser than. That doesn't mean that we're failures, but we are going to achieve X, Y, and Z, which are our goals. Like it's an important thing to realize that when you have the title instructor people are going to listen to you more, your words carry more weight. You are important within the community as a whole, so we just have to be really careful about those kinds of things. So I'm gonna break this up into a couple of sections, I'm going to try to keep this so it doesn't go on forever. This is a very large and whole encompassing kind of subject matter, but I want to try to focus it to a couple of key things. The first is that in order to be a good Scent Work instructor, again, this is in my opinion, you have to know who your clientele is and you have to be really honest about that. The potential buckets of people that I could see it could be your potential clients are people who are just looking to have a good time with their dog, they're not looking to really achieve anything else as far as competition. They're not doing it for any other reason than "I just liked to have some fun with my dog. Maybe, I want to give them a job so that they don't like destroy my house, but other than that, it's just this is an extra activity to do." So that's one bucket of people. Another bucket of people are people who are interested in competition, they either just found out about it and maybe they're doing other dog sports, but they are seeing you because they want to achieve something. They want to achieve titles. They want to perfect certain skills. They want to be successful in competition. I don't know of many people who are interested in competition and want to pay money to an instructor so that they don't get results. That's typically not how these things work. So that's bucket number two. Bucket number three are people who are doing Scent Work because they want to give an outlet to their dog, and oftentimes in the context of a behavior modification program. Someone who has a reactive dog, a shy dog, a dog who they need to help build confidence or a dog who has stranger danger or it could even be a dog that just used to be able to do a lot of things, but now they can no longer do them because of age or physical limitations. So may not even be a behavioral thing and maybe more of a life change because they had a physical injury for instance. So these bucket of people have very specific wants and needs and desires and you are supposed to help them achieve those things. Now, with bucket number three, some of them may very well also wanted to compete and some of them very well may also want to just have fun with their dog. As an instructor, you have to know who it is that you are appealing to and who it is that you're helping and who it is that's reaching out to you for help and whether or not you can help them. That's not to say that as an instructor that you would not have clients who fit in all three buckets, meaning that you have some clients who just want to have fun, some clients who want to be competitive, and some clients who are working on behavior mod or they're trying to give their dog a physical outlet in an activity that maybe they used to do agility but now they've retired. Of course, I think that a lot of Scent Work instructors have a variety of clients from all three buckets, where the trouble lies is where you're trying to apply the same type of approach that you would for a competitive client that you are with a client who's just trying to have fun or even worse still, you're trying to put the same level of expectation on the client who has a behavior modification case, as you would for a client who is trying to be competitive. When you know that that team will have to take a much longer period of time to potentially compete and you also know there's a really good possibility that they never will be able to compete. This is something that I see happen a lot, where people will contact me and say, "I've been working with a trainer for a while. I had a couple of questions," and they layout all these things that they want to do, say, okay, and why can't you do this with your trainer? Like, "Oh, my trainer is great. They like them, blah, blah, blah. I just don't feel like we're going where we need to." Okay, but why? Because first of all, I don't want to obviously take someone else's client, that's not okay. But I also just wanted to figure out what the disconnect is. And the person is saying, "Well, my trainer has said that we need to do X, Y, and Z so that we can achieve said goal." More often than not when they are, there's trouble, it's because they want to trial. "And I just don't feel like we're getting there. We've been doing this for put in time a month, three months, six months, whatever. And I just don't feel like I'm getting any closer and I feel as though my trainer is getting frustrated with me." I said, "Okay, well can you give me a little bit more background about your dog?" And then sure enough the dog has a slew of other issues behaviorally, which is not bad on the dog at all. But from the outset, from what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing, it doesn't sound as though competition would be on the priority track for this team. It would be more of, "Well, let's address some of these other behavioral things first and then maybe once all those things are figured out and the dog has the skills and you have the skills, maybe then we can talk about competition." So I will send them back to the other trainer with that news and say, "Okay, well, you know, maybe you guys just need to readjust the way that you're approaching this. Maybe focus on this, this and this, and focus on having a good time and you make sure that you're jotting down your successes, and I'm sure you and your trainer will do a really great job with this. You guys sound like you're on the right path. You guys are doing great." And I'm happy to report that the very few number of times that that's happened, the trainer will reach out to me saying, because I always CC and everything else because I'm not trying to steal anyone's clients, that's another big thing to be a good instructor, don't steal other people's clients. But I'll CC them on the email and they will respond to me, "Thank you very much. Appreciate it." This happened two different times with one person, it was just a miscommunication between them and the client. So this helped them figure out, "Okay, we need to be on a better wavelength to figure out what you need and what I can offer you." For the other trainer it was just an eye opener of, "Oh, I had no idea. I thought that this is what they wanted." So it's trying to push them that way, but apparently they need to work on this other stuff first. And it's not that either of these instructors are bad, they're not, they're great people, they're accomplished, their students like them, they just were looking for clarification because things didn't seem to be working out. Which as a good dog advocate, you should do, I mean, I don't care who you work with. If you're working with them for any period of time and you're not getting the results that you thought, then you should probably get a second opinion. It doesn't mean that that first person is bad. It's just being a good dog advocate. So all of this to say that in order to be a good instructor, you have to know the client that's in front of you and how it is that you can help them. This can be really challenging when we're talking about in-person group training classes and I know there's some people rolling their eyes going, "Oh, you're just saying the only online works." And that's not true at all. I think honestly that in-person group training classes are excellent training tools, if people could do a combination of these in-person group training classes, maybe even a couple of privates and online, I think that's actually the way to go because it just gives you the full picture. But where I see on an instructor side that it can be really challenging is when you have a class that's filled with all these variety of people and you haven't really thought of how it is you can address each of their needs without singling one out or without making another one feel as though they're being singled out, or without making another one feels as they're falling behind and all these. It's a challenge, it's hard, it's difficult. There's no real good formula to it as far as do this and you're guaranteed to be successful, it's all about really how it is that you design your classes, the length, how they're run, what the expectation is for the class and how it is that you approach it with the people. So when I used to do in-person group training classes, all the dogs are being crated and the expectation from the very, very baby class to even my most advanced classes was that the people obviously want to be checking-in on their dogs, make sure their dogs are fine, and after the first week or two of the dogs are either working or they're sleeping. But they are there to learn by watching the other dogs to figure out what's happening in this space to see why it is that we're setting things up certain ways. It's a learning thing the entire time for the people and to almost celebrate the differences of dog-to-dog, and almost to celebrate the differences from team-to-team. We will be very transparent as far as who was interested in competing and who wasn't. And it wasn't a, "Wow, you're great at competing and I'm just this lowly little person who just wants to have fun. I'm not important and you are." It wasn't anything like that. But it was the highlight the differences and the differences are okay, but we want to make sure that everyone is getting something out of this. Now I'm not saying that that's perfect, I'm not saying that someone couldn't improve upon that, but that format worked for my clients and it also created a level of partnership and a bond between all of them where they would root for each other's dogs, where they would root for each other. The ones who people knew were competing, they'd ask how they did during the weekend, and it was just a nice way of kind of building a little mini community within the class itself. A good instructor should be cultivating that, of allowing these people to join the community of the dog. That should be the whole goal and not having these little tiny islands of individual people and dogs who never communicate with one another, and it's all very competitive and gross and yucky. That can happen a lot in group training classes where people are comparing, your students are comparing each other to one another and it just gets really gross really quickly, and that's across the board. That's not just in Scent Work, that's you see it in your basic obedience classes too. "Well my dog didn't sit as fast as that dog", and so on and so forth. You want to try to avoid those kinds of things as best as you can, so as an instructor you have to know how to cultivate a good atmosphere within your class and even if you're working with someone one-on-one, you want to be able to do that too. You have to build up that relationship, particularly for working with a dog who has any kind of behavioral issues or physical issues. You're going to have to make adjustments so that that dog can be successful. Somehow manipulating the space, manipulating the search, manipulating the exercise, maybe breaking it down to further pieces, whatever the case may be so that they can be successful. And particularly in a group training class that has to be done in such a way that that person doesn't feel as though your "dumbing things down for their dog", which you aren't, but that can be the perception. And you also want to make sure the other people in the class like, "Oh, now they're going, everything's going to be really boring now." I mean, again, you just have to think how can this go wrong and how can I avoid that? So that's the biggest thing that I see with people who are teaching Scent Work is obviously you want to keep things safe and everything else will go into a little bit about that in this podcast, but it's just designing it so that you're fulfilling the needs of the people who you're working with. This is where you have to be honest with yourself. For me personally, I am not the type of instructor who cares about having people shaving off seconds off of their total search time. I prefer to focus on the dog doing well as far as being able to complete the task, being an independent hunter and having that relationship with the person where the person is listening to the dog as far as what is the dog is saying as they're hunting. I don't care about placements, like that's not a gauge for me personally as a competitor, but it's also not a gauge for me for my students, I don't care, I just don't. So if I had someone come to me as a student who wanted me to solely focus on that, I'm not that instructor. That's not who I am, and I've had two people, not in Scent Work but for Barn Hunt when I used to teach Barn Hunt, that's what they wanted to do. They wanted to get High in Trial every single time. And I'm like, "I'm not the person to work with, sorry." And they were both shocked and they were like, "What?" They were friends. It's just not what I focus on, like it's I care more about your dog doing well as far as doing the activity, as far as completing the task. I don't care if you get High in Trial, "But we do!" like, "I know, but what I'm saying is that, I can't provide you with those guarantees." Number one, I don't think anyone can, but number two, if things start going down the rabbit hole of your dog isn't getting High in Trial. I'm uncomfortable as far as how it is that I would then fix that, I don't want to get into any of that because it's just not what I do. There are instructors who can absolutely zero in on, we can figure out the exact skills that you and your dog would need to help better ensure that you could be closer to the high in trial rankings. I mean, no one can guarantee you that you're going to get High in Trial every single time. And if they do, then maybe you should look elsewhere, but it's just understanding who you are as an individual. So for those two people, they had every intention of paying me as much as I wanted to charge them and just guarantee us. I'm like, "That's not what I do, I'm sorry," and they worked with someone else and that's totally fine, but what we need to realize just as instructors is who we are as people and what it is that we're providing, and making sure that we can indeed provide what it is that our students are asking us to provide. That also goes into making sure you're being careful with how you advertise yourself and evaluating. I mean, if you find yourself, you have a booked schedule hopefully and you have lots of classes and you have privates and consultations and everything else, and you find yourself dreading anything where you're like, "Ugh, I live in the east and I really hope it snows today so I can cancel my class." If that happens, then something's wrong. You may want to reevaluate things so that it can be something that you don't dread. And that leads us into how it's important in being a good instructor of doing good self-care, of making certain that you are balancing all these different things you have to do. I think that it is false that to be a good instructor you have to have achieved the highest titles and if you were doing a dog sports-specific instructing like Scent Work. You must have gotten or you must have earned X title in order to teach. I don't think that's true. There are people who are excellent instructors which means that in from my terminology, so just so we're clear on this, an instructor in my estimation means someone who is very good at teaching people and training dogs and both together to where the dog and the person can actually understand what is being taught to them. There are people who are very good at teaching the people, but not very good at training the dogs. There's people who are very good at training dogs, but terrible teaching people. In my estimation to be a good instructor, you have to be a total package. You have to be able to do both and it's difficult, it's very hard, don't get me wrong. So now that we have a better understanding what my definition of instructor is, there are instructors who do not like to compete, there are instructors who maybe competed before but don't feel like competing anymore. There are instructors who just don't have the time to compete or the resources to do so. That doesn't mean that they're bad instructors, that's not a disqualifier. So I know that it's very alluring to say, "Well, if I receive, if I earned the highest title, then that will just be a guarantee that people will want to work with me." Then let's be blunt, the higher the title that you have, the more people are gonna say, "Well, you achieve that. You must know what you're doing." Sure. But that's not a guarantee, there are plenty of people who have achieved the highest titles across the board, not just instructors just anyone, and you would actually watch them work a dog and be like, "Wow, really?" "Okay. I mean that's fine, but I don't feel like I can learn anything from you." So what I'm hoping that people understand is if you want to be a good instructor you have to know who you are as a person and not put yourself into situations where you're going to be burning yourself out, where you're going to be making it so that it is so impossible for you to do what you need to do to serve your clients best. This is speaking from experience of being someone who's pretty much on the fence about competing. There are times I like it, there are times I don't and I really couldn't take it or leave it. It's just there. I think it's a good test for training but it's not like a need, it's not like, "Oh, I have to go and do this." It's just like, "Okay, well if I get around to it then I'll go and do a trial and we'll see where things are." It doesn't make me a lesser than instructor than someone who's out every single weekend campaigning, it's just different. The other thing that I really want to nail down in this podcast is that there shouldn't, even though there is a perceived but there shouldn't be different tiers of instructors depending on who it is that you work with or who it is that you're focusing on. What I mean is, is that I had a colleague come up to me during a workshop that I was speaking at, and it was during a break and she was asking me a question about the organization that I worked with and she's like, "I don't really understand why it is that they offer this high champion award." So I was explaining it, whatever. And she said, "Well, I just think that it's odd that they would already be pointing out dogs that are already champions." I was like, "Well, there's a lot of work that goes into it and it's celebrating people who putting the time and the training and everything else. It's still a dog has to do well at that trial in order to earn it. And it's just basically any dogs who have already earned a championship would be eligible for that award, to figure out depending on how they did it, that particular trial." What she said next has always stuck with me, "Well, I guess I should just stick to the type of trainer that I am. I focus on people and dogs who just may need help, and not those champion types", and she walked away and I just looked after her and it's stuck with me all these years later because there really is at the heart in the community this delineation between "pet people" and "dog sport people" and I just don't think that's true. I mean, we talked about earlier in the podcast, those buckets of people, but that doesn't mean that as an instructor you can only work with one of them. Like that's the misnomer of, if you're going to be working with people who care about competition, then you are not allowed to work with people who just want to have fun with their dogs. "Clearly, you would have no idea what those people would want." Well, that's not true and it also doesn't apply the other way. If you were focusing solely on people who just wanted to have fun with their dogs, or as you were focusing on people who just wanted to do competition, that somehow you're better or worse than another instructor. That's not true either, so this is something that I think is. It's an ugly underbelly of our industry of instead of celebrating your achievements up to a point when I get to that in a second, and also what you could provide, a lot of it is trying to say, "Well at least I don't do that." It's like, "Well, who cares? I'm not trying to work with whatever that is. I'm trying to work with you, and I want to work with people who are inclusive." So in my opinion, because Scent Work is such a broad community as far as the types of people who may be interested in hiring you for your services if you are an instructor. You're going to be limiting yourself, if you put on those different hats of "pet people only", "competitor person only", whatever else. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't know your clientele, you should. If you don't have any idea how it is you be able to help that person, then please don't advertise to them. But don't look down on people who aren't in the camp that you're working with, I hope that makes sense because it's a huge problem and all it does it perpetuate more of the cliquiness that's within just the dog community overall, which would be really nice if that went away. So I want to talk about some of the things that I found have been helpful when I was teaching in-person group training classes when I was doing Scent Work. I touched upon some of these things already, but the big thing was to really think through what it is that I wanted the class as a whole to achieve within a given session. So a session would be like a six-week class where they're starting and where I wanted them to go as a group, and then how individually their goals may line up with that. So as an example, I had a class of, I believe it was eight or nine dogs and it was a beginner class. So the goal overall is for the dogs and the people to have a basic understanding of what Scent Work is all about. Hopefully getting them to the point where I follow the training. We go from having food in boxes, so hopefully going from that point to where now they are finding food that's placed on top of little tins, throughout an interior space. Hopefully, you know that's the goal anyway. With this individual class, there was one dog who had a severe level of fear, a severe level of timidity and shyness and no confidence mean crawling on the belly to come into the class. I mean, just really bad. The goal for this dog is just to have them comfortable in the space and explaining all of that to the other students and incorporating them in that process by having the person who had that shy dog, go out and just, we would have maybe two or three boxes in the room. And the treats would be in front of the boxes because the dog was so worried if the treat was inside the box, they would just fall apart. So to have the person come in, let the dog take the lead, and if the tried, they ate the tree off the floor, then they give them a jackpot and everybody else would do very quiet, "Yay!" I mean we're talking super quiet. But by having them be involved, meaning the other human students, they breathe more because the first run they all held our breath which made the dog like, "Oh my God, no one's breathing." So that doesn't help. It offered them a level of empathy for this team, they were all genuinely rooting for this team. It provided support for the handler of the dog that was working and it also ignited in the dog the joy of having other people cheer for her. By the end of that six weeks, she was confidently working the space with multiple boxes, we have confidence problems where a box of had treats in it, had an empty box on top of it and she would move the empty box out of the way. She was a little too worried about it, she'd go for it and then she would have it her mother and say, "Can you just change this a little bit for me?" In the beginning, we may and then we would just wait her out and she was able to do it and she would just light up when people could now clap for her and go, "Yay. You're great," like it would be a little bit more boisterous as far as the crowd was concerned. She loved it. She was fantastic and it helped all the other students understand the power of the activity itself. This dog handler down the line may very well be interested in competition. Her goal right now was to get it so her dog wasn't terrified with life, that's all she cared about and they achieved that and she saw the changes at home, she saw how the dog would actually asked to play. She would go up at home and she would boink the boxes that were up on the table and she'd be like, "I would like to play my nose game now." All of that helped all the students and because she was starting at one level which was several stages below where their dogs were starting, just because of the confidence issues. It almost took off some of the pressure from them, if their dogs happen to be struggling with something, like even the confidence problems, they'd be like, "Wow, you know, my dog did so well with this that, but they're really having a hard time with this. I'm just going to wait them out, if that dog can do it, so can I." And it just provided them more patience, which everyone needs and it was this really great bonding experience with all these students. There was different levels of handling ability as far as their ability to just walk within the space of staying focused during the search of being able to handle at leash or a long line, and being a good instructor is knowing what it is you want to focus on and to not destroy your student, particularly in front of everybody else. By always pointing out when something is wrong, but you have to use those positive reinforcement kind of approaches. So that you're building them up to, you don't have to address everything in every single run, there may just be certain things that you focus on. Again, these are people, they have lives, they have work, they have other things going on. If you're bombarding them during a one and a half minute run of 30 things that they need to do, they're not going to do any of them, they're just going to feel really defeated and gross, and they're going to go back to their seat and they're just going to be really gloomy. Being a good instructor is being able to tick off all those boxes of, "I see what they're doing, I see that these five things are going really well, I see these five things have improved, and I see these five things need improvement. What's one from each of those columns that I can bring up?" So they can have one thing that they check off is great, one thing that's improving and they should be proud of, and one thing they can work on. What's the most important thing in that run right then that they can do when they can walk away with and they can practice outside of class? The other thing that I find personally has helped as an instructor is trying to take some of the pressure off of people as far as it comes to being perfect in class. So again, for that very shy dog, there would be exercises that we will be talking about and she would only be able do half of them. She'd be able to do part of the setup and then you would see her kind of unravel and be like, "Oh no, you're fine, we do a recovery searching, it should be all set." The expectation was as long as she tries, that's all I care about. You can then work on this at home for the next seven days until I see you again. We don't have to jam this all into one hour. So to be a good Scent Work instructor, in my opinion, you have to be able to be that flexible, you have to set your client's expectations so they're not sitting their dog up to fail and they're not seeing themselves up to fail. You have to outline what it is exactly that they're supposed to be doing when they're not with you, they have all those days and hours that they could be doing stuff. You can't get everything done in one class. So being able to juggle all that is really important. So one of the big pitfalls that I see as far as being a Scent Work instructor is not understanding the clout that you have with what it is that you say or do. What I mean by this is, if you are constantly posting, particularly on social media about all of your accomplishments in competition for instance. And you have current, former or perspective clients who are seeing that, but they're just seeing it in a bubble where you're not explaining, "Oh by the way, this dog and I worked on these things for a year and a half, was really super intensive. It wasn't just a straight line, there was a lot of hills and valleys and we took some detours and whatever else and we're still working on X, Y, and Z, and then we also achieve this stuff." If you don't have all those qualifiers in there, you're putting out to the world, "I have achieved all of this by pure magic and I am the best thing since slice bread and if you want to be as good as I am, then you better achieve this as well." That's problematic because again, understand specifically with Scent Work, it is open to a wide swath of people. For a dog sport, it is almost a gateway dog sport where you can have people who've never even heard the term "dog sport" before but they may fall into Scent Work for any number of reasons. And if they see on social media that you're just buried in ribbons and titles and trophies and everything else and you have a very young dog. They go, "Well then my dog should be able to do that too," and they rush off the trial and then they fail, and they get really frustrated and they get angry and they get demoralized, and they don't understand because all that lead up wasn't included. It wasn't included that you work with that dog almost like a campaign like it is an insane amount of work that you've put in to achieve that. Maybe it was the dogs breeding, maybe it was a combination of all these things. On top of that, you also do this for a living. I'm not saying that you have to have an asterix behind what you do, but understand the clout that you're carrying when you post stuff, because I can tell you as a fellow instructor, as one of your colleagues, it is heartbreaking to try to piece together the relationship of a handler and a dog who have completely fallen apart because they didn't understand all that other stuff that would into it. They rushed into trial, they failed and now they think that there's something wrong with them and their dog, and it takes forever. If you ever can to try to piece it all back together again and it's totally avoidable, if we just focus on this is an innate instinct, absolutely. But it's still a skill and there are absolutely dogs out there who need to learn how to learn, who need to learn the skills so that they can work at the most basic problems. There are other dogs who can fly through foundation competition, and they get stuck in the middle levels because they don't have those skills yet. And that's okay, you can work on it. There's no rush. So I'm just hoping that people who are instructors just realize who's listening to them, and when they see all the dazzle and the wonderful posts that those people are the ones who then run into the room, they grabbed their odor kit that they haven't practiced with in a year. They throw some hides around and they say, "Okay dog, go find it." And when it doesn't find them all, all 20 hides in 10 seconds, they get frustrated. You just have to be careful. So for me personally, I am very good at self-deprecating, I don't have much of an ego. Actually, I don't think very highly of myself at all. So if things don't go well, I'm more than happy to post about them. If I'm doing some training with my dog and he's struggling with something, I'm happy to post that too. I'm happy to post about, "Oh, you know we're working on this, we're working on that." If we compete, yeah, sure, great, we did this. Oh, but we didn't get this and this and this and this is why. It just helps people realize that I'm a human being and it also reduces some of the expectations for me because what happens if you go on this big blitz, right? Everything is perfect and awesome and now all of a sudden you know you're up against even better competition than maybe you were and now you're not. You still get your titles, but now all of a sudden you're not getting every single ribbon under the sun. It's just you have to be thoughtful about these things, just be careful. Lastly, just to round this out, in my estimation to be a good Scent Work instructor, you have to have a very distinctive view on how to keep things safe. Particularly, when we're talking about group classes. You're asking dogs to use hunting and for a very high valued resource that you are only building value in. There are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong, there's lots of opportunity if you're not careful for a dog to be placed into conflict. There's a lot of opportunity for a dog to be put into conflict not only with other dogs, but even with the instructor, with their handler, things can get really icky really quick. But even outside of that, the way that you design your searches can absolutely break a dog, and I'm not overstating this. Depending on the type of dog that you're working with. Like for instance, that very shy dog. If I had presented her with a horrendously difficult problem for her. Because I was concerned about the rest of the class and I wanted all of them to progress at a certain rate. She could have shut down and could have turned off to the entire activity, and then also could have ruined the relationship she had with her owner. You have to be able to recognize those things and obviously avoid them. And as an instructor, if you're a good instructor, you know how to help guide your students so they are not inadvertently doing that with their dogs and they're practicing. And that's where capping off those expectations are really important. Harping on those expectations, helping them break things down into small attainable goals, pacing themselves, being just very fort right at the very beginning. "This is why we're doing it this way, all will be well. The journey is the important part and this is what we're trying to avoid. We don't want X, Y, and Z to happen. We don't want your dog to shut down, we don't want them to hate odor, we don't want them to not trust you, we don't want them to lessen their confidence, we want the opposite of all those things." So to be a good instructor, you have to know how it is that you're designing your searches in your classes, in your sessions, as well as if you're handing out homework, what they should be doing at home. To achieve those things, to ensure that you're not setting people up to fail. Knowing the difference between offering a learning problem and offering a trick question, in my opinion, trick questions have no place in dog training period. A learning problem is allowing the dog to develop a skill, a trick question is just what it sounds like. You're setting something up going, "Aha, there's no way you're ever going to get that!" What's the point? There's no point to that. The last thing that I would say that someone would need to be a good instructor is knowing when you don't have the answer, is being humble to refer out to someone else if you need to or to consult with someone else or to work with someone else. You don't have to know everything. That's okay. You're not expected to know everything. If you did, then you probably wouldn't be a dog training instructor. You would be some celestial being that would fix a universe and all will be well. There's always going to be someone else who knows more than you, which is fine. But if you come across something that you just don't know how to deal with, be honest with yourself and be comfortable doing one of those three things. I've done all three throughout my career on a variety of different things, not just with Scent Work, but just dog training overall. And also understanding that there may be times when you just may not mesh well with a client just personality wise, but it could also be expectations, it could be any number of things. That's when you need to have good relationships with your fellow colleagues, your fellow instructors. So you can let that person go somewhere else and obviously have a really bad client, I'm not saying that you should, you'll be like, "Oh, hey, Sally and Sue, here's this terrible client. Enjoy." I'm not saying that, but if you have someone that is perfectly fine, they pay their bills, they try hard, but the two of you are just missing one another. Having those relationships with fellow instructors will allow you to refer this client to them which helps you in the end. I know that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense because you're losing that business, but that person will like you for it because you didn't just leave them high and dry. You're cultivating this relationship with this other instructor, which is great. And it's a really good possibility that instructor is going to run into the same situation and maybe they have someone they think will be good for you. Also, the person that you referred, I doubt they live on an island. So they probably know people, friends or family, they may refer those people to you so it's just having a little bit of foresight. I think that is the big underlying thing as far as what it takes to be a good Scent Work instructor, foresight of who it is that you're working with, who it is that you're advertising to, who it is that you can best help, how it is that you can actually have them achieve the goals that they're setting, how it is you can help them set those goals, what ways you're going to help cap off their expectations or set them so that they are realistic. How is it that you're going to present yourself so that you are portraying the right information and you are setting the right expectations for even people who may not work with you yet? How is it you can prevent problems from happening down the line, and how is it that you can conduct yourself so that you are good within the community of fellow instructors, competitors, and just dog owners? So those are the big things that I think a lot of us just don't think about when we're instructing. It's hard being an instructor when you actually get going, it's a hustle and then all of a sudden it's a day and you're running from thing to thing to thing, you're almost on autopilot but sometimes you just need to take a step back and just evaluate everything and making sure that we're checking off all of our boxes, that we're doing what we need to do and that we are meeting our clients expectations and needs and we're doing it in the right way, and we're doing it for the right reasons. So I hope you found this podcast helpful, happy training, and we'll look forward to seeing you soon.

Summary: Stacy Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com. Links mentioned: FDSA Podcast Group Scentsabilities (Stacy's Site) Next Episode:  To be released 7/20/2018, featuring Deb Jones, talking about teaching people to teach dogs.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be talking to Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com — I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anyone who is interested. Hi Stacy, welcome to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I’m excited to chat. To start us out, can you just remind listeners who the dogs are that you share your life with? Stacy Barnett: I have four crazy hooligans who live in my hut. They are; they’re nuts. I’ll start out with my older dogs. I have an almost 11-year-old Standard Poodle named Joey. He’s a brown Standard Poodle. He’s absolutely wonderful. I absolutely love him. I have a 7-year-old miniature American Shepherd, which is, you know, a mini-Aussie, named Why, and Why is actually his name. He came with it. I always have people ask me, “Why is his name Why?” And I always say, “Why not?” So I have Why, and then I have my two Labradors, who I refer to as my Dream Team. My Labradors, I have Judd, who’s almost 9 years old. He is my heart and soul. He’s actually the one that really got me going in nosework and is the reason why I ended up quitting corporate and pursuing a whole job in nosework. He’s my baby, he’s my Labrador, my 9-year-old Labrador. And then I have my youngest, who is a major hooligan. She is about 15 months old and she is a Labrador, a little shrimpy Lab. Her name is Brava, and I absolutely adore her. She’s the only girl in the house, so she’s like my soul sister. Melissa Breau: I’m sure she gets a little spoiled being the only girl in the house. Stacy Barnett: She does, and the boys love her. They absolutely love her. They fawn over her. We all do. We think she’s wonderful. Melissa Breau: Alright, so I know you’ve been on the podcast a few times now to talk about different aspects of nosework, but today I want to focus our conversation on how handlers can tailor nosework training to their specific dog. Is there a particular type of dog or particular skills or maybe a personality type that really lends itself to helping a dog become a strong nosework competitor? Stacy Barnett: There are, but at the same time I also want to emphasize the fact that every dog can do this sport. Maybe not every dog can compete in this sport, it really depends on the dog, but every dog can do this sport. There are certain aspects of the dog’s personality or what is intrinsic to the dog that will help the dog to become a really strong competitor in terms of being very competitive, or a dog that will really gravitate toward the sport and really, really love the sport. In my experience, all dogs do love the sport, but there are some that just seem to live and breathe for it. And the ones that seem to live and breathe for it, there are a couple of different things that contribute to that. Number one, the dog is a little bit more independent. If the dog is more handler-focused, I say if the dog is really into you and really cares what you think, those dogs tend to not be as gung-ho for the sport. The dogs that are a little bit more independent but have a nice balance between environmental and handler focus seem to do a little bit better. Above all, they have to have a natural love of scenting. Now, most dogs do have this natural love, but there are some dogs that just really, really love it. Those are the dogs I would say make the strongest nosework competitors. Melissa Breau: What other factors may influence how well a dog does when it comes to nosework? Stacy Barnett: One of them has to do with how motivated they are for food and toys. We tend to use food and toys as primary reinforcers for nosework. It’s very easy to reinforce with food, for instance, because it’s very fast. This is a timed sport. You have a certain amount of time to do the search, and typically, at least in the U.S., the fastest dog wins. If you can reward very quickly with food, you’re going to be at an advantage. Toys work really well too. Dogs like toys, they tend to work really hard for toys, you can use toys for a reward, but having a motivation for either food or toys is a real advantage. Another thing is the dog’s ability to think on their own and to problem solve. This goes hand-in-hand with dogs being independent, so if you have a more independent dog that can do some problem solving, you can do really well. I look at Brava, for instance. Brava, and I actually put a video of this on my Facebook page, knows how to open doors. She is a problem solver. The latch doors, the lever doors, she knows how to push down on the door and pull on it and open the door, which is really kind of amusing in some respects but kind of scary in other respects. But having that problem-solving ability can really help in nosework. The third thing that is not a requirement but is definitely helpful is physical fitness. Physical fitness is not a requirement. You know, this is a really great sport for older dogs, for infirm dogs, that sort of thing, but having that physical fitness can give you an edge in competition. There’s different sorts of physical fitness. There’s also fitness related to stamina. Stamina is important from both a physical perspective and a mental perspective. If you can have that mental stamina or that physical stamina, and I’m also thinking nasal stamina, dogs that can sniff for a long period of time, can help in competition. Melissa Breau: To dig a little more into it, you were saying about nosework being good for many different types of dogs. Can you talk to that a little bit more? What are some of the benefits of doing nosework? Stacy Barnett: Oh, there are so many benefits of doing nosework, and in fact I think we could do a whole podcast on this. I think we really could. I’m thinking of three different groups of dogs that really benefit from nosework from a therapeutic perspective. One of them is reactive dogs. For a reactive dog, what it can do is you can develop a positive conditioned emotional response to odor, and then if you have very mild triggers while the dog is experiencing — and I’m talking extremely mild, where the dog is under threshold — and the dog has a positive conditioned emotional response to odor, your dog’s reactivity level can actually go down. With my dog Why, for instance, he used to be extremely dog-reactive, and he was dog-reactive out of fear. So I started to train him in nosework, and he started to really enjoy nosework. At the same time, in doing nosework and having fun in doing nosework, he was also exposed to the smell of other dogs, not necessarily dogs in his surroundings, but the smell of other dogs. The end result was actually lowering of his reactivity level, which was really fantastic. So now he can be within about 8 feet of another dog, which is unbelievable. Older dogs. Older dogs are really super. It can keep their mind active. If they can’t physically do all of the things that they used to be able to do, they still have an active mind. They still want to do things. They may not be able to do agility or heavy-duty obedience or IPO or whatever, dock diving, I don’t know, whatever you’re doing. Even barn hunt. Barn hunt requires a certain amount of physical ability because they have to jump up and down hay bales. These are all dogs that when they get older they still want to work, they still want to do stuff. So if you do nosework, it exercises the mind and it keeps them busy because olfaction, the olfactory lobe, is one-eighth of the dog’s brain, so you’re really, really using the dog’s brain and they can stay engaged. I’ve seen it do incredible things for dogs with cognitive dysfunction who have gotten older. We have seen some amazing, amazing things with the older dogs. Then you have the young dogs. Young dogs, their joints are young, you don’t want to stress out their joints, you don’t want to over-exercise them, but yet you still have these energetic young animals who need an outlet. And it tires them out, which is super, because it does use so much of their brain. In AKC, for instance, you can even trial your dog as young as 6 months old. For a lot of dogs that may be too early, based upon their emotional maturity, but you can do this when they’re young and it’s not going to tax their bodies. So you can protect their bodies but you can still get them tired, which is a really, really great thing, trust me. Melissa Breau: Especially when you’ve got a drivey young dog. Stacy Barnett: I do, I do. She’s about 15 months old right now, and I have to tell you, nosework has been amazing for my sanity and for her sanity. Melissa Breau: I think most people probably start out teaching nosework by following a class or they’re using somebody else’s training plan. But at some point, all these different kinds of dogs, handlers need to tailor that training. How can a beginner handler tailor their training based on their dog’s stage of learning and their temperament? Stacy Barnett: You have to be in tune with your dog’s emotions. So whether or not you’re a beginner or not, you can still read your dog. You can still tell if your dog is confident, if they’re feeling motivation for an activity. You have to be able to read that confidence and that motivation because that’s really the core. Those are sacred. Confidence and motivation are sacred in my book. Once those are in place, you can start to build on skills. But you have to always think about having like a little meter on the back of your dog, like a little meter that says how confident they are, how motivated they are. But based upon that confidence and that motivation, you can tailor what you do with your dog. Maybe you want to build the confidence, or your dog is having some confidence issues — and I don’t just mean confidence in the environment, by the way. There are three different kinds of confidence that I talk about. There’s confidence in skills, which is basically does the dog believe in themselves. There’s confidence in the environment. That’s is the dog comfortable in the environment. Is the dog comfortable in new places. And then there’s confidence in the handler, and this is something that I think a lot of people don’t think about. That’s basically does your dog trust you. Does your dog trust that they’re always going to get their reward for the work that they do. Basically you need to evaluate all of these things and always check for that confidence and that motivation. If you have that, then you can work on the skills, because the skills should be secondary to the confidence and motivation. Melissa Breau: I know you’re a fan of Denise’s book, Train the Dog in Front of You. Can you share a little bit about how that concept applies to nosework? Stacey Barnett: Yes, I love that book. I love, love, love, love, love that book, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my boss. No, I really do, and I tell everybody it’s not a nosework book, but that doesn’t matter. It is such a good dog-training book, and especially chapters 2 and 3 — notice I even know the chapters — chapters 2 and 3 are especially applicable to nosework. Those are the chapters that relate to whether or not the dog is cautious or secure, and whether or not the dog is environmental versus handler focused. Because those are two really core things that affect the dog’s ability to do nosework. If the dog is cautious, for instance, you might want to work in a known environment. If the dog is more secure, maybe you want to work in more novel environments. The same thing goes with environmental versus handler focus. You’ve got to think of these things as spectrums. It’s not an either/or, it’s not whether the dog is handler or environmental focused. It’s on the spectrum. So if the dog is more environmentally focused, you might have a slightly different way of handling the dog, where you might be thinking more about distractions and how you’re going to work with distractions, or if the dog is more handler focused, you might want to be thinking about how to build independence. Actually there’s three different kinds of focus, although this is not in the book, this is more my interpretation. There’s environmental, there’s handler, and there’s search focus. So if you can understand where your dog falls on these spectrums that Denise talks about in terms of environmental and handler focus, you can figure out how do you then reorient your dog onto the search focus. Melissa Breau: Denise opens the book by asking handlers if they are handling their dog in a manner that builds on his strengths while also improving his weaknesses. I was hoping we’d get into that a little bit. Can you share some examples of how a dog’s personality or strengths might influence their nosework training? For example, if a dog is super-confident or less confident, how would that impact training? Stacy Barnett: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I always talk about my pyramid. I have a pyramid of training, and that pyramid of training, there’s confidence on the bottom, then there’s motivation is the next layer, then skills, and then stamina. Basically, if you have a confident and a motivated dog, you can work on harder skills, because confidence and motivation, again, it’s sacred. You can also work on their personality strengths. If your dog is confident and motivated more naturally, maybe you can work on harder skills, or maybe you can work in new environments. The other thing is that it’s also important to really evaluate the dog’s resilience. From a resilience perspective, that will help you to identify whether or not your search is too challenging or not challenging enough. So you need to think about the dog’s natural drive levels, the dog’s resilience, and that can help you to understand how challenging of a search that you can make for your dog in order to keep the dog from … because you don’t want anxiety and you don’t want boredom. You can actually find a sweet spot based upon the dog’s resilience and the dog’s drive levels. But again, the basis, of course, is confidence and motivation. Melissa Breau: Funny enough, I was debating whether or not to announce it here, so I guess I will. We started a new Facebook group specifically for the podcast, and we’re going to encourage people to listen and then ask some questions, so maybe if anybody has a question, I’ll have to tag you.   Stacy Barnett: That sounds great. Melissa Breau: Come dish out a little more. I know you enjoy talking about this stuff. Stacy Barnett: I love this stuff. I love this stuff. I eat, sleep, and breathe this. Melissa Breau: What about natural arousal states? How might a handler tailor training based on those? Stacy Barnett: Arousal is one of those things that … don’t fear arousal. If your dog is high arousal, don’t fear it. Embrace it. Arousal is actually the key to really successful nosework trialing. What’s interesting is that dogs have a natural arousal state, so dogs either have what I call an arousal excess or an arousal gap. If you think about what your dog does when they’re at rest, where that arousal state is compared to their arousal state when they’re in drive, that will tell you whether or not you have an arousal excess or you have an arousal gap. The size of that gap is going to indicate how much work you have to do, because some dogs are a little bit closer to the ideal than other dogs. But what you want to do is when you train them and you’re actually working them, you always want to make sure that your dog is in drive — in drive approaching the start line and in drive while they’re actually searching. You can condition this arousal, because arousal is a habit, and if you can always work your dog in the right arousal state, you’re going to find that your dog is going to come more naturally to the start line and in the right arousal state, and the right arousal state is when the dog is in drive. That’s at the peak arousal. If we think about the Yerkes-Dodson Law, like the curve, it looks like a bell-shaped curve, for dogs who have an arousal gap, we want to increase the arousal to the point that they’re in drive. For dogs who have an arousal excess, we want to decrease the arousal to get the dog into drive, because just because you’re peeling the dog off the ceiling doesn’t mean that they’re in drive. And that’s not what we want. We don’t want the dog that we have to peel off the ceiling. For those dogs, we have to lower the arousal so that they can focus and they can really think. And working in drive really becomes a habit, so you always want to work the dog in drive and always want to work the dog in the right arousal state. Melissa Breau: Of course, if handlers are doing this well, as training progresses their dog will improve; but I think it’s common for trainers in all sports to find they are training the dog they used to have instead of the one that’s in front of them right now. How can handlers evaluate their dogs as they go along and avoid that misstep? Stacy Barnett: That’s really interesting, and I refer to something called typecasting. If you’re familiar with typecasting and you think about the movies, there are a couple movie stars that I can think of off the top of my head that definitely get typecasted. Typecasting is something where you have an actor who might be casted in a very similar role, regardless of the movie that they’re in. Two of the major type-casted actors that I can think of are Christopher Walken and Jim Carrey. Christopher Walken, he’s always kind of that creepy, funny dude. He’s always kind of creepy, he’s always kind of funny, he’s always in those creepy roles, he’s always in just this weird role, and then Jim Carrey is always in the role he’s very kind of a slapstick, silly, funny, not very serious role. And for type-casted actors, it’s very difficult for those actors to break out into another type of role. So it’s very possible that you have type-casted your own dog. If you think about Judd, he used to have a nickname. I used to call him Fragile Little Flower. He was my fragile little flower, and he had a hard time in obedience and rally and agility. He’d be the dog stuck at the top of the A-frame and that kind of thing, just very nervous, very shut down. He is no longer that dog, so I had to divorce that typecast of his. Now he is “I am Judd, hear me roar.” He’s this really great search dog. So I had to break that typecast, because if you have a preconceived notion about your dog, you can train to that preconceived notion and you can actually impose restrictions on your dog. So think about whether or not you can break that typecast. The other thing is have a framework. I suggest my pyramid, and I mentioned my pyramid before, earlier, where you have confidence, motivation, skills, and stamina. So always reevaluate your dog in every search session. Every time you do a search, is your dog confident, is your dog motivated, that sort of thing, especially confidence and motivation, what is the dog’s right arousal state. And sometimes recognize that your dog is going to have an off day. So reevaluate your dog with every search, but also, if you have an off day and all of a sudden your dog doesn’t seem very motivated, there could be something else that’s going on. Maybe say, “All right, today is not our day, and tomorrow’s a different day.” Those are the things I would do to make sure that from a handling perspective you’re always reevaluating your dog and you’re always training the dog in front of you. Melissa Breau: I’m not sure who said it, but somebody at one point mentioned if the dog doesn’t do something you’re pretty sure they’ve been trained to do, let it go. Happened once, don’t worry about it. If it happens two or three times, then it’s time to start thinking about how you can change your training. Stacy Barnett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Whoever said that is a genius. Melissa Breau: Are there any dead giveaways — or even something maybe a little more subtle — that indicate it’s time to go through that process in your own head and reevaluate the dog that you have and maybe your training plan a little bit? Stacy Barnett: Absolutely, absolutely. Things like if your dog is bored, or if your dog is anxious, these are the things where perhaps you’re not evaluating your dog’s resilience level or your dog’s drive level well enough. Because depending upon the dog’s drive level and the dog’s resilience level, you could easily put your dog into an anxious situation. Or if the dog is bored, then you need to reevaluate and say maybe you’re making your searches a little bit too hard, or maybe you’re making them a little bit too easy. Maybe the challenge level isn’t right compared to the dog’s skill level. The other thing is look for changes in the dog’s attitude, and whether or not they’re positive or negative, and then modify your approach based upon that, because you always want the dog to come thinking, This is the most fun part of my day, and if your dog isn’t having fun, you need to reevaluate what you’re doing, and maybe you need to reevaluate what your dog needs, so maybe your dog needs something different from you. Melissa Breau: To round things out, I want to give you a little bit of time to talk about some of the exciting things on the calendar. I know you’ve got a webinar next week on Setting Meaningful Scent Puzzles for Your Dog. Can you share a little bit about it, what the premise is? Stacy Barnett: Oh, absolutely. I can’t wait for that one. The keyword is meaningful. Because it’s not just about setting scent puzzles. We can all set scent puzzles. Scent puzzles are basically our way of creating problems for our dogs to solve so they can learn and build skills, and it’s all about skill building. However, it’s really, really important that we think about the word meaningful, and meaningful really refers to the resilience and the drive of the dog. For instance, I’m not a big fan of … sometimes we see this in seminars and it actually bothers me, where a clinician may set out a really, really hard hide and have green dogs work the hard hide. What you end up with is a dog that might lose their confidence or lose their motivation. So it’s really important that you set the right challenge and right challenge level for your dog, based upon the dog’s resilience and natural drive levels. That’s really what I want to talk about is based upon the dog’s natural drive levels and resilience, how do you know you’re setting a meaningful scent puzzle that’s going to build the skills at the same time as caring for the dog’s confidence and motivation. So it’s not just about building the skills, but rather it’s about how you build the skills so that you can preserve that. Melissa Breau: What about for August, what classes do you have coming up? Anything you want to mention? Stacy Barnett: Oh, I have three classes coming up. I’m teaching 101, so if you want to get into nosework and you haven’t started nosework, join me in NW101, that’s Introduction to Nosework. I’m also teaching NW230, which is polishing skills for NW2 and NW3. And the one that I want to mention today and talk a little bit about is Nosework Challenges. That’s NW240. That’s a series that I haven’t taught in a while, and I’m going to bring that series back. NW240 is Nosework Challenges. It’s a lot of fun. It’s going to be focused on skills, but at the same time what I’m going to do is I’m going to add in elements of this discussion around resilience and drive, so that we can make sure that we’re doing the puzzles in the right way. Melissa Breau: One last question for you. It’s my new ending question for people when they come on. What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Stacy Barnett: You have to actually train, which sounds kind of funny, but nosework can seem so natural, so it can be like, well, the dog is just scenting, they know how to find the hide, they have value for the odor, so they go out and they find the target odor. Well, that sounds great and all, but you really have to train, because it’s very possible now, with nosework being a lot more popular than it used to be, now with the addition of AKC out there and some other venues, there’s a lot of trialing opportunities and it’s very possible to get into a situation where you’re trialing more than you’re training. If that’s the case, that’s going to have a negative impact on your trialing. You’re going to find that having that competitive mindset instead of the evaluative context is going to be a detriment to your training. So it’s really important to work your dog while you’re evaluative versus competitive, if that makes sense. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. That’s great. I like that a lot. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Stacy! I really appreciate it. Stacy Barnett: I’ve had so much fun with this. This is a really great topic, a really, really great topic, and I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having me on. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and I hope some folks come and join you for the webinars. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time we’ll be back with Deb Jones to talk about becoming a better teacher for the human half of the dog-handler team. 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. CREDITS: Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

In this podcast, we will discuss the battle many dog trainers, instructors, handlers and owners will encounter at some point: keeping their ego in check when it comes to training and competing with their dog. We will discuss how this applies specifically to Scent Work, some of the common pitfalls and how you can set your dog and YOURSELF up to succeed.  Be certain to also check out the Scent Work University blog. ----more---- Looking to build some skills that will help you become a better Scent Work handler? Take a look at our Handler Scent Work Skills courses.  Know your dog needs to work on a particular skill or aspect of their Scent Work training? Our Advanced Scent Work courses have what you need.  Need tips on how to succeed in a particular Scent Work competition organization? Find what you are looking for with our Competition Venue courses. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the Scent Work University all about Scent Work Podcast. We're so delighted that you're here. The purpose of this podcast is to discuss what the title says all things Scent Work. We're hoping that you'll find this podcast helpful. We'll answer some of the questions you may have about the activity of Scent Work. In some of our series, we're also going to be giving you a behind-the-curtain look as far as what happens at trials, what your instructor may be going through, as well as some tips that you may have as both a competitor as well as an owner of a dog where you just want to broaden their horizons. All right. Let's get started. I wanted to take a quick second just to introduce myself. My name is Dianna Santos. I am the Owner and the Lead Instructor for Scent Work University as well as Dog Sport University. I've been training dogs professionally since 2011. I am certified through the Karen Pryor Academy of dog training. I'm also a certified Nose Work instructor through NACSW. In addition to training dogs professionally for a number of years, I am also privileged to be the judge and CSD coordinator with United States Canine Scent Sports which is a Scent Work competition organization that was started in 2016. We are growing very rapidly in the United States and looking to grow internationally as well. In addition to that, I am also an AKC fully approved judge for Scent Work. I also participate in a AKC Scent Work trials as a score room person as well as a competitor. I come at this from a variety of different standpoints as not only an instructor and a professional trainer, but also as an official and a coordinator of officials and also one of the backstage people for competitions. I view Scent Work from a variety of different viewpoints. I think that it can help me in helping you have a very well-rounded approach to Scent Work. It's just a really quick rundown for me. All right. Let's get started with our podcast. In today's podcast, we're going to be talking about a very important topic. That relates to battling your ego. This will be in the context of Scent Work and Scent Work competitions. We're coming at this from the standpoint of not only a competitor but also an instructor and even an official. This is, hopefully, going to be helpful to all those different categories of people who may be involved in the activity of Scent Work and the competition element as well. The first thing that I wanted to really underline when we're talking about this really important topic that's almost an elephant in the room is it's crucially important for us as handlers to understand that when we are doing Scent Work competitions, we are doing this on behalf of our dogs meaning that we are the ones who sign the checks, we are the ones who bring them to the trial site, we are the ones who signed them up. Your dog isn't the one making these decisions. You are. As such, it's really important for us to understand that we hold a lot of responsibility as the teammate in how we conduct ourselves and how we hold ourselves together mentally and how we cope with the competition stressors overall. This is why battling your ego is a really important thing that I don't think too many people give enough credence to. The fact of the matter is almost everyone is going to reach this point at some point in their competition career where you may have been very lucky in the beginning parts of your training. This is pretty common where in the lower levels, you're getting guesses left and right, you're getting lots of cues and lots of pretty ribbons and everything is fabulous. Then, suddenly, it all comes to a screeching halt. You get your first no or maybe you get a couple of no's. Now, you're not getting cues. Particularly, if you're working with a group of friends or if you're working with classmates who may also be trialing at the same time, maybe they got a yes where you got a no or you happen to see colleagues or friends going out and saying like, "Oh, I got this awesome title and, oh, we did this." Then, you see other posts like I got the first ever yada-yada. This is where the human brain starts getting involved in really negative ways. It starts weaving in all these insecurities, self-worth issues, and questions about, well, now, I need to get this cue not because I'm trying to make memories with my dog, not because I'm trying to test my training, not because I'm trying to have a good time with my dog because I need this because this shows that I'm a good person. This shows that I'm a good trainer. This shows that I'm a good competitor. This shows that I'm a good dog honor. That shift is something that almost everyone will go through in some point of their competition career. It's crucial that you recognize it as early as you can. Then, get the car back on the road because if you stay on that path, it's going to diminish the quality and the fun of the activity. You are going to diminish your ability to be a very good teammate to your dog. You could actually be putting both of you into situations that you're not ready for. You could be discounting the importance of actually training and practicing. You could just be taking away all the fun. You could actually be making it miserable for both yourself and dog. The point of this podcast is to touch upon some of these hot topic issues that can be really uncomfortable for some of us to talk about, but is very crucial for us to realize and to understand that if you're going through this, I've been through it. Almost every competitor at some point has. You just have to recognize it and then figure out how you can get back on track. One of the ways that we can help ourselves as competitors is we can have a really honest discussion as to why it is that we're competing in the first place. For me, personally, I am a horrible sore loser. It's really bad. When I was a child, I would play a lot of card games with my family. I was very young. They were all experienced and more often than not, I would lose. In the beginning, I would throw fits. I mean it was terrible. It's really bad. I didn't like the way that felt. I completely swapped it. I put it on its head. I would throw games on purpose because I felt like I had a little element of control. Then, it didn't make me feel so bad. That's not really a great coping mechanism for it. It would have just been better to learn not to be a sore loser, but that's how I dealt with it. Knowing that when I came into the dog sport realm, I avoided it as long as I could. I really did. I was a professional trainer for a while. I would just say, "Oh, my dog isn't appropriate and whatever." My first Doberman was fairly ... he was dog aggressive. He was not dog reactive. He was dog aggressive. They're like, "Oh, we can have you. We could lend you our dog." I was like, "Oh, no. That's okay." But in the back of my mind, I was like, "I don't want to do this, because I don't want to feel that way." I know at some point I'm not going to do well. I don't want to feel a little gross about it. It did fall into it with my new Dobie who is wonderful. He's extraordinarily talented. He makes me look like I know what I'm doing. I remember our first real competition thing that we were doing consistently was Barn Hunt. He was fabulous. I mean he was just spectacular. As with most sports, the lower levels, it's not that they're easy, but you're able to go along. You're able to accrue a lot of Q's fairly quickly. We did that. It felt great. I was like, "Oh, look at the pretty little ribbon and oh look he gets a little couple letters after his name." How exciting. But I was just thinking, "Oh it's not that big of a deal like, oh, we're just having fun." That's what I would try to convince myself where in the back of my mind, I was waiting for that ever-present this was all going to fall apart at some point. Sure enough, we entered into a senior class. It was the first time that we got it a "No". I came out of the ring. We held our party. Everything was fine. I was like, "Okay." Well, just no biggie. Whatever else, also realizing that senior for barn hunt is one of the hardest elements to go into from the lower levels. It's a big jump from open to senior basically. Then we went back for our second run. We got another "No". I can honestly tell you that second run I was so stuck in my head about that first run. I wasn't reading my dog. I wasn't going along the ring the way that was supposed to. I was distracted. I was so stressed. It affected our ability to do it. Then, I just started making mistakes left and right. I wouldn't practice anymore. Then, we just show up for trial. Then, lo and behold, we would get another no. It was a nightmare. It was just awful. The whole time I'm sitting there going I can't believe this. I teach barn hunt. I can't have "No's" which is a ridiculous statement because the last time I checked I'm not a robot. I am a person who has flaws, who makes mistakes. I am not perfect by any stretch. It started snowballing from there. I finally caught myself when I wasn't going to practice anymore. I wasn't able to teach because my neck and my back issues acted up, but I wasn't even taking him just to have fun. We went for months, almost six months, without doing any Barn Hunt, one of his favorite activities ever, simply because I was all caught up in the, ,well, we don't have our senior title. I was like, "Who cares?" Last time I checked, like no one's knocking on my door saying, "Santos, why don't you have your senior title?" No one cares. It was something I had to go through. I just had to really sit down and evaluate and say, "Okay. Look. My dog loves this activity." It's a very big jump from open to senior. You have to be more present as a teammate when you're doing this. I need to not be all hung up. The fact that we got some "No's", "No's" that we earned really. I earned. He did his job. He found all the rats. I just never called them. While this isn't specifically for Scent Work, I'm hoping that I can demonstrate that this happens to everyone that at some point in your competition career, you're going to get a no. Particularly in the realm of Scent Work, a lot of times when we call false alerts, it's because of us. It's because of the handler. We convinced the dog of, "Oh, look, I'm staring at this chair." The dog is like, "Well, there's no odor there." But maybe when I play this of a game, I don't know, maybe you change your game, but you really like it when I sit. I'm going to sit here. I'm going to look for my cookie. Then, we get all flustered and mad. Then, we try to blame the dog when actually they were just cuing off of us. It's really crucially important for us as handlers to understand the importance and the weight that we hold as a teammate. That means we have to have our head screwed on right when we are actually going in to compete. Now, I can hear you saying, "Okay. Well, that's all fine and dandy." But what about what other people think? I don't want to readily admit it, but I really do care what other people think. Particularly all the instructors and the other officials out there raising their hands like, yeah, there's no way that I can show my face if my dog can't get X title. No one's going to want to learn with me anymore. No one's going to take my classes. No one's going to be at my business. I need to be up on my game. I need to be perfect at all times. I understand the concern. I truly do. There were times where I was like, "Oh, I just …" It's a good thing that my neck and my back went out because I can't teach barn hunt anymore. One of my students are like, "What?" I'm like, "Well, I haven't gotten these titles. Clearly, I have no idea what I'm doing." She's like, "Of course. You do. What are you talking about?" We saw your run. He was having so much fun. He found the rats. Then, we learned from you that we need to not do that, that we need to understand our importance as handlers. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be an instructor anymore, but that's something that a lot of people go through where they're pushing themselves and they're pushing their dogs in this attempt to be perfect so that they can maintain their ability to hold on to their clients because they feel as though if I falter even a little bit, then, everyone's going to leave me. A shout out to all of my fellow instructors and officials. Your students more often than not are not just with you because of what you achieve. That may have been how they found you, to be blunt, but it's really the connection that you make with them. By showing that you aren't perfect, you're actually helping them because it's setting realistic expectations. I cannot tell you how heartbreaking it is to see students come to me for brand-new, never had them before. They've been struggling and really falling apart as a team with them and themselves in their dog because they see all these posts. They're always so lofty on social media. We've only been training for two seconds, but now, we have the highest title and blah-blah-blah-blah. They're trying to emulate that as much as they can. Sure enough, it doesn't work. Sure enough, there's a lot of problems that come along with it. Now, they're just at their wit's end. They go, "I don't know what to do. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know what's wrong with my dog," which is heartbreaking. There's nothing wrong with either one of them. Everyone learns differently, and everyone has a different way of approaching things which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. For my fellow instructors and officials, if you have a student who's with you right now and they are showing progress, they actually can see that paying you their money and you are helping them and they're happy with that, it's the human connection that you're making with them. They're not just going to abandon you because you went to a trial and maybe didn't queue and everything. It feels like that at the time, I understand, but it's not true. We need to as professionals remind ourselves of that because we're putting all the undue pressure on ourselves, but I can tell you that that does bleed over to our students that if we're putting that high almost unattainable expectation on ourselves, we are then transferring that to our students which is entirely unfair. On the same wavelength is the idea of always wanting to be the first. Now that AKC Scent Work is available for people to enter into trials which is fabulous, more trialing opportunities, more opportunities people play is great, but now, there's this mad rush. I want to be the first to get this title. I want to be the first to get that title. Personally, I think that is a fool's errand. It's not to talk down on people who do that. If you do that, but you do it consciously and you recognize that if something was happening in your training that you needed to address first. If it wasn't going along the way that you wanted to, then, it's not going to be the end of the world than I guess. But, often times, none of those considerations are being made. I would urge people instead to always ask themselves why are you competing. Why are you doing this in the first place? Why are you spending your money? Why are you getting up so early on a weekend? Why are you calling around all this stuff in your car so you can have it set up at the trial site? Why are you doing all this training in preparation? Why are you travelling to the trial site? Why are you going through all the stress that just comes along with trialing? What is the purpose? At the end of the day, you really should include I like doing this with my dog. If that's not part of the equation, then, maybe you want to re-evaluate things and figure out where things went awry, and how you might be able to fix it. One of the biggest ways that the ego can really get in the way of you as a competitor is trying to keep up appearances that everything that you do is perfect. This is where you can get into a competition of keeping up with the Jones'. This is where you will see trends spread like a wildfire. It doesn't mean necessarily that that trend was good, but someone sees someone else do something. Then, they start doing it. It just goes from there. This is where we have the show-me thing went from coast to coast in record time. It is the bane of almost every single official's existence like stop your dog has already told you where it is. Why are you saying show me? The same thing where you may have someone who is watching an official maybe do a debrief at a trial where they're going over, well, this was a particular owner problem. This is what we were expecting. This is what we saw. Here, I'll give you this small little tip that is extraordinarily contextual to this type of odor problem, but now the everyone is doing it for everything. It's something that we really want to be mindful of that just because someone else does it doesn't mean that that applies to you and your dog. It doesn't mean that if you don't do it, that you're somehow wrong. In the same vein of trying to keep up appearance as an appearing as though everything is perfect. All that's going to do is cause you to get really stressed out when things do go left. For anyone who has competed at any period of time at a summer trial, you know that things go left all the time. Our trials are notorious for having things happen. I give a lot of props to the people who host and the people who officiate and the people who volunteer who keep things running so smoothly for the competitors, but, oftentimes, in the back-end, there's a lot stuff going on that was not planned. But even for yourself as a competitor, how many times have one of you walked up to the start line? You have this whole plan. Maybe, it's a venue where they allow walk first. You're like, "Okay. I know that this is the way this search area is all designed. We're going to come up to the start line. We're going to be there for X number of seconds. I'm going to check my little wind flag. I have taped to my belt. Then, we are going to go left. Then, we're going to do a pattern over here. Then, if he doesn't check this out of this, I'll make sure we go there." That's your plan. You have it down to a science. You've read all the articles. You've listened to all the podcast. You're like, "This is what we're going to do. It's going to be great." You walk up to the start line. You look down. There is no flag on your belt. It's blown off in the wind. You didn't even realize. Great. You don't know where the wind is going. Okay. Fine. Well, we'll figure it out. Then, you are getting yourself all ready. You realize that your long line is horrendously tangled. I mean it is a knot. Now, you're sitting there and you're scrambling and trying to get your long line all out of knots. You're all frazzled. Now, you don't remember was I going to go left or was I going to go right? That whole time your dog is standing there at the start line going, "Yeah, the height is right across from us, whenever you're ready." But you're not paying attention to your dog. You're thinking about how you can keep appearances. You can look like the awesome handler that you know that you are. You get your long line all untangled. You give your cue for your dog to search. They try to go straight. You decide to go right. You're dragging your dog along with you. They're like, "Okay. Then, maybe we don't want to today." You're doing a pattern and the dog is like, "It's not here. I told you it's way over there." You're asking them to check over and over again. They're like, "I'm telling you, man, it's not over here. Whenever you're ready for me to tell you where it is, you just let me know." You skip the whole part across from the start line because you want to do a pattern on the other side. You're doing your pattern over there. You're doing all these lovely Vanna White's. You're doing all these movements. You're giving your dog line. You're stepping back in. You're doing all this wonderful stuff. The whole time, your dog is like, "I mean I can sniff this if you want, but there's nothing here." Then, finally, you get across from the start line and the dog gives you a beautiful alert. Now, you are circling behind them. You're checking their line. You're doing all this stuff. The dog as you're standing like, "I don't know how many times I need to tell you this." They walk off. They gave you this beautiful indication. Now, you're doing all this to check. They leave. They're like, "Oh no." Today, you're going through your mind I don't know if they showed any interest anywhere else. They really showed interest there, but I wasn't done checking. Oh, maybe we didn’t check their thresholds. Now, you go over to the threshold. Now, you get your 30-second warning. Now, you're really stressed out. It's like, "Oh my goodness." Your dog is really investigating in this corner. Lo and behold, that's where another dog had peed before. This is an exterior search. You're looking at it. You're like, "Oh wow. They're looking really hard at it. Okay. Okay." Then, you start seeing the back-end swinging, like oh that's not that kind of looking. You urge them back on. You have like 10 seconds to find this thing now. You urge your dog to go back to where the hide really is. They go. They give it a very slight indication. They're like "Yeah. For the 15th time, here it is. Do you want to maybe give me a cookie now?" You go, "Alert." The judge who is like losing their mind on the inside goes, "Yes." You go in in your reward. That's best case scenario. That whole time you are sitting there stuck in your head going, "Why is this so hard?" Then, you get the scoresheet back from the judge. It's ticked off trust your dog. Give your dog more space. Don't direct your dog so much. I mean I want to talk about how you being stuck in your head has negatively affected your search and on the feedback that you get which is totally fair is now only going to feed into your need to try to control the search even more. This is really bad cycle that just goes on and on and on. Let's take the same exact scenario. You do a walk-through. You have an idea. Then, you just take a breath. You're like, "Okay." This is what I think that we should do if my dog has not shown any signs that they've actually found the odor yet. Then, we will need to do these things, but my dog is the lead dancer They're the ones with the no's. You come up. You realize that your wind flag is gone. Don't worry. If it's windy enough, just hold out a part of your long line and see which way it goes. If you have longer hair, just take a piece of your hair out and see which way it goes. If you're really that worried about it, close your eyes and just try to figure out where the wind is going if you can. Breathe through untangling your long line. Chitchat with the judge or yourself to actually talk because talking will actually force you to breathe which is a good thing. Once it's all untangled, take a nice deep breath. Hold your dog at the start line. Then, watch their head. See where their head is actually pointed. You may have thought, "Oh, well, this whole part of the search area looks really super interesting. They must have put a hide over there." But the dog's head is pointing ahead of you, then, let them go straight. When your dog has actually shown an indication, know that even if you've trained a final alert response, it's very common for dogs to not give that final response behavior at a trial because you're stressed which they can detect which can cause them to be a little stressed, but if you know from reading your dog that they're in odor, don't ask them to confirm it 20 times because they're probably going to leave. Then, what are you going to do? For me, personally, I would rather call alert and trust my dog and get the ever dreaded no than to not trust my dog and force them to fall somewhere else. It's just a consideration for people to keep in mind as far as a possibility. But I'm hoping that you can see the difference between those two examples. Their real-life examples, they happen all the time. I've been in that situation where I walk up to a start line and everything is cool as a cucumber. I'm getting ready to switch my long way over. It is just a ball in my hand. I'm like, "Oh, it's like extension cord." You look at them wrong and they're tangled. In that moment, I feel as an instructor, well, I'm just a complete failure as a human being because my line is tangled. Now, I'm holding up the whole trial and, oh, everyone's going to hate me. It's just terrible. None of that is true. My long line is tangled. Who cares? Just take two seconds and untangle it and go from there, but these are the kinds of things that we have to keep in mind as competitors. There is a definite added stressor when you are either an instructor or an official. It just comes as a nature of the beast which means you have to be even more conscious of it. You have to work that much harder against it. One of the things that I noticed with competitors, myself included, is they are getting wrapped up in trying to be perfect. They don't have to be. There is an absolute desire to meet all the requirements and a need to meet all the requirements for the level that you're competing in. As you go up the levels, there's an expectation that handlers are going to clean up their handling such as you won't be dropping treats in the search area, such as you won't drop your leash in the search area, such as you'll have good leash handling skills at that point. You won't pull your dog inadvertently off of odor. Those sorts of things are tests of precision of being able to have some tact and skills under your belt. That's a whole purpose of having those in the upper levels of competition, but that doesn't mean that if you were to go feed your dog and little known to you, you fed one treat to their mouths, but there was another little piece stuck on your finger and you fell on the ground that you were now a failure as a person. These things happen. For me, personally, I was at a trial recently with my dog, I think, the last couple of months. He was working his exterior space. Everything was great. He found his hide. Wonderful. I called alert. They said yes. Fabulous. I feed him. As I'm going to put my hand into the treat pouch and out, it flings the treat right at the hide. I'm an official with this organization. I'm like just give me a, picked up my treat. I gave it to my dog. It happens. Being human and not being perfect is okay. Having a good sense of humor helps a lot. It's just something that I really had to improve my motor skills. I had to maybe look at the type of treats I was feeding. Maybe, the types of treats I was feeding were more prone to getting stuck on my hands and then falling out as I was trying to rush into feed. That's where being truly prepared comes into play. I find it to be extraordinarily unfair to the dogs, a level of expectation on them when we are trying to reach a certain pinnacle of our training. If we haven't put in the preparation for ourselves, that's a really convoluted way of saying if I'm not putting in the time to improve my leash handling skills to ensure that my motor skills are good, to ensure that I could actually read my dog, to ensure that I can actually break down a search area to know, okay, we have gone here, here and here, but not there, to know that, okay, what is it that I need to do as the team meet of this partnership to help my dog if they need it? When do I need to step in? When do we need to step out? All those different factors as far as being a handler is entirely unfair if I haven't practiced any of that. If I don't possess any of those skills and I'm putting 100% of the onus on the dog where I could actually be inhibiting their ability to do their job, that's just not fair. That's coupled with the fact that you're putting so much weight on your need to get this cue, need the title. Then, you have to put the time in. You have to put the preparation in. I've talked about this in my blog previously where there needs to be a balance with how often you're competing and how much you're actually practicing. I know firsthand lives are crazy. There's so few hours in the day. All of us are doing a million things at once, but if you're going to be competing particularly regularly, that means that you should be practicing regularly. I'm not talking about hours a day, but you should be doing this fairly regularly. You should be honing your skills. It's not you can't then be upset if your dog doesn't perform well, if you're not putting in the time to improve yourself. This is where having the realization that you don't have to be perfect, but that still means that you do have to practice. That's a hard thing for a lot of people to comprehend that if you realize that there are things that your dog is doing in their training that you need to work on, such as let's say that they are having difficulty with corner highs or they're having difficulty with threshold highs. We're very easy to go into dog trainer like, "Okay. Well, , we can do this and that and the other thing in order to practice for that. Perfect. But, then, if you're also viewing your videos and you notice that you're crowding your dog or you're constantly fiddling with your leash or you're never getting to the entire search area because you're not covering the whole search area, that means that you also need to do things as the handler to improve your skills. I hope that makes sense that while you do not need to weave in your own self-worth with the fact of whether you cue or not because you shouldn't do that. If you don't cue, it's simply information on what you need to do with your training going forward. That being said, that information more likely than not is going to apply not only to your dog but to yourself as a handler as well. If you do notice that there's something you need to work on, that doesn't mean that you're terrible. It doesn’t mean that you're the worst. It doesn't mean you should give it up. It doesn't mean that you should quit if you're an instructor or an official. It just means you have to work on something which isn't bad. It's the practicing and the playing of the game at home which should be the most important part to the whole thing. You are having this opportunity to play this really great game with your dog. If you can improve your relationship with them by improving your skills along the way, that's a win-win. That's not a bad thing. I hope that makes sense that while I don't want anyone wrapping up their self-worth as far as whether they get a cue or not at a trial, that doesn't mean that you then get to throw away your responsibility as the handler. You do still need to have your skills as fine-tuned as you can at the level that you're competing with. If you're brand-new as a novice, I do not expect you to have the same handling skills as someone who's competing at the elite level. It's just not. The same thing goes for all dog sports. You're not expecting someone at rally novice A to do the same thing as someone who's doing their arch competition for competition obedience. It's just not the same, but that doesn't mean also that the person who's competing at the highest level then just gets to use an excuse why they shouldn't also hone their skills. I hope that makes sense and understanding that if you're really hitting up a wall for your training where you're frustrated all the time, the dog seems really losing their enthusiasm for the game, everything seems just monumentally difficult, it very well could be that your ego is getting in the way that it is clouding your judgment as far as viewing what actually needs to be worked on both on the dog side and your own. Then, it could be causing you to destroy the reason why you want to compete in the first place. I'll end by sharing a wonderful thought that a colleague shared with me which I can't take any credit for. This is not mine at any point, but it is brilliant. She said that she goes into every single trial when she goes into it and when she leaves. How am I going to have fun today is how she goes into it. Then, when she ends did I have fun today. How brilliant is that because that is the whole point of doing this. This is a game. While earning titles and earning ribbons is fabulous and the accomplishments can be really quite amazing and really someone to be respected, that's not the end all and be all of everything. It's the fun that you're having with your dog. It's the memories that you're creating with them because they're not with us long enough. That's the more important piece to this. Make sure that when you are doing any type of competition, but particularly with Scent Work that you are doing it for the right reasons and that you are having fun. How are you going to have fun at this trial? When the trial is over, did you actually have fun? Those are two really great tests that you can give yourself to make sure that you're just on the right track. I hope you find this podcast helpful. It's touching upon some really hot button topics that I don't think are talked about enough, but I'm hoping that they can help you as you continue in your Scent Work career particularly if you're competing. Thank you so much for listening. Happy training. We look forward to seeing you soon.

SUMMARY: Stacey Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, and the host of the Scentsabilities podcast -- but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. Links www.scentsabilitiesnw.com Next Episode:  To be released 1/19/2018, and I'll be talking to Lori Stevens about how you can help your dog reach optimum fitness in about five minutes, so stay tuned! TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility, and Barn Hunt, and the host of the Scentsabilities podcast — but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. Hi Stacy, welcome back to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. How are you? Melissa Breau: I'm doing well. So this is our third take, thanks to technology. So hopefully this time we have good sound and everybody does well. To start us out, Stacy, do you want to tell us just a little bit and remind listeners who your dogs are? I know since last time we talked you have a new addition, so maybe you could share a little bit about that. Stacy Barnett: I do, I do. I love talking about her anyway, so that's really great. I have four dogs now, so I'm getting closer to the “crazy dog lady” status. I don't think I'm there yet, but a little closer. I have four dogs. My oldest dog is a 10-year-old Standard Poodle named Joey, and Joey is competing in the NW3 level right now in nosework. I have a 6-year-old miniature American Shepherd, or mini Aussie, and he is at the end of E2 level. Then I have two Labradors now, so my main competition dog that I've done most of my competition with out of these dogs is Judd. Judd is — I can't believe it — he's 8 years old now. Time flies. He's an 8-year-old Labrador Retriever, and he's a dog that's my elite dog that I competed at the 2017 NACSW National Invitational this year. He's really the one that brought me into nosework in a big way. Then I have a brand new addition. I have a — she's going to be 9 months old, believe it not, this next week — and she is a Labrador Retriever from working lines. I'm very proud of her breeding and her breeder because they produce professional dogs for the professional sector, like FEMA dogs, cadaver dogs, that kind of thing. So she's bred for detection. She's definitely living up to her breeding, which is really exciting. But she's a really super dog, I absolutely love her, a little peanut, she's only about 35 pounds right now, but she may be small, but she's mighty. Melissa Breau: I know that you mentioned on Facebook a little bit, and some other places, that Brava's been a little bit of a change from some of your other dogs. She's a little different. Do you want to share a little bit about that? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. Brava is, she actually thinks her name is Bravado. That's her attitude. Her nickname is actually Big Bad. She's really a piece of work, but I absolutely adore her. She is what people would typically refer to as a high drive dog, but she's also a high arousal dog. With my other dogs, I can get them into drive, but they are not what I would call high arousal dogs. I would say that they're either low arousal or moderate arousal. But with her, she's a high arousal, so it's totally on a different side of the Yerkes-Dodson arousal curve. Melissa Breau: I want to talk a little more about that. Do you want to explain what the curve is and how it works, and what you mean by saying she's on one side and they're on the other? Stacy Barnett: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm actually really interested in Yerkes-Dodson Law because I find that it is the number one success criteria. Like, if you want to be successful in nosework, and probably a lot of other sports, but the number one key to success is managing this curve. So this is a really important concept. Basically, with the Yerkes-Dodson Law — and it's a law, by the way — it's not something you can break. Picture a curve that looks like a bell curve. It's actually a normal distribution curve, but it looks like a bell curve. As your arousal increases, your performance increases. So as the dog — or whatever we're talking about, but we're talking about dogs right now — as the dog's arousal continues to increase and increase and increase, the dog's performance also goes up until it gets to a point at the peak of the curve. And at the peak of the curve, this is the point at which I consider the dog to be in drive, and that's at the point where you're going to get the highest amount of performance, the highest degree of performance, out of the dog. But now what happens is, as the dog continues to increase its arousal — so your high arousal dogs tend to live on that side, on the right side, of the curve — so as they continue to increase that arousal, their performance actually decreases. So as the dog is more and more aroused, the performance gets worse and worse and worse, and it gets to the point where it becomes beyond arousal. It's actually the high anxiety, and it's that anxiety that is kind of like there's a point of no return at that point, where the dog's totally out to lunch. That's basically the curve, and like I said, it's a law, so to be successful, you can ride the curve a little bit. So trying to figure out, you want to take a look at what your dog is giving you, where their emotional state is, and then modify that emotional state so that you can try to get the dog back to the peak. When you get the dog back to the peak, the dog's in drive and you're going to have the best performance. Melissa Breau: To talk about that just a little bit more, what does it look like when the dog is on that right side of the curve and getting to the point where they're so over-aroused that it's impacting their performance? Maybe what are some of the things people can do to bring that back down? Stacy Barnett: OK. Let's talk about the right side. The right side is — this is the part of the curve that Brava is really highlighting to me. I have to say, though, she's just to the right, like, she's able to focus, which is really nice. With a dog who is high arousal, you're going to see a number of different things. You can see … let's say the dog is waiting. Waiting is really hard on these dogs. They tend to sometimes … they might be barking. So if you see a dog and they're obviously very agitated, and they want their turn, they want to go now, they want to go now, they want to go now, they want to go now, those dogs that are barking, they're in high arousal state. Or if the dog is pulling you to the start line. Or they're coming off of the start line and they're exploding into the search area. These are indications that your dog's arousal is too high. It's basically picture a 3-year-old child on a sugar high. That is high arousal, right? They can't focus. Melissa Breau: Sort of the way people think of a dog who stresses up. Stacy Barnett: Yes, yes. And actually there is a direct relationship, like, if you think about stressing up. I actually like to think about this in terms of real arousal and perceived arousal. We perceive high arousal dogs that stress up to be high arousal dogs because it's very obvious to us. So the real arousal equals perceived arousal. Interestingly, there's also another kind of stress that we see that doesn't look like high arousal, but it really is, and that is when the dog stresses down. So the dog is still stressed, the dog still has high anxiety, and it's still on the right-hand side of the curve, but you see these dogs and they're shut down, and it's very easy to misinterpret this, to think that the dog needs to be lifted up in its arousal state. So sometimes you see people try to jolly the dog, or “Hey, let's go, let's go, let's go,” maybe some toy play, and all they're doing is actually increasing the arousal even more, they're increasing the dog's arousal even more, and the dog actually can't get out of that anxiety state. That's where the perceived arousal is very different than the real arousal. Melissa Breau: You started to touch on it there, the other side of that curve, the left side of that curve. By contrast, what does that look like, or how does that work, and what should people be looking at? Stacy Barnett: The left-hand side of the curve is our lower arousal. If a dog is really low arousal, he's basically asleep. So you have the really low arousal that might be a little … very laid back, very like, “Hey, I'm here,” they might be a little bored, they might seem bored, they might be a little slow, they might be a little over-methodical, they might be unmethodical. Those are the dogs where you just want them to give you a little bit more. Those are the dogs around the lower side, and as long as they're not too low on the arousal curve, it's actually pretty easy to get them up the curve. I actually find that the ideal state is slightly to the left as a natural state, because a dog has a natural arousal state, and then they have the state that they're currently in. So if their natural arousal state is slightly to the left, just the fact that being at a trial will actually put them at the top of the curve. I'm actually very lucky Judd's one of those. He's slightly to the left as his natural arousal state. I take him to a trial, he loves trialing, it puts him right at the peak arousal, and he's in drive. Melissa Breau: We all want that dog, right? Stacy Barnett: Yeah, right. Everybody wants Judd. Everybody loves Judd. Melissa Breau: We talked before this and we talked a little bit about this just kind of outside of this context, but I know another big thing for you is really adapting your handling and training to the dog you have, and not just in terms of arousal levels. You also talk about the importance of adapting your training and handling based on how secure your dog is, or how confident they are, and whether they're more handler focused or more environmentally focused. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. Can you share what some of that looks like and how people can adapt accordingly? Stacy Barnett: Absolutely, absolutely, and I just want to give a little bit of a plug for Denise's book Train the Dog in Front of You. Now, again, this is focusing on nosework, but I think every competitor, if you do dog sports, buy the book. And no, she's not giving me any kickback on that — I just wanted to let you know! Basically because the most important thing that you can do from a dog training perspective is to know what kind of dog are you dealing with. I don't mean are you dealing with a Border Collie, a Labrador, or a Shih Tzu. It's the dog, the personality type, the very specific what makes your dog tick. What's really cool is Denise has actually broken down the dog's personality into dimensions, and these dimensions, if you can understand where your dog falls, it can give you insight into what's the best way to train your dog, which is really cool. For instance, what I like to focus on specifically, especially for all our nosework stuff, is there's two particular dimensions that I think are really important. One of them is, is your dog secure or is your dog cautious. The dog who is secure, that's ideal. We want that secure dog. The dog who's cautious might be a little bit more timid. Actually Judd, as an example, is a cautious dog. So you have a cautious dog, but then you compare that to Brava, who is very secure. You see the difference in their searching style. I did a search just the other day in my back room, and there was a tight space. Brava was really pushing into that tight space, where Judd was like, “Ooh, I don't know, it kind of makes me nervous.” So you have secure versus cautious. Then you have another dimension, which is also really important, which is either handler focused or environmentally focused. Along with other sports, we do like to have the dog fairly handler focused. However, in scent sports specifically, we need to have a dog that's a little bit more on the environmental side, but not so environmental that they're prioritizing their environment over target odor or over working with us as a team, because again, this is actually a team sport with you and your dog, and you have to work together as a partnership. So ideally you actually have a dog who is somewhere in-between handler focused and environmentally focused. But if you can understand which side your dog is, that can give you insight into how to train your dog. Melissa Breau: So what it seems to me is like what you're talking about really is balance, this idea that you want to hit this perfect in-between on a couple of things, right? Working to balance out our dog's natural tendencies, whatever they may be. So I wanted to ask about one more skill where balance is important. How do you achieve that right balance that you're talking about in teamwork, between teamwork and independence, especially during a search? Stacy Barnett: There are some handling things that you can do. For instance, one of these things, I actually call it proximity of influence — it's just a term that I coined — that the closer you are to your dog, the more influence you're going to exert on your dog. There's actually a sweet spot, and every dog is slightly different in terms of where their sweet spot is. You don't want to be so close to your dog that you're influencing your dog too much, because at that point you're providing a little bit too much input into the search, and let's face it, we don't have a nose. I mean, we have a nose, but it doesn't work very well. But you also don't want to be so far away that you're not a partner with your dog. So by understanding a little bit about is your dog environmentally or handler focused, it can tell you how sensitive they're going to be to your proximity. I know, for instance, with Judd, Judd is actually quite independent. He's pretty … from an environmentally focused perspective, he's more on the environmental side versus handler focused, and he will actually tolerate a lot of handler interference because he just tells me to get in the back seat anyway. Whereas if you have a dog like Joey, my Standard Poodle, who is actually very handler focused, he's very open to suggestions. I actually did a search this morning where I had a hide, and it was in the proximity of an area where there's probably a little bit of residual odor from a few days ago. Joey paused for a second and he looked at me. I made the mistake of saying, “Joey, go search,” because as soon as I did that, I actually prompted him, especially because of my proximity and where I was, it in effect prompted him to alert on residual odor, because he was like, “Oh, OK, you think this is where the hide is absolutely. I think it is too,” so he alerted. These are the types of things that had I been a little further away from him, or not talked to him, I think he would not have alerted there. So this is just an example, and the really cool thing is I got it on video. I love video so I can share it with people. It's different kinds of things like that, so you can really work that balance based upon the position of your body with a dog and your voice. Melissa Breau: I think when we talked about this before, you talked about there's a certain kind of angle that you like to see between you and the dog. Stacy Barnett: Yes. The 45-degree angle. Melissa Breau: Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. This is something I actually talked a little bit about in my handling class, but it's also going to be in my Win By A Nose class. We'll talk about it there also. I think, personally, there is a perfect position in relation to the dog, when the dog is searching, for the handler to be. That position is actually 45 degrees behind the dog, but out away from the dog. You're not parallel to the dog. Let's say the dog is searching a vehicle. You're not parallel to that dog. You're actually behind the dog and at an angle of about 45 degrees. What this does is it puts you into a neutral position. That neutral position is something that helps to offset that suggestion that we have. Dogs are very suggestible, and some dogs are more suggestible than others. And understanding how suggestible your dog is actually is really good information to know. The interesting thing, this is my theory, is that our dogs don't understand that we have a really bad sense of smell. Our dogs don't know that because our dogs just assume that whatever they're smelling — they're smelling birch, anise, or clove — that we can smell it too, and a highly suggestible dog is going to be like, “Well, I think it's here. Do you think it's here? I think it's there. Do you think it's there?” And then they start an alert at you. Having a 45-degree angle can help to negate that and offset that. It's cool stuff. Melissa Breau: Yeah. I know that nosework isn't the only sport you've done. It's where your focus and where your career is now, but you started out in obedience, you've done a little bit of agility, so I was curious. Is there anything that you've learned from those other sports that has carried over into nosework for you? Stacy Barnett: Oh absolutely, absolutely, and I think a lot of the times with nosework, I think sometimes people forget that it's just another dog sport. Granted, the dog is out there, they're doing something that they are very adept at doing because they have this great sense of smell, and because it's a dog sport, it has a lot of corollaries to other dog sports. Those corollaries, things like the dog has to be able to acclimate, that sort of thing, and from a behavior, there's a lot of behavioral corollaries. There's also from the perspective of … so I'm going to use an example: movement. If you do agility, you'd learn that your body position and the way you move affects your dog. It tells your dog where to go. Now interestingly, the same thing happens in nosework. But in nosework we're sometimes very oblivious to that because we start off with the dog doing most of the work and we do like to have 80/20, we want the dog really driving the search. But it's very easy to forget that our body movement, our body motion, and our acceleration or deceleration, how we're standing in relationship to the dog, that all that is communicated to the dog. So if we look at, say, agility, and all the motion cues, and the body position cues, and all these cues that you give to your dog, you can actually look at that and say, “Hey, those are natural cues,” and those type of cues also apply to nosework. Melissa Breau: I know that your life has changed quite a bit since we last talked. Not just the new puppy, but you've been working with the AKC on their new scentwork program. I wanted to ask you what being an AKC contractor is about, what are you doing? Do you want to just share a little bit about what you're doing for them, what's involved there? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I'm one of the contractors. There's a small handful of us. We're basically consulting, so we're helping the AKC with … we're just bringing some thoughts, some ideas, to making sure and really helping to support the program so that we end up with a really excellent sport coming out of it, because that is a new sport for the AKC. So we're helping to consult. We're also supporting some of the trials, like maybe if there's a new scentwork club or something like that, to make sure that they have the support that they need for trials, and to answer questions and that sort of thing. And we're working at doing some judges education, so we're helping to define what we need to do to help make sure that we have the very best judges out there. Melissa Breau: Last question. I know you've got your Win By A Nose class coming up on the schedule for February. Do you want to just share a little bit about how much of all of this is incorporated into that class, and maybe a little bit about what else you cover? Stacy Barnett: Yeah, so that's great. A lot of this will be incorporated, but the Win By A Nose class is all about successful trialing and training strategies. So it's how do you get from the point that you're going to be good to great? What is it going to take to help to become a really great competitor? And we're going to get into, there's probably going to be a little bit of mental management in there, there's going to be a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some different trialing strategies, different cue strategies. We'll be talking about arousal, we'll definitely be talking about a little bit of handling, a little bit of what's the best way to set your training strategies up so that you can get yourself ready for a trial, all this type of stuff that comes together to get to the point where you are really ready to go out there and hit a home run. Melissa Breau: Awesome. It sounds like a good class. Stacy Barnett: I think it's going to be fun. I think it's going to be good, yeah. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Stacy, and for sticking through the technology fails. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week, this time with Lori Stevens to talk about how you can help your dog reach optimal fitness in about five minutes at a time. 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. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SHOW NOTES:  Summary: Julie Symons has been involved in dog sports for over 20 years. She's competed in flyball, conformation, agility, obedience, herding, tracking and nosework. One of Julie's favorite things is a versatile team! Her first Belgian Tervuren, Rival, was the first of his breed to finish his championship in conformation, obedience, and agility. Julie truly believes that participating in multiple sports is enriching to both person and dog and builds on that mutual partnership and trust. She also blogs at K9 Rivarly.com, for those of you out there like me, who just can't get enough of all this dog stuff. Links mentioned: K9Rivalry.com Next Episode:  To be released 4/28/2017, featuring Julie Symons.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau, and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast, brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports, using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Julie Symons. Julie has been involved in dog sports for over 20 years. She's competed in flyball, conformation, agility, obedience, herding, tracking, and Nose work. One of Julie's favorite things is a versatile team. Her first Belgian Tervuren, Rival, was the first of his breed to finish his championship in conformation, obedience, and agility. Julie truly believes that participating in multiple sports is enriching to both the person and the dog and builds on that mutual partnership and trust. She also blogs at k9rivalry.com, for those of you, out there who, like me, just can't get enough of all this dog stuff. Hey, Julie. Welcome to the podcast. Julie Symons: Hi, Melissa. Thanks for having me. This is going to be a lot of fun. Melissa Breau:  Did I totally butcher the Belgian Tervuren there? Julie Symons: Not bad, but I forgot to remind you Rival is a she and not a he. Melissa Breau: Oh, well that makes a difference. Julie Symons: It does. Melissa Breau: So, to start us out, can you tell us a little bit about the dogs you have now? Julie Symons: I have my Belgian Tervuren, Savvy. She's nine years old, so she's my second Terv, and she is, I would not say semi-retirement, but I'm not training her in agility, or showing in agility or obedience anymore. We are focusing on nose work. She has her breed champion, her agility champion. Last year she got her UD and her Nose Work 3, and a couple of years ago she got a Tracking Dog Excellent, and that was really, a really exciting class to title in. It's hard to get into test, and it's challenging to find places to track and train, so she's a Versatility 3 dog, it's a title in AKC, so she's my first Versatility 3 dog, so that's her. My newest dog is a Belgian Malinois, sometimes also hard to pronounce. He is 17 months old, and I love him. I do prefer girl dogs, but I felt that he was a better addition with my current girl, and they do get along great, and he's a very friendly dog, not quite much phases him, so it's been really nice to find that in a Belgian, and it's just fun to train him, and he's different, so every dog I've had is different. He passed his Nose Work ORTs, Order Recognition Test, last fall, and we have his first Nose Work 1 trial next month. He's still a baby dog, you know. I don't like to push them. Nose work is a little different. I know he's ready for that, but I have years for him, really, you know, trialing and anything else, so I'm taking my time with that. Melissa Breau: It's kind of awesome that's he's a Belgian with the ability to kind of hang out. Julie Symons: Yeah. I actually, kind of, joked that he's like a golden in a Malinois suit, and he's gone to a couple of conformation shows, sometimes the only Malinois, and I never even, you know, he just didn't mind people touching him, examining him. I didn't even have to train that. I probably don't even want to admit that, but we'll see. He's a little older now. He might, you know, sometimes they go through different phases, and they go through different periods of time, and we, actually, have a trial next weekend that we're showing in conformation, so I do like to get dogs out early. That's the one thing I do like, conformation is something that you can get them into the ring early, if they're ready, and they can have some really fun time getting lots of steak and liver in the ring, so. Melissa Breau: Hey. Can't beat that. Julie Symons: No. No. Melissa Breau: So, I think, from reading your bio, and stuff, you started out in flyball, right? Julie Symons: Yeah, when I bought my first house, I was an adult, in my 20s, I wanted a dog, so one of the first things I did was I went and got a dog. I went to a shelter and I picked out Dreyfus, really cute dog, kind of a big, you know, 60 pound, 70 pound, you know, Collie mix. We called him the Dick Clark of dogs because he never aged. He lived to 16, almost 16, and except for his physical appearance, you know, he just looked as handsome and young as Dick Clark, I guess. You know, I don't really remember how I got into flyball. I do know that I started out in some local class where you just stood in the room for an hour, and you got one time up, you know, in such ways we don't train anymore. You just don't have your dog, you know, unfocused and sitting there for an hour, you know, while you wait your turn, and I think I started, I got into the Amber mixed breed, it's an American mixed breed organization registry. I don't even think they have it anymore, and I could get like, you know, obedience titles, so I must have been renting, you know, some other training buildings to practice, and there were some people there that were doing flyball, so I must have networked and met them because I once I started going to matches and some UKC trials, and you just started meeting more people, and I got on this flyball team, and it was neat because, you know, I learned how to teach my dog to hit a box and a ball would pop out. He was really good at flyball. He was a big dog, so he was able to jump the little hurdles fast, and he got a run in every heat, at the trials. I remember my team members weren't always happy that he got a run every time, but he was consistent, you know, and you want the time for the flyball, for the speed. I also learned, you know, like doing a Front Cross, you send your dog down one side and you do a Front Cross and you pick your dog up. So, you know, I do look back at that as, you know, I didn't stick with it, I still really like the sport, didn't stay with it, but it was my first time going to, driving a couple of hours to a trial and I remember thinking, well how can a dog stay in the car that long? What if they have to go to the bathroom? It's funny, when you look back and see, we were all newbies, we all started out somewhere, and you know, I remember taking pictures of my dog in the hotel room, like, wow, they can be in the hotel room, with us. So, I did that for about a year, went to about three or four tournaments for flyball. At that same time, I was starting to look for my purebred dogs, and I thought, oh, I like this. There wasn't as many opportunities for mix breeds back then, as it is today. I, actually, was looking at mixed breeds before I got Drac, my Malinois. I was so open to a mixed breed, it didn't really matter because you can do so much with them now, but back then you couldn't, so I definitely wanted a purebred dog. You know, Dreyfus was great, but he really was, you know, not a lot of drive, very distractible. Now I probably have a lot of skills now to deal with that, but you know, he liked to sniff the ground a lot, and he was not the easiest, you know, dog to train, you know, and for being new, you know, it was kind of hard, so I didn't do much with him, past that. So, I started researching, and I was looking for my next dog, and I saw the David Letterman Stupid Pet Tricks on, you know, one night I was watching TV and they had a Belgian Malinois. I really liked that breed, so I was still going to this local obedience class and I mentioned it, to the instructor, and he said, oh, you should really get a Belgian Tervuren instead, so I went to a show, in Syracuse, a conformation show, and I found when the Belgian Tervuren were on, and I loved them. They were so beautiful. I grew up with rust Collies, so they kind of reminded me of that a little bit, so it was so fortunate how I found my next dog. I contacted breeders. They didn't know me from anybody. They had a boy and a girl, and I got the girl, from Missouri, flown to me, sight unseen. Her name was Rival, and she changed my life, and she was just this high drive, just very biteable, bonded to me immediately, and then, I think, I did bring her to that same dog, pet, class trainer, for a little bit, but I didn't stay long because, you know, the methods were much different, and I heard about a local trainer, who had just got her OTCH, on a lab, so I started private lessons with her, and I never, ever, went back to obedience classes, a class environment. Then, so, when I got her, agility was really starting to hit the scene, so I got into an agility class right away. This is when AKC had one class, you would have the standard class, you would run in. We would drive like, you know, four hours, and you would go in the ring for 30 seconds, and you were done, for the day. So that's how I, kind of, went. Then, in obedience, of course, I was continuing with that, and private lessons, and then I added agility. I started, when she was young, I started tracking the pet class that I had gone to was run by some Schutzhund trainers, so I would meet with them, when they would do some tracking, and so I learned a little bit about tracking, but I didn't stay with them long. I would take a lot of breaks on and off from tracking, you know, and of course nose work wasn't around at that point, but that's how I, kind of, just, you know, I got the bug. I got the dog training bug with Dreyfus, got the purebred dog that I had more opportunities, and you know, she just made it so enjoyable and easy for me to pick up new sports, and so that's how I, kind of, you know, you get that first dog, you know… Melissa Breau: You dive in deep, and the world opens up to you. Julie Symons: Yep. Yep. Melissa Breau: So, at what point, I mean, it sounds like you were doing a lot of different things right out of the gate, with Rival. Did you immediately know that versatility was going to be something that was important to you? At what point was that like a conscious thing where that was like something you wanted to focus on? Julie Symons: You know, I do think it was because of her, and just training her in so many sports, her temperament and her drive were superb. She excelled at everything we did, and she was a great teacher. I mean I still consider myself a novice handler, at that time, and I really got addicted. I got addicted to dog training, and I know, any and all of it, so I just, you know, couldn't imagine just doing agility. I just enjoyed the cross training and just teaching such different skills, to my dog. I think I would get bored if I only did one, and I think that my dogs, the dogs I tend to get, to me, you know, I don't want to put human feelings on dogs, but I do think they enjoy the versatility too. I think they like the different skills and the different things they get to do. Melissa Breau: So, in retrospect, what are some of the benefits that you have seen, from competing in multiple sports, with each of your dogs? Julie Symons: Yeah. So, what I just mentioned, I do think there's a cross training aspect to it. I'm not just working on, you know, their muscles for running fast. I'm using their nose, and I'm asking for some precision in other sports, like obedience. It also gives them breaks, you know, instead of working one sport all the time, you know, they take a break from, maybe, some of the more strenuous running and jumping, and then they get to switch to something else. I found that training in the different sports, you just develop and bond and relationship that's different and maybe a little deeper because you have to learn different context of things, you're learning more skills, and it strengthens that relationship that you have, you know, you have this mutual understanding with each other, to go out and do these different sports, and that you have these, you know, cues and things that they understand, and it's just amazing to know that I have…because I train for sports, I don't normally train just to train. I've gotten a little bit more into doing some tricks, I think that's great for dogs, too, so just to think of all the ways I can teach my dog to do different things, and back to, you know, when I had Rival, she really showed me what was possible to do with a dog, and the possible bonds you can have. I just never thought you could do all of this with a dog, and I just think that's what made me like the versatility of it too, it's just a, kind of, challenge to try other sports, you know. So, when nose work came along, I did not need another dog sport, believe me, but her brother had started it, and I saw a video of it, didn't know much about it, and he passed away at a little bit of a young age, so I was, kind of, inspired to say, you know, in his honor I'm going to take this nose work class that I heard about Denise teaching, before Fenzi started, and she was actually in heat, or she was injured, or something, so like the timing was really good, so I used that, my dog is in heat or has a minor injury or it's winter, you know, I think of what else could I do with my dog because I can't do some of the other things, and that's, actually, how I got into nose work. So, you know, it just comes along at the right time, for you, with the dog that you have. Melissa Breau: So, I'd imagine that knowing now, at least, that that's something that's important to you, that you want to do a lot of different things with your dog, when you have a new puppy, which you've been through fairly recently, you might approach, kind of, those early days a little bit differently, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Julie Symons: Yeah. I think it is a little different, knowing what you're going to, you know, train your dog in and compete in, but it's really quite similar because a lot of the same skills that you need across all the sports, like you need your dog to be able to stay, you know, and sit or down, you really do, in every single sport. You need impulse control, you need them to, you know, wait for your cues. They need focus. They need recalls. You know, you just need all of that stuff, so that's what I just start building. I tend to train thoughtful dogs. That's good. I'm thinking like I want more like, almost out of control dogs, but I really don't. I do tend to train, I tend to teach dogs to be very thoughtful, and I do need to balance that with some of that little bit of edge that I do want from them as well. Let's see, what else? But I also, like, approach it by switching on and off. I'm not training every sport all the time, you know, nobody can do that, and even, since training in multiple sports is also a challenge in itself, I also, you know, have a busy day life, day job. I have, you know, a son. I have a husband, so it's hard to fit everything in. So, how I approach it is I just, sometimes, focus on one thing a month, like I need to teach my dog to weave, so just that month, it happened to be summer, I'm going to just, every day, go out there and train my dogs, a couple of times a day, on the weave poles, and I don't really have time for anything else, but that's okay. That's just what I'm doing that month. Then, the next month, I might focus on, I don't know, getting out to new places for obedience, and then the next month I may focus on teeter, you know, get my dog on the teeter and everything, so it just, I don't really have a good, you know, plan around it. I don't write it down, or anything, I just make sure I train my dog on something, most days, and I usually have a focus, so a lot of it depends on what I might be starting to want to compete in first. Melissa Breau: That makes a lot of sense. Julie Symons: Yeah. Yeah. Because you can't, if you try to sit there and say, you'll get overwhelmed. You'll get overwhelmed if you're going to try to say, I want to do all of these six sports, oh my gosh, you know, and you know, I kind of move on. Once Savvy got her MACH 2 to, you now, I didn't need to get a MACH 3 or 4, so I just decided, she could have still kept running, she was seven or eight, or something, but I just had other things to do. I had to go work on her, you know, TDX or her, whatever, nose work, now. I am very goal oriented to the title, so that kind of drives me in the direction that I train. Melissa Breau: Yeah. I feel like that's something that I've definitely struggled with, so it's interesting to hear, kind of, pick one focus. Now, at least, for me, and for my dog, I found that she doesn't always retain the information long term, if we, kind of, leave it alone and come back to it, you know, like months later. Is that something you've had to deal with at all? Julie Symons: Oh, she doesn't. Well, no. Well I do think it depends on what it is, if you hadn't, you know, taught something to kind of fluency, then you're going to lose a little bit, but I also think they remember some of it, at least, so there are some things that I think you do need to, kind of, not drop off, you know, for too long. It depends, you know, it might be stays or recalls, obviously. I do think that, most part, they do remember, so, in that case, if they don't, then, you know, you might have to just decide what's more important that you need, and keep that in because, you know, I could do more than just my weave pole training that month. Obviously, I'm in the catch, and I'll do stays with my dogs. I'll put them in a sit stay, while I'm making something, or you know, sometimes it just takes one minute of training, just one to three minutes of training, a day. Everybody can find that. I started to train a little bit before I went to work. Lately, with Drac, I train when I get home. He is so pumped and into me, that's when I need to train him because he's a young, adolescent boy. He, kind of, like doesn't have a lot of stamina to focus, so I've actually had some really, really wonderful sessions, and it just might be as much as i can train with a handful of food and that's all I do. Now he's 17 months old, and he is like, oh my gosh, I'm like, he is so focused on me, like that didn't happen months ago. So then, because I have that focus and maturity, I'm able to, kind of, progress a little bit further or teach him something new, so it's, kind of, give and take, and you're right, I know some of the stuff I started with him, like backup, I was teaching him backing up, he doesn't know that at all, anymore, so, yeah, that is something that I did lose, but that's not as important to me, to backup, away from me, so I've got to get back to that because I do think it's useful, in some areas, but yeah, I did lose that one on him, by the way. I think what happened was, I was teaching him some other things, like a fold back down, or something else, and he kept backing up, and it wasn't reinforcing it because I was working on something else, so I think that's why I lost it because of the reinforcement, you know, I extinguished it. I extinguished his backing up, accidentally. Melissa Breau: Yeah. Do you have any advice, I guess, for other trainers, who maybe want to intentionally train for multiple sports or approach the idea that if they have a dog, they want to compete in multiple sports, either for getting started or just, kind of, for balancing things? Julie Symons:Yeah. Yes, I do. So, a little bit, what I mentioned earlier, I think if you just don't get overwhelmed and realize that you aren't trialling your new dog, right away. It really is going to be years before you really get them in the ring, and I know, like it's almost like you put a lot of time in those first, you know, two to four years. I didn't bring in my, you know, Rival, who got an Obedience Champion, she didn't enter the obedience ring until she was five. She could have gone in a little earlier, but I wasn't ready, and once I got in and I realized we were ready, but you have time to bring your dog in because once you get them into that ring, at that time, it goes fast after that, so you take that time, you know, I would say two to four years, depending on the sport, and once you get to that point, then it goes really fast. If you start too early, I think you're just setting yourself up to have too many gaps in your training, and then you're going to, probably, struggle, and then it's going to take you longer, so I would, you know, number one, not worry about time. It will come, when ready. Also, a foundation, like I said earlier, just work on the foundation, work on things that you're going to want anyway, you're going to want to save the recalls, the focus, the impulse control, that's going to apply to every sport, and something that's near and dear to Denise's heart, actually, is personal play. I've had to learn that more so in the last nine years because my first dog, Rival, was just naturally into me. I was her world. Honestly, I didn't do anything, to make that happen, and when I got Savvy, and now I have Drac, other things in the world are more interesting, to them, than me, so I have had to think about, wait, I've got to build that personal bond, that personal play, not relying on food so much, or toys, and if you can focus on that, and you can have a dog that's totally into you, that's half the battle, and then the rest is just skill training, it's just skills, and we all know how to trail skills. Seriously, we have all the classes and the tools and the, you know, video examples, and the people's blogs, we all know how to teach skills, some are harder than others, don't get me wrong, but if you have a dog that you have built up this wonderful relationship with, I mean we all have wonderful relationships with our dogs. I'm not even saying that. It's from an interaction, it's a kind of bonded, you know, interaction that you need to build for that personal play around other, you know, interesting things, in the environment. So, I would say, and I had to, really, grow in that area, for me, and I really bring that into my training more where, to me, it's more important that I'm going to interact and play with my dog then teach Drac to backup again. To me I'd rather need him to really want to come to me and to play with me, so that's the things that I would have people to focus on.  Melissa Breau: You know, I've seen, I don't remember if you shared a video or if it's on your Fenzi bio, or what, I mean, I've seen some of your competition videos, and I would never guess that personal play is something you've struggled with. I saw you in between exercises, and on one of the videos you got down on the floor, and you were like very happy to be there. It was really nice. I mean it was… Julie Symons: Yeah. I mean I think one of the videos might have been Rival, and I did make a clip, once, for somebody, to show what I did between the rings with Savvy, and she's a very distractible dog. She'll know the things in her environment, which is typical of Belgians, too, they're very aware of people, there are some people they just don't like, and so I've really had to work on that, so thank you, for that compliment. To be honest, that is why Savvy didn't enter the obedience ring for a while. I can't remember how old she was, when she actually went in for her Novice, CD, but she actually went in for her, you know, Novice CD but she got her Utility title at eight, last year, because I got her, when my son was young, he was only two, so I just didn't have the time. I had three dogs, and I had my older dog, Dreyfus. I had, did I have three dogs? Yeah. Savvy. I still had Rival and Dreyfus, when I got Savvy, and I just couldn't do it all. I, actually, realized I cannot do it all right now, and that was okay. That was okay. If I put pressure on myself then it's just going to carry over to my dogs, so I appreciate that compliment. Melissa Breau: So, you got there, and you got there at your own pace, and you got beautiful results. Julie Symons: Yes. Yes. Melissa Breau: So, I know that, in addition to teaching for FDSA, you also teach in person, right? Julie Symons: Yeah. So, actually, back in the late ‘90s, I started teaching agility, when I was doing well with my dog and it was still new, in this area. I found, you know, that I enjoyed that. I enjoyed helping people, and I was in a dog club, so I started teaching through a dog club, and then, eventually, when we bought our current property, the first thing we built, you know, we have seven open acres, and the first thing we did is we built a hundred by hundred, you know, fence, so the property was, the house hadn't even started building, and I had this hundred by hundred, you know, fence. Melissa Breau: Priorities. Julie Symons: Yeah. Priorities because it was a lot of deer, and everything, and when I first started, without the fence, you know, a couple of dogs to take off, and that was really scary, so we got the fence up. So, I started teaching on my own. That was probably back in 2000, in 1999 or the year 2000, and then I had my son in 2004, and I tried to keep up, you know, and I tried to keep teaching, and I was still showing Rival actively, finishing up some of her big titles. I just had to back off a bit, so I stopped teaching and took a break from that, and then when I got Savvy into nose work, and she got her nose work 1 title, I immediately was like, “I'm going to start teaching.” I just wanted to get that first title and then start bringing it to my area because I could tell it was an up and coming sport. You know, everybody just didn't AKC anymore, you know, there's Barn Hunt, there's a lot of other venues of dog sports. It was about the same time that I started teaching at FDSA, and so it's gone very well, locally. People love the in-person classes because they can have them, you know, from me, so they're spoiled a little bit. So, yeah, really, actually this morning I hosted a little match for some students, and myself, trialing next month, so it's a lot of work. I rented a building and we had a gym area and another room to do hides. It keeps me busy. Melissa Breau: So, just for anybody who may happen to be local to you, do you want to share, kind of, what area you're in? Julie Symons: Yeah. I'm south of Rochester, New York. I'm near the thruway, so I'm actually equal distance between Syracuse and Buffalo. I do have some people that, you know, come about an hour away, but most are local. Ironically some of them are just like within five minutes of my neighborhood, so we all live pretty close, and Rochester, New York, we've heard this for years, we have a really, really big, strong dog community, some really talented people, a lot of people invested in training, you know, competitively with our dogs. You know, I have people, in my classes that, you know, I have few pet people that started with me, people who hadn't done much of the competitive sports, so I have a mix, but I do have a lot of people who have some dog training experience, and it was cool that they, these are people who do Schutzhund, you know, obedience, rally, agility, like they're interested in nose work. Their dogs may be getting a little older, they're retiring form a sport, or they're young dogs who are coming up, and it's, really, taught me that it applies, or interests, a wide range of people, you know, it's not just for certain, you know, demographic of dogs and handlers, so and it's growing. I, actually, can barely keep up. I, just recently, made a job change to go to part time. I work at Xerox. I've been there my whole career, out of college, and I just decided that I want more time to myself, as well as for dog training. So, yeah, I'm actually really excited about that. The hours will change in a couple of weeks, so we'll see. I'm not really sure if I'll get more time to myself. I may just get busier, so we'll see, but I did find that that's what I love. That's what I was passionate about. That's where I was creative, and that wasn't the side of my life that I wanted to cut back on, so I just sat back, looked at our situation, and said, “I can do this,” so, yeah. Melissa Breau: Now you, kind of, mentioned AKC in there, and some of the other Nose work programs, but I know there's been a lot of buzz about the fact that AKC has just recently added a scent work program, right? Julie Symons: Yeah, and that timing came quite at a good time, for some of my latest decisions. Yeah. So AKC rolled out a nose work program, they call it scent work, and you know, I think we all expected it to come at some point. I think a lot of people do like to show in AKC. AKC, you know, is a big organization, and probably going to be able to put on more readily available trials for people to enter. I love the other nose work programs. I think they've done a really great job with them, and I will still trial in them, but there's people that are in some isolated areas that are too far for trials, there's a long waitlist, so I think the AKC program, the reason I'm excited about it, is I think it will get more people into the sport because I really have found that nose work just does something to the dogs. It does something to the handlers. It's not just the dogs that love because they get to use their nose, but just the people, to see their dogs be these little detection dogs, and there's something about it. I haven't quite pinpointed it. I think people like tracking, but tracking, sometimes, is hard to find the field, and there's also limited, you know, tracking tests. There's just something about it, and I think it's just people seeing their dogs, instead of us telling our dogs not to sniff and smell things, we're letting them sniff and smell things, and they're doing it with purpose, and they're doing it, you know, it's a job. I think dogs are, kind of, bred to do jobs, and it's a job that comes naturally to them, but there's still practicing and training and skills that you've got to train to actually compete in that sport, so it's just been something that I'm really excited about with the AKC program. Then they added this handler discrimination class, which existed in a UKC program, so I'm not as familiar with that, from a nose work context, but I've done some articles for 20 years, and you know, I never really had a lot of problem with that, but I understand that it is challenging. I think it's just more of a mindset of people realizing our dogs really can pick up the smallest amount of smell, and it's not even a small amount of smell. I mean we're putting our strong odor on it, compared to anything else, in the environment, so there's a discrimination that they're making between our smell and the steward's, you know, smell, from touching the articles, and in this new AKC program, you actually have your glove, or your sock, that you, you know, scent, and then they're going to have another  person's scented, you know, item in one of the other boxes to start, so it's going to be discrimination, and you know, it's just like with anything,  you train your dog, what was reinforced, what is the value, so I teach my scent is to be reinforced, there's a value to that, and to me discrimination is less of an issue than somebody going, oh, I like the steward's hand smell better. It's just more that they're stressed, or they just pick up any article, so I think that the discrimination part, to me, you know, is very trainable, and it's easy to teach a dog, just like with nose work, we teach our dog these odors, you know, Birch, Anise, Clove, these are odors that we've taught you that are reinforced. Any other novel owner, whether it's a piece of bread or some meat or a toy, or even animal droppings, you know, they may find that self-reinforcing, but if they have the drive for the odors that we have reinforced, then they will seek those out over everything, so. So, yeah, it is pretty exciting, with the AKC program.  Melissa Breau: My understanding is that you're going to be a judge, right?  Julie Symons: Yeah. I did apply, to be a judge, and I was approved. They still have to rollout… Melissa Breau: Congrats. Julie Symons: Yeah. Thanks. I've never entered that arena, of judging, so they still have to rollout like some online training and a test to take, so we're waiting for that to come out, and it's exciting because somebody, locally, is taking nose work classes with me. She said, oh, we're thinking of getting this added to our national breed, coming up, and she said, I know somebody who's a judge, so it will be very nice that I could, you know, maybe for some of the local breed shows, you know, I'll be available to help with that, to get it started. Melissa Breau: Right. Right. Now I want to change gears a little bit because I know you also do the obedience games class, at FDSA, even though it's not in the schedule, until October, I wanted to make sure we had a chance to talk a little bit about some of the obedience stuff you teach too, so do you want to just tell us a little bit about the concept for the class and kind of what you cover? Julie Symons: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for bringing that up. It's been a very fun class topic for me. It's called obedience games, and we added a starter version, which I just ended last term because I found that my first version got advanced pretty quickly, so I thought, wow, I can really even break this down more, and that was a real hit. It, kind of, you know, took a life of its own, and it was just real exciting. It's about, you know, being informal but still being clear to your dog. It's about adding more movement and less, you know, static, stationary behaviors, and less fiddling with, you know, precision and the front, so we're not even doing fronts, so I'm like, we're not doing fronts in this class. Every time your dog comes here, you're going to pass a treat between your legs, and then that just builds this like, you know, center of position, and your dog is going to continue with speed, and they're just going to know, you know, to like go through you, you know. We're not going to worry about errors. I really emphasize that because we all, you know, we all get a little frustrated or disappointed, and I'm really, really impressed, early on, there are no errors, we're just training, we're learning, we're finding out what gaps we have. We're getting information from our dogs. There's no reason to be, you know, upset, or bothered and we don't want our dogs to ever, you know, we don't want them to have stress, in this game, and I think that I'm seeing some people give me comments that they're seeing some people who took my very first obedience game class, last fall, they said, wow, I very rarely still use the games, it's really helped my dog in the ring. I think it's more that it's helped the human, you know, it's helping humans to, kind of, maybe loosen up a little bit. One of the things that I really was, you know, enforcing was, you know, these daily games that if you just work, just a few minutes, like I said earlier, a few minutes a day, with your dog, there's just something about that because I can go days and days without training my dog, I just get busy, you know, but instead, if I just find one little, kind of, action packed, high reinforcing game, to play with my dog, which with a purpose for obedience skills, for example, it just pays off with even your recalls. It pays off with your dog, you know, your personal bond, and I try to do some personal toy and play before every session. I encourage that for the students to do. Then, because we're all so busy, I'm busy, you know, you can find a couple of minutes every day, and it really will add up and you will find your dog actually learned skills, and they want to work with you more because they look forward to that time of the day, you know, that you train with them. Another thing is, you know, these scores will come eventually. When I entered, you know, my OTCH dog in her first trial, you know, we did get good scores, but they weren't going to be scores that got me placed to get the OTCH points, but I was just in the novice class. I didn't need those points yet, so I wanted her to go in there and know her job and be happy. I just, kind of, worked at those point deductions that I got, I just worked to clean them up, over time. I just said, oh, that's where our gap is. I'm going to clean it up, and I'm going to lose less points, in that exercise, and that's how I got to the higher scores, but not until I was, you know, further along, in my obedience competition trial because you've got to get that experience, and I just think I was trying to bring that thought process to the games classes.  Melissa Breau: Yeah. I mean, I think that even the mindset, right, from competition to thinking about it all as a game, for the person, is such a difference, and it just brings a more relaxed structure and more fun. Julie Symons: Yeah. Yeah. It has. I have been pleasantly surprised with how well it's been received, and I might even have to come up with like a middle level now. We'll see how I can plan that. And what I love about it, too, is it complements all the great skills classes that we have, at the Academy, so people can be working on their retrieves, and you know, whatever, you know, all these other little skilled areas, you know, separately but at the same time, but separate from the quick little three minute games sessions because I'm doing that with Drac. Believe me, I'm working on, you know, his retrieve and his hold, and things like that. I'm working those heavy-duty skill things off on the side as well, so. Melissa Breau: So, to kind of round things out, I want to ask you the three questions that we've asked everybody so far, who's come on the show. Julie Symons: Okay. Melissa Breau: So, first, what's the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? Julie Symons: Okay. It has to be just, you know, Rival, my first Terv, she became the first champion OTCH MACH Terv, and just getting that OTCH, actually, in itself, was just a thrill because I just went from the Novice A classes to OTCH, and I learned so much, from her. I, also, had my son, he was a couple of years at that time, and I just needed a couple of more points, and I was going in the ring, and we weren't doing well. I was no longer training in the open class because my dog was now older, she was ten, or nine, or ten, and there was a lot of jumping. I couldn't even train. I didn't have time to train a lot, and I didn't have time to maintain that, so one of my friends, and trainers, said, “You really need to enter the open class.” On a whim, I entered the one day that had spots left, in open, and we went in the ring, and I said, oh, I'm never going to finish my OTCH. I'm never going to finish my OTCH in an open class because all of the points are in utility and you know the scores, people get such great, you know, scores, you know, and it's so hard to get the points in open, if you look at the point schedule. We went in the ring, and that's the one that I show a lot, it's in my obedience games intro, and we went into the ring, and I love to watch it. I watch it, if I'm down, or something, because just I went in there and I think that's a lot, what I process my obedience games class with because I went in the ring not expecting much, and my dog was getting older, I knew she was going to be retired soon, and I have a son. I just can't keep up with everything. I just thought, someday I'm not going to be able to go in the ring with this dog, and so I'm going to go in there and we got like a 199, you know, first place, we got her OTCH from that run. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Julie Symons: Yeah. Then, you know, to be a first in something is so hard, in a breed like the Belgian Tervuren. Now the MACH was a relatively newer title, so some fabulous dogs, before, obviously didn't have that chance, but yeah, I am, we are the first Belgian Tervuren champion OTCH MACH, so that was very, yeah, special to me. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Julie Symons: To be honest, that dog was so deserving of that, so. Melissa Breau: Yeah. She really sounds like something special. Julie Symons: Yes. Melissa Breau: So, the second question, I like to ask everybody, and I think this is, honestly, my favorite question of the whole podcast, is what is the best piece of training advice that you have ever heard? Julie Symons: Yeah. I was looking forward to this one. I thought a lot about it, and you know, we all get such great training advice, but there's two that really stuck out to me, and they've been pretty recent ones. I absolutely love Amy Cook's, in one of her classes, but she also said it at camp last year, that, “Every time you train your dog, you're teaching them how to feel,” and that just, you know, goes back to some of my outlook on training, also, is just like that's why I don't want to, if I stress them out, that's how they're going to feel about training, so it's just such a powerful but simple statement that she made, and I really embrace that, and share that as often as I can with my students. Melissa Breau: That's great. Julie Symons: I have a second one too. Can I have two? Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Julie Symons: Okay. Another one that I really liked was one from Bob Bailey. It was, you know, he's big on clicker training, shaping, and he said something that, also, really resonated with me, with, “You better made a decision because the next one is right around the corner.” So, if you think about when you're training a dog, and you're like, oh, was that the right criteria. Was it right enough? You know, your next decision is right up on you. You have to make a decision, and it might not be the best decision, and it might not even be the right decision. You probably made a wrong decision, but you have to make a decision on whether you're going to click something or reinforce something because the next decision is right around the corner, and it's okay, you look at all of us trainers, our timing is off. We accidently click something that we weren't supposed to. Look how resilient our dogs are. They recover. You know, they're fine. So, I just really like that because I think some people, we freeze up, we freeze up in the training, when we don't know what to do. That's okay. Do something because you're going to have to make another decision, like, another second later, so I really pulled that off of a DVD that I was listening to, and I never wrote it down, exactly what he said, but I just remember that concept. So those are my two. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. So, for our last one, who is somebody else, in the dog world, that you look up to? Julie Symons: So, this is, of course, the hardest question, I think, everybody has had, and I thought about it also, so this is obviously tough because I've learned so much from people, local and afar, because I work in so many different sport areas, you know, it just multiplies how many people I've worked with. I think I'm going to say that I do look up to anyone that thinks out of the box and is willing to try something different. I just think that, sometimes, we all get, kind of, stuck in an area, in a way that we do things, and I think somebody who is willing to, you know, just, kind of, maybe work outside their comfort level or just try something new, I just really respect that because you're not going to grow if don't do that. You're not going to change something, and of course, my learning has exponentially grown, being a part of FDSA. I think the whole base of the FDSA instructors are amazing, so I do look up to the Academy and the instructors that we offer such a diversity of people and topics. It's not just performance now, it's from, you know, your mind to cooperative care to competition. There is one name I will mention, if I have to mention one name, if I have time, is I will never forget one person that I worked with, with Rival, my very first high drive performance dog, her name was Patty Hatfield. She's from Florida, and she had a wonderful Malinois named Lily, who was on the US agility world team, back in the ‘90s, and she would come to our area frequently for agility seminars, and she helped me, so much, with how I interacted with my dog. I am a pretty high drive person, myself, high energy, actually, high energy, and so with my dog, so she taught me how to, you know, adjust my energy levels, when she needed to be calmer. She also does just love her dog. She had a great bond with her dog, Lily. She just loved her. She would talk about, you know, when she went home, from a seminar, I know I'm going to do all the wrong things, and I'm going to go hug my dog and just get all crazy when I see her, but you're not supposed to do that because back in that day, you were supposed to ignore your dog, when you got home. You were supposed to not let them run up the stairs, ahead of you. You're not supposed to let your dogs on the furniture, or you're supposed to eat before they ate, all these little, you know, control things that were told to you, and I always remember, because I, kind of, did that stuff too, but I thought, “I'm not going to tell anybody,” but I let my dog up, on my bed, and let my dog run up the stairs, but I always thought I was doing something wrong because that was what you were told back then. I just remember her just saying, “I don't care what I'm doing, or if I'm doing the wrong thing. I love my dog, and I just got to be excited when I see her, when I come home,” so I always, kind of, still just think of those interactions that I had with her, with the advice she gave me. She had a Malinois, and again, I just love the Belgian breeds, and I could relate to that as well, so. Melissa Breau: Thanks, so much, for coming on the podcast, Julie, and thanks, to our listeners, for tuning in. We'll be back in two weeks with Amy Cook, to talk about using play to help dogs cope with fear and reactivity. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app, of your choice, to have our next episode automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Can Barn Hunt help the Nosework dog?  Can Nosework help the Barn Hunt dog?  Join me for a discussion with Liz Carter, Barn Hunt judge and owner of Revolution Dog Sports out of Reno, Nevada to find out!