Donate
In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Courtney Brown from Einstein K9 about search and rescue, handler scent discrimination, and sensitivity and specificity.
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Science Highlight: Conservation detection dogs: A critical review of efficacy and methodology
Problem Solving with Kayla Fratt
Where to find Courtney: Website | Facebook
You can support the K9 Conservationists Podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/k9conservationists.
K9 Conservationists Website | Course Waitlist | Merch | Support Our Work | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok
Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt 00:01
Hey all, I’m just dropping in to the start of this episode with an ask. K9Conservationists is a nonprofit, and we are heading into the holiday fundraising season. I know there are so many worthwhile causes to support, and times are tough, but we do have to ask. So this year, our goal is to raise just under $5,000 which would get us a new GPS collar to make sure that all of our dogs have their own GPS collars for our surveys and to cover my travel to South Africa for the African Canines in Conservation Conference, which is hosted by the Endangered Wildlife Trust, I’ve been invited to be one of the keynote speakers, and I’m so so so excited, but it’s going to be really expensive to get me there, and we want to make sure that I can do this for free, rather than charging Endangered Wildlife Trust or raising the prices of this conference, which is aimed to help African canine handlers get together and learn we don’t want to be charging them for my, you know, very expensive plane tickets. So if you find the content that we put together on these episodes valuable, I really hope that you’ll consider donating, which you can do at k9conservationists.org. Your donations are tax deductible and will make it possible for me to travel to South Africa, again, at no cost to our hosts. And then, aside from being a keynote speaker at this conference, I would also be able to provide some one on one, mentoring and shadowing for several different teams that we’ve worked with remotely for the past several years, which is really, really invaluable. I am so excited about this opportunity to provide free capacity building and support to these programs, but we do need your help to pull it off again, you can donate using the big green donate button on our website, k9conservationists.org. Thank you so much, and here’s the episode.
Kayla Fratt 01:53
Hello, and welcome to the K9Conservationists podcast, where we are positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs. Join us every other Tuesday to talk about detection, training, canine welfare, conservation biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla Fratt, one of the three co-founders of K9Conservationists, where we train dogs to detect data for researchers, NGOs and agencies. We don’t have any new reviews for the podcast to read today, so please drop one in if you haven’t yet. And today, I’m really excited; we’re going to be talking to Courtney Brown from Einstein K9 about kind of more sensitivity, specificity stuff, because I can’t let this stuff go. So Courtney and I first met several years ago. Now, I guess it was just, was it two years ago? I don’t know.
Courtney Brown 02:35
It wasn’t that long ago. We’ve been we’ve chatted online previously, and then a met in person, like –
Kayla Fratt 02:41
It feels like potentially 18 years ago, but we were talking, so I gave a presentation about our cheetah discrimination work. We’ll link those episodes in the show notes where we we had some cheetah scat detection dogs we were working with in Kenya, and we did basically a differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior protocol to reduce those dogs false alerts to caracol and leopard scat, and we just got to talking at the IBC conference. We had a great time. I’m going to read you her bio now. I’m already getting ahead of myself, because I’m super excited about this topic. So for those of you who don’t know Courtney, She’s based in Dallas, Texas and began her dog training career working with service dogs at Texas A & M. She’s assisted in the raising and training of service dogs for four years, including one year serving as the president for the organization. Courtney found her passion for detection through a local volunteer search and rescue team, and through her journey in SAR she certified two German Shepherds, Chief and Echo in live find area search and trailing respectively. Along with being a member of her search team, she also served on the board of directors for the Search Dog Organization of North America for two years, and instructed at seminars across the country. These days, Courtney is most active in the sport of mondioring with her Belgian Malinois, Arrow, and she has actively trained, competed and coached teams in a variety of dog sports, including Schutzhund, IGP, agility competition, obedience rally, obedience scent work, barn hunt and dock diving.
Kayla Fratt 04:03
This paper is really, really worth reading in general. And then a couple things that stood out to me. And just I want to underline again, there’s a lot of variation in conservation detection dog performance, but the costs are relatively universally high. Terminology for analytical measures are inconsistent and sample sizes are small, which make for low statistical power. So the paper particularly called out terms like quote detection rate and suggest using sensitivity and precision instead. Y’all have heard of me using sensitivity and specificity. A lot precision is closely related to specificity and then sensitivity, because it covers the miss rate and precision effects reflects the false positive rate, which, again, specificity does kind of the same thing. And then, to quote the paper, again, “According to a systematic review by Jonah and et al., 2017, up to 70% of conservation detection dog studies report limited training details, and almost 25% were considered to be poor quality. All these factors together greatly harm the fields reliability and replicability.” And like, I know, I’ve noticed this, you’ll read papers, and they won’t mention how many dogs were used, breed, age, experience, like, how the dogs were trained, nothing, you know, they don’t even often mentioned, like the teams or give shout outs or thank yous, which obviously, of course, we want that. But it’s also just, you know, it’d be important to know that if in one paper that has a much higher success rate, however, you want to mention success, those dogs actually had six years of experience with that target species and had worked in that area before, and then, comparing to a paper with lower success rate, maybe those dogs were less experienced, but we don’t even know that. So at risk of going long, I’ve already got a little long but again, this is just such a worthwhile paper. I’m going to close with this important word from the authors. So again, to quote, “Conservation detection dog efficacies should be evaluated during training and testing, rather than waiting until operational searches to affect performance. However, many published studies simply investigate whether conservation detection dogs can discriminate the target odor in a simple controlled trial and do not progress to testing the dog in a field environment under operational conditions. Indeed, of the 67 studies examined in this review, 37% focus only on the training and testing. 42% of them assess solely field performance, and only 20% looked at both again.” I really, really recommend reading this paper. I could have gone on and on about the findings, and have brought this to my beloved lab mates, who often use dogs for scat collection, but are definitely guilty of writing papers without reporting the information that I just mentioned. And, you know, it’s not their fault they didn’t know, but I think this is a really important paper to keep bringing up. So with all of that said, Courtney, welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you.
Kayla Fratt 04:03
And I’m super excited to talk to Courtney, but first I did prepare a science highlight this week, so I would like everyone to please clap for me. This was a really fun paper and really, really relevant. This paper is titled “Conservation detection dogs: a critical review of efficacy and methodology.” And it was published by Beth McKeague. Sorry, Beth, I don’t know how to pronounce your last name. It turns out, Caroline Finlay, who we’ve had on the show before, and Nicola Rooney in Ecology and Evolution. And this was just published in February of 2023, which I guess was about a year and a half ago at time of recording. But still, and this abstract is so good that I’m just going to read y’all the abstract, because it really summarizes the whole paper so well. And then I’ve got a couple takeaways that I want to underline that we’ll circle back to at the end. So to quote basically the entire abstract, “Conservation detection dogs use their exceptional olfactory abilities to assist a wide range of. Projects through the detection of target specimens or species. Conservation detection dogs are generally quicker, can cover wider areas and find more samples than humans and other analytical tools. However, their efficacy varies between studies, methodological and procedure. Procedural standardization in the field is lacking, considering the cost of deploying a conservation detection dog team and the limited finance financial resources within conservation, it is vital that their performance is quantified and reliable. This review aims to aims to summarize what is currently known about the use of scent detection dogs within conservation and elucidate which factors affect efficacy. We describe the efficacy of conservation detection dogs across species and situational contexts like training and field work reported sensitivities such as ie, the proportion of target samples found out of the total available range from 23.8% to 100% and precision rates, which are the proportion of alerts that are true positives, ranged from 27 to 100% conservation detection dogs are consistently shown to be better than other techniques, but performance varies substantially across literature. There is no consistent difference in efficacy between training, testing and field work. Hence, we need to understand the factors affecting this. We highlight the key variables that can alter conservation detection dog performance external effects include target odor, training methods, sample management, search methodology, environment and the conservation detection dog handler. Internal effects include dog breed, personality, diet, age and health. Unfortunately, much of the research fails to provide adequate information on the dogs, handlers, training, experience and samples. This results in an inability to determine precisely why an individual study has high or low efficacy, and it is clear that conservation detection dogs can be effective and applied to possibly limitless conservation scenarios. But moving forward, researchers must provide more consistent and detailed methodologies so that comparisons can be conducted, results are more easily replicated, and progress can be made in standardizing the conservation detection dogs work.” Like, mic drop. Love that abstract.
Kayla Fratt 07:50
Thanks. Yeah, thanks. I’m excited.
Kayla Fratt 09:19
Okay, so you and I talked, you know, way back in the IABC conference. And, you know, we first started talking because it was like, hmm, I wonder if that approach that you all used with the cheetah Scott detection dogs would have worked in these other cases. And then we also just, you had some really interesting firsthand experience with dogs that were, I think actually, in all of these cases, these dogs were exhibiting, like, really, really high levels of specificity that you didn’t necessarily want, which is kind of the opposite problem that we had with the cheetah scat detection dogs. So why don’t you start with just tell us about one or, I mean, we’ve got three different anecdotes here, so tell us about a couple of them, maybe all three of them, and we’ll get into it.
Courtney Brown 10:38
Yeah. And I think part of the other spark for this conversation was your interview on Sarah Stremming’s podcast talking about Barley’s work, kind of what an optimistic generalizer He is. That was kind of the theme of y’all conversation. And so I reached back out to you then, and was like, gosh, this is so interesting too, because I feel like I have the most pessimistic little German shepherds in the world, as I was actively working through this, and very optimistic about their reward, pessimistic about how specific they needed to be, I guess so not. They’re like happy, optimistic dogs, in that they are going to be correct. They’re just pessimistic about what their what the definition of correct is.
Courtney Brown 11:20
So I was actively working through, kind of like a silly, interesting problem. Both of my shepherds are retired now from any sort of professional detection, so they’re playing barn hunt. And like AKC scent work, and in our barn hunt training, we, for a period of time, only had access to male rats, and so that’s really what Chief trained on for about a year. It’s the only like sex of rat that echo was introduced to whenever I first started training her. And then I noticed it in competitions that my like cue rate was was interesting whenever I did know that there were female rats in the ring. And then same thing, we finally got some female rats to train with in the facility that I work for, and they were just absolutely blowing over them as if they were a distraction, like sniffing the tube. Nope, that’s not it got to keep going. And so I just thought that it was so interesting. That was the challenge that I was facing in my current training, as you were talking about Barley, just species, generalizing, making these giant leaps, and I’m like, so wild. Why would that be? Why wouldn’t you just hit on a rat? It could it’s a whole rat, like it’s a whole it’s a whole rat in a tube. It should be so obvious, but they were just like, No. That is not what I have been trained to find. And it is so important to me that I find what I have been trained to find. And so I was like, okay, and it’s not even so in the sport of barn hunt, you also have empty and litter tube, so they have, like, the bedding that the rats were were in, but no rat in the tube. That’s one of the distractions in the competition. And so I was like, I don’t even remember having to do any sort of big training project on teaching them not to hit on litter that that that was no big deal for them.
Courtney Brown 13:05
So when I started thinking about, Okay, well, the the eight and 10 years of history that I have, respectively, of detection for these dogs, what could, what in their learning history could have created this, this huge specificity, and I mean, I have some theories, and I think probably that they just echo, especially Echo was kind of the worst of this. This particular problem was harder for her, and she was my scent specific trailing dog whenever I did search and rescue. And so I think that her entire introduction to detection and scent work as a concept was highly specific, right? Like there are 10 people standing around at the start of your trail, and there is a very, you know, relatively faint odor on a scent article. And find that trail amongst the Much, much fresher and and she was quite good at that, and really kind of took to heart the specificity of it. It’s why I enjoyed working her in that discipline. And so I have to imagine that, that that like learning history, how they were introduced to sit work, and probably some personality too. That’s what I love to talk about. If you think that there’s like the barley is, is like, inherently really optimistic, in a way that I mean, also my like sample size is two of the same breed dog that I raised in a very similar manner, right? So I just think it’s so interesting that we can have dogs that are so highly specific, so specialized, so specific, that a whole entire rat that is the wrong biologic sex. They were like, I’m so certain that’s a distraction, and I must keep looking. And I’m like, No, it’s I’ve already paid you for that a couple of times. Now, the not making the leap, they’re like, No, I really think I really got and
Kayla Fratt 14:54
I wish Sarah was here for this too, because, like, that episode was so fun with her, and we had so many rabbit holes that we like, oh, we were working hard, or she was mostly working hard not to let me go, yeah. I mean, because, yeah, I do. I think you’re right. I think it’s personality or temperament or something, you know, one of those kind of fuzzy concepts. I used to know the difference between personality and temperament. I don’t remember anymore, and, but then also, yeah, the training history. And, I mean, I have the same issue. I’ve got an n of two. I’ve got two detection. I mean, I guess if you include the cheetah scat dogs, but like we were, we kind of parachuted in, worked with those dogs for a couple months, and then parachuted out. So I just like, we did the training, and I think we did a great job of it, but it’s a little different from like dogs that you actually live and work with for years. Yeah, I’ve got two dogs. I’ve raised them both, although I will say my two dogs are on opposite ends of the spectrum, which I think tells you one of two things, maybe either, yes, it’s a temporary thing, um, or there is something about how I have grown and changed as a trainer in between barley and niffler that made that difference. And I, you know, I can use both um, but, yeah,
Courtney Brown 16:17
Right. I mean, it’s everything all the time, but I do think it’s fun to kind of try and distill it down, because so the counterpoint for my for my rat sex problem, was my class dogs. So I also teach classes, and those dogs, you know, started around the same time that I started teaching Echo barn hunt, when I started teaching these classes, because she came to work with me, so why not? And so it was really interesting that the dogs in my classes didn’t seem to have nearly the same like jump in, in believing that female rats were also in play and to be rewarded, right? That were they were those, they were going to get rewarded on those two every now and then, I saw a couple of dogs have, like, a little question mark, but, and I still have some dogs that every now and then and it, but sometimes the gender doesn’t like, the sexism doesn’t matter. They’re just every now and then, there’s a particular hype where they’re like, I think, but I’m not totally sure. Like, that’s a common thing. I think in a lot of it across the detection spectrum, dogs are like, I’m pretty sure this is it. But like, you can see in their in their indication and their alert behavior, that they’re not it’s not as strong as you would expect for something like that.
Courtney Brown 17:24
So yeah, my my class dogs just really made that jump immediately. And so I’m like, okay, then it’s not, it’s not learning history in the sport, in this particular odor profile, because echoes had a really similar length of time as the dogs that are in my classes. So it’s got it. So that was what I was what I was like, oh, it’s got to be learning history, like, years long, right? It’s got to be that these dogs, for a lot of them, their first, their first anything detection related, their first sniffy concept, was barn hunt. Maybe some of them dabbled in AKC scent work first. But I know that none of them are like, very highly titled and scent work. Yet this is kind of the first sport that a lot of my students tried. And whereas Echo has this, like, incredibly rich, diverse scent work history layered in with a ton of specificity. So I was like, oh, it’s got to be that. It’s got to be just her, her big, long history, and not that she doesn’t want to find female rats. Because she loves her rewards, like she loves playing with the tube. She loves getting a ball that it’s not, it’s not a motivation issue for this particular dog.
Kayla Fratt 18:20
Yeah, no, yeah. I would. I would not imagine. So, um, well, it’s interesting. So one of the things you said is that she had always been good at the mantrailing and about. So, you know, again, that kind of points us towards, like, was it? Was it harder to get Chief started on that? Are there? Were there some dogs that you saw on the team who maybe weren’t as naturally inclined towards that like I can imagine if, for some reason, someone was like, Kayla, you’ve got to quit conservation you’re joining search and rescue, I’d be like, great. Barley is an HRD dog. And Niffler, I think I would try training like I think, I think I would feel a lot more comfortable with I mean, he would also enjoy wilderness air scent. But Barley, the only thing I would feel comfortable putting him on would be HRD, because I think I can, I think I would be able to get him to the concept of human decomp in a way that I’m not confident I could get him to an individual. So, yeah, like, what did you see like? Because it sounds like Echo was kind of naturally good at that. Like, finer splitting, like, finer discrimination, of like, taking the article and then, like, also, let’s just pause here. I’m sorry I’m doing a terrible job of asking a question. I’m just so excited. But like, can we just pause here and talk think about like, so you’ve got an article that, like, has how many different odors on it, and then you’ve got, you know, some grass, some dirt, whatever. And they have to not just sniff the article and then find its match out in the world. They have to, like, find the component of that that then they can replicate in the world and pick that signal out from all of the other signals and follow it like it’s not like they’re doing a one to one matching between the article and the world. It’s. Yes, there’s so much noise in there, right? And maybe the fact that it’s that hard also helps. But anyway, my question was supposed to be about like Echo’s original predisposition,
Courtney Brown 20:12
Yes, and make sure that we circle around to the concept of being that hard, because I do think that that actually that hard. Yeah, I don’t think so. Interestingly, I started Echo in area search in, like, big area search. It’s actually like what her breeder even recommended for her, because she’s a ridiculously independent creature. Through all of our endeavors, she has been a ridiculously independent creatures, including the more obedience focused things that I started with her later in life, just, just independence shines through. She does whatever she wants, truly. And so I started with this big area search, and she, she covers a lot of ground. She’s, she was, she was good at that too, but really, Chief was also good at that. So Chief, I didn’t know if he was going to be great at search and rescue. Generally. I didn’t really get him for that; Echo I got for that. And so once Chief was like, Oh no, no, I love this game, I was like, Okay, well, then I don’t need two live find area search dogs. What else could this dog do? And I considered human remains detection as well.
Courtney Brown 21:11
And then truly, I would have to think back on how this happened. But I think I just kind of got talked into doing trailing. It always looked very cool. It looked very, very hard. Area search felt a little more logical to me. It made sense to my brain how you would train that trailing has quite literally always felt like magic to me. And I kind of maintain that to this day, that it is, yeah, it is kind of wild and I and to be totally honest thing, there’s not there. There isn’t enough real science and data on on the efficacy I have. I have some efficacy questions, and I think that we can do a better job. I think that there should be more consistent training, kind of, like the science update that you did, like, I think that the search rescue world needs that too. But, I mean, I absolutely saw dogs do really incredible my dog do really incredible things, and so, yeah, she is a super detail oriented dog. I think the independence helps a ton.
Courtney Brown 22:11
So being attached to the dog, when you’re doing detection with them, inherently creates a lot of influence from the handler. You can’t get away from it. So a dog that is extremely sensitive to handler influence, kind of genetically, that’s that’s always kind of looking back and maintaining a lot of communication with their handler. I see having a tough time in trailing, because you are accidentally influencing them too often, because you’re holding a leash that has tension in it, right? So if you kind of know where the turn is, and you kind of subconsciously telegraph it down the leash. I think you can get yourself in a real bind versus a dog who just, those cues are not as relevant to them because they are not as they just don’t look to humans for help, and echoes that dog, she does not look to humans for help. And so I think that that’s a personality trait that made her pretty good at that. And then, yeah, and then, yeah, she’s like, a pretty a detail oriented dog, and a dog that has absolutely no problem with, like, what we would call maybe drilling, maybe, like a lot of repetitions of the same thing in a row. That’s something that she like, she’s not gonna check out a training. She can do, like a little one to one kibble per behavior until, yeah, she collapses, right? Like she so I do think that lends itself to, like, tracking specifically very well, yeah, and she’s just very focused and motivated. So I think there’s a lot of dogs that can do trailing well. And like, to be really honest, she’s really smart, so I think that helps do I think that there’s, they’re processing a lot of information, and yeah, so I think those are all the things that would make her just more likely to pick out really small details and and assume that there is a very specific correct answer. There is one correct answer, yeah, no.
Kayla Fratt 23:56
I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s so interesting. It’s actually funny too, that like her breeder thought that there that she might be more suited towards a different discipline. But then, you know, she transitioned over. Do you see, I guess, that she is more kind of thoughtful or precision oriented with other stuff as well. Like, does she pick up on, like, precise fitness behaviors or obedience stuff quickly as well? You
Courtney Brown 24:22
Yeah, I would say, so she definitely, uh, precision, maybe less. So, man, if I had her now, if I got if I got her as a puppy, now, I think that it would be lovely, um, she was a dog that I learned a ton on. So I can’t say that we have totally showcased a lot of precision in our obedience. So I’d be hesitant to say that, but I do think that she’s like, temperamentally set up for that. Yes, I think that she is. Yeah, her fitness, she interestingly has, was diagnosed with dysplasia when she was really young. It quite literally never slowed her down a day in her life. So fitness, specifically. She, we’ve done a ton of and she does pick up on precision movements, like, really nicely. But, yeah, yeah, I guess all that to say, Yeah, I do think that generally, that is how her but honestly, she’s too, my older guy who kind of had the same issue, but to a lesser degree, and had a little bit less specific training in his like, upbringing. He also is, is like, a very detail oriented dog and and really enjoys obedience. And can be, I mean, and
Kayla Fratt 25:31
I don’t think there. It’s surprising to me that I mean, a, obviously, yes, you trained both of them, you raised both of them. B, also, like, it’s kind of a stereotype, but when I think of German Shepherds, I do think of them, you know, like, not that they don’t have arousal issues or other other things that are kind of common with but I do think of them as a breed that particularly excels in the sports where, you know, you need to be, like, obedient to footprint. Footprint tracking in, you know, if they’re like, 15 degrees of parallel to you, you you fail, whatever, and, yeah, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I you know, obviously there’s a lot of like, beliefs about breeds and like ego and whatever that goes into your selection of a breed for a given sport. But often, often, there also is, like, a reason.
Courtney Brown 26:25
Yeah, totally. Now we’re getting into my, like, current life of protection sports, and I think that it is it you wouldn’t, you would not go wrong looking at the breed tests for each specific breed and seeing what they reward. And that Schutzhund and IGP reward power and precision, that balance, like, that is the entire name of the game is the balance between power and precision. And any of your ring sports, mondioring, Belgian ring, French ring, where Malinois dominate. It. That balance of power and precision just isn’t necessarily, it’s just not, it’s not highlighted in the same way athleticism sure is. The jumps and ring sports are absolutely absurd compared to IGP and Schutzhund, so for sure and very quick thinking. There’s a reason why the stereotype for Malinois is that, like they they do first, think later, right? They kind of impulsive movements, compulsive, honestly, is rewarded in the sports where Malinois tend to dominate. And it’s, it’s just not a coincidence. There’s a reason that the sports are scored in the way that they are to reward the breed traits of the breed for whom that is meant to be a breed trait.
Kayla Fratt 27:37
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, going to the some of the breeds that I’m more familiar with, you know, I think there’s probably some amount of a reason that you don’t see a lot of Spaniels excelling in these sorts of jobs even, or these sorts of tasks even, you know, absent the like bitiness. But I don’t think of Spaniels and labs and some of these, these pointing, flushing, retrieving breeds as dogs that are naturally quite as inclined towards that sort of thing. And like, yeah, I’m talking pretty far out of my my depth here. So like, nobody freak out at me, but like, that’s not what you think of
Courtney Brown 28:15
No, I think you you look at the sports, yeah, you look at the sports that have certain traits that are rewarded, and you look at what breeds are winning those sports, and you get a pretty clear idea of what, not that, not that a different breed. I mean, my girlfriend’s Border Collie was at Mondioring Nationals this year, so not to say that a different breed couldn’t do it. There are incredibly talented individuals of each of these breeds. But like, if you look at who’s winning consistently, and they can show you what, what breeds are naturally suited, right? So tracking being a part of IGP, it makes sense that my German Shepherds are genetically predisposed for that to be a trait that that comes pretty, pretty easily, that kind of specificity, honestly.
Kayla Fratt 28:51
Yeah, absolutely. And so I’ve got a couple other rabbit holes I want to go down, but first we’re going to go back to the first rabbit hole that we had, which was this idea of it being so hard that that makes it easier. And that was actually something that I had been kind of thinking as we were getting closer to saying it, which is actually I wonder if teaching barley like being faithful to a specific individual would potentially be easier for him, and if that would actually help. And it, it kind of falls into this, like, I find it easier within the conservation dog world to either teach the dogs, hey, this is the species you’re looking for, or, and I’ve never done individual work, but, you know, I can imagine how that would would go again. I don’t know if it’s supernaturally inclined for Barley, but like, maybe that would be easier.
Kayla Fratt 29:40
But one of the things that I find really, really challenging, and you honestly tend to see people trying to avoid having this happen at all, which, you know, is a benefit that we have. We don’t have, like, a rule book that’s sent down from on high about, like, how things we need to go. We get to have conversations with our project partners and suggest things, and go back and forth. And that is, so when we were in Guatemala, the dogs were trained to find Jaguar, Puma, Ocelot, margay, jaguarundi and tayra, six species, oh, and then coyote and gray fox. So that was all of the carnivores that were like, over, you know, bigger than a bread box. And I think that was pretty straightforward for the dogs, because it was just kind of like, okay, carnivore scat, great, easy. What would have been really, really tricky is if we wanted them to find all of those except for Puma, or all of those except for like, I think where, like, it’s easy, if you can kind of clearly define the category, it’s a lot easier. So, yeah, let’s talk about the fact that it was so specific with, yeah, with individual tracking that that might have actually helped. Or you think it helps?
Courtney Brown 30:55
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s really interesting. I feel like we see this in a lot of like, you’re like, handler strength discrimination. So I do a little bit of AKC obedience. And mondioring also has a handlership discrimination. And people talk about it’s like, kind of like wives tale, wisdom style, not over scenting your article. So like, you don’t want the thing that that the dog is supposed to find that smells like you to smell so much like you that there’s a lot of odor to discriminate amongst, right? Like, if, if, what you put down if, now the other articles near it also kind of smell like you now, the dog is discriminating. Doesn’t smell, kind of smells. Oh, definitely smells. Versus, if you kind of lightly sent this article, it’s now not a three part multiple choice. It’s just two it either doesn’t or it kind of does. And so I think that the same, like, I definitely saw that whenever Echo was doing trailing, and that her starts – so that the dog, I mean trailing, is like, really two components in IGP tracking, you know where your track goes. It goes straight from the flag right in, like, search and rescue and rescue and wilderness tracking it, it’s a an infinite 360 degree where the person could have, could have walked right from, if you have just a point in the ground, could have gone any direction. And Echo starts on hard surface. So like on asphalt, were truly miles better than on grass. And I think it was because there was either a small amount of odor or there was literally none at all. Versus in grass, there was quite a bit of odor, and then there was a radius out from that where there was some but not a lot, that depended on the wind conditions. And if it was moist, if the ground was wet, then it would hold the odor in some spots. And so she was really having to kind of discriminate her whole way down that initial part of the track of like, am I still going the right direction? This kind of smells like the person. Oh, this really smells like the person. Okay, wait now, it only kind of smells like the person versus on hard surface. It either barely did or it didn’t. There wasn’t anything held that she was having to discriminate, right? So I think that that probably was a super formative scent work experience for her that like it is, it is just one thing. There was only one person you were looking for, following any other like tangential odor, other people, fresher scent, on top of that just quite literally, never led to a payoff, because the payoff is finding a person that’s where the toy was. So she just it really solidified in her brain there is one right answer to a scent work puzzle, and the harder it is, the better. The harder that, the less scent there is, the kind of more specific she could be, the easier that was for her to discriminate versus getting caught up in quite a bit of odor. I don’t know. What do you think? Do you have, like, a parallel for that?
Kayla Fratt 33:45
Not, not anything that’s coming to mind right away, unfortunately, because I haven’t worked with any of the dogs that do there, because there are dogs that do individual discrimination, or, like we did a science highlight a while ago out of, I think it was, yeah, must have been out of New Zealand, where they were training, or, no, not New Zealand, Australia. They were training dogs to detect Tasmanian devils in estrus versus out of estrus. Yeah, and I’ve never done any of that sort of stuff. I’ve done, you know, discriminating between two congeners, which are like two species that are within the same genus. But, yeah, I’ve never done like individuals or like hormone level or disease level variations between individuals, and most of those we have set up kind of as more of a discrimination. And a lot of those within the conservation dog world, what you would actually do is you’re not you’re not having the dog go out and, like sniff the environment to find the Tasmanian devil and estrus. You’re actually taking samples. I don’t know if it’s fecal samples or urine samples or swabs or something. I. And then you’re bringing them back into the lab and having the dog do like a lineup, um, or maybe a go, no go procedure.
Courtney Brown 35:06
Oh, I see. So you’re like finding every Tasmanian devil, and then the dogs are determining which one.
Kayla Fratt 35:10
Yeah, those Tasmanian devils – they’re in a zoo. They’re basically like swabbing. They need to know, like, you want to be able to introduce the male and the female at the time when the female is most receptive. You don’t want to miss the window, but you also don’t want to introduce them too early, and I think they beat each other up.
Courtney Brown 35:29
That’s so cool. I actually one of my really good friends used to work at the Dallas Zoo, and she told us the exact same thing about, I’m almost positive that was tigers –
Kayla Fratt 35:38
I think it’s not uncommon in a lot of our solitary carnivores,
Courtney Brown 35:43
Tricky to exactly right that you have to that the timing, and I am so certain they never use conservation dogs. But what a cool, what a cool use I would have never, would have never thought that that was useful –
Kayla Fratt 35:57
Yeah, kind of going back to this, like learning theory concept, and I hope that for everyone at home like this is this hopefully feels like you’re sitting around and just like hanging out with your dog nerd friends, because we don’t really have much of an outline here, we’re just having a good time. You know, Barley. Barley, you know he, we struggle with precision. We struggle with specificity. He also is my first shaping dog, and he is the, like, classic baby clicker trainers, first shaping dog.
Courtney Brown 36:27
Oh, your cute little 101 things to do with –
Kayla Fratt 36:31
Yeah, and we, I mean, I still, like, I pull out a clicker, and he is, like, back up, spin, right, spin, left, you know, down, paw down, you know, like, oh yeah, we’ve all seen this dog, and it’s amazing how hard it is to undo that now that it’s a thing for him. And I, I, you know, I don’t know how much of that learning history versus temperament is part of our thing. But like, I will say Barley in general, even outside of, like, odor, he struggles a lot more with precision. So like, as another example, I’ve been doing, I’ve been having a lot of fun with I’ve got a little brick wall in the backyard now with all the little holes in it. Oh my god, it’s so fun.
Courtney Brown 37:14
I’ve seen, yeah, it’s so crazy, and I love it so much.
Kayla Fratt 37:18
Barley has such a hard time with it. It’s so interesting. Like, well, not that he’s got a hard time with it. Like, I can see his nose hits the right hole, usually. But one of the things we’re really working on is, so if everyone can imagine, at home, if you haven’t seen one of these brick walls, they’re very popular on the internet right now for scent dog training. And you get a bunch of the bricks that have, you know, like the ones I have, have three holes in them, but some will have like, six or 12 or whatever. So they’ve got a bunch of little, tiny holes in them. You make a little brick wall, and then you can move your odor around within that. And it’s a nice way to do some drills for, like, high sniff frequency, for kind of getting the dog right to nose on source, and working with really, like, low volatility odors. It’s also really nice as a way to just, like, do some really quick training in the backyard. That’s my favorite thing about it.
Courtney Brown 38:10
Yeah, I’d use it for a dog who was giving me some, like, cringy type behavior. Like, oh, this is probably close enough. I would do something like that to get them like, hey, no, actually, the closer your nose gets, the better.
Kayla Fratt 38:22
So one of the things barley is a little bit more likely to fringe than Niffler currently, which hasn’t always been the case, but Niffler has cleaned up on that really quickly. But what Barley really, really struggles with is he gets nose on source, and then he immediately pulls back and looks at me and like, building duration for him is also really, really hard. I think he’s a dog that like, maybe to use another to throw another label into the mix. He’s very, very anticipatory, and he’s very, very quick to like, make a call, make a decision and stick with it. And if I don’t reward, he doesn’t necessarily like, take a proverbial deep breath and, like, think about it. So we actually, like, yesterday, what we did is we pulled out a brick that had just three holes in it, and we just did reps where he just had the one brick, and I stood really, really close, and I was with the clicker so that I could actually make sure that I was clicking at the moment his nose was on the right hole, versus Niffler, like, almost immediately has picked up the brick wall and will, like, hold his nose to it, and, like, it’s just, like, naturally, much, much easier for him. And some of that, I’m sure, again, you can go back to the concept of, like, Niffler was not just my second clicker trained dog, but, like, I trained probably hundreds of dogs in between getting Barley, and starting to train Barley, and getting Niffler and starting to train niffler, you know, he’s my second dog.
Courtney Brown 39:46
Oh, right.
Kayla Fratt 39:47
But there was a lot of experience in between the two, and also, yeah, maybe a little bit of who he is. But it’s just, it’s fascinating to me how within my guys in particular, it like we seem to have. Of the same issues going through in a lot of the same things. And like, I know I personally find it a little I find it harder to fix the precision issues, but I also find them less concerning in general, or not concerning. But like, they don’t bother me as much versus niffler is a little more likely to be like what you described with echo in chief, where, like we’ve, we’ve talked a little bit about like in Guatemala, we pulled out. They were trained on dehydrated scats, and then niffler struggled a little bit with Jen with jumping from the dehydrated scats to fresh scats. That stressed me the heck out. I was like, contemplating washing him out of the program. I was like, I don’t I’m a failure. Like, I don’t know how to do this. I need to quit the podcast. Like, I clearly should never talk about conservation dogs ever again. I don’t know what I’m doing. Versus barley makes a false alert. And I’m like, Oh, you silly boy, no, let’s keep going. And like, yeah,
Courtney Brown 41:01
No, I think that’s so interesting, and that is, I think, human learning history, because my starting in search and rescue a false alert. So like an HRD dog making a false alert on a distraction like food, huge deal. People lost it. It was a huge training project. They’re not deployable. They cannot alert on something that is not human remains. But the amount of, I will say, like in training dogs, the amount of mental gymnastics that a person wants to do to talk about why their dog maybe didn’t alert whenever the odor was right there, it’s just so interesting that the culture is flipped right, like the culture that I got raised. My detection upbringing was like, false alerts. Huge. Bad deal not alerting. Lot of reasons why. They could have lot of reasons they could have not alerted. Let’s talk through it. Let’s train it right, like and I think that’s the the nature of, I mean, I don’t know the two different disciplines. I mean, I think, I think it’s really interesting that, like, false, quote, false alert, right? Barley, like making a generalization that you wouldn’t have wanted him to a generalization that was not productive is, like, a no big deal. This skill generalizing is such a valuable skill for you to have that, like, you made a jump, it wasn’t the right one. You’re not getting paid for it. But, like, that’s not a that’s not a that’s not a bad it’s not a negative behavior for you to have done. That’s something that is is rewardable in other contexts. Versus Niffler having a hard time making the generalization leap, like is a big deal for you, whereas it’s just,
Kayla Fratt 42:34
I think there might be something for me about there’s something that is so painful about a myth to me. There’s something that is so hard about knowing that something’s there and like, maybe you set it out and having the dog blow past it that like, causes a spiral of like, do they understand it? Where are the holes in their foundation. Like, how do you troubleshoot this and and I think that there is a reasonable difference in between, like, what SAR people do and what we do, which is that we don’t have to stand up in court. So, like, I think for you all like, you need to be able to say, like, no.
43:21
Definitively say if my dog gave an indication, yes, if my dog gave an indication, it is human remains, versus if they just didn’t give an indication, because they weren’t super sure. That’s I think. I mean, I’m sure there are people that would disagree with this. Probably it’s just really important the dog is accurate on both ends of the spectrum. But like I have seen culturally, the the a false alert, just like is, is such a big deal. Also, the thing I was thinking about is it’s physically identifiable, right? So I think that barley making a jump. I mean, the silly fruit story, right? Him making a jump to alerting on a fruit that he got a piece of, like, it can be silly, because you walk up and you’re like, that’s not scat, that’s a fruit.
Kayla Fratt 44:03
What’re you doing my man? And I will say, and you’re like, I did have a nice spiral that whole day where I was like, Oh my God, what? Like, everyone is watching my dog just find fruit now, you know, throw my dogs in the dumpster and then throw myself in after them. Like, yeah, that thought, are we really, I mean, are we really, there was doing anything but, and so I think part of that also comes back to just, you know, knowing your dog and knowing your training and, like, I guess I had worked with barley in a variety of operational settings before that, like I felt confident enough that we were going to come back from it, and again, I’d kind of rather find like Jaguar plus fruit than nothing. He just kept finding chico sapotes, a) we haven’t yet worked in another area where that was going to be a problem. Yeah, and b) like, yeah, it was annoying, but that was it. It was just annoying.
44:04
Yeah, right, the visual ID piece has to be really that that’s a, that’s a big piece and just right, it’s just the the purpose of the dog is, is too general, like, the the generalization is such a because you don’t get to train on, like, how many conservation detection dogs get to have one target odor their entire career.
Kayla Fratt 45:22
I don’t think all that many. And even –
Courtney Brown 45:26
That can’t be that common. You have so many. There’s there’s so many projects and uses. And for a dog’s entire lifespan, like you, they have to be able to jump from one project to another, because there’s not enough. There’s not enough projects for one single, target odor, I assume the majority of dogs –
Kayla Fratt 45:41
Well, and very few of us are tolerant of just working on wind farms for the rest of our career. Because that would, that would probably be the option,.I mean, and I know like Debbie Deshawn does, she runs mussel dogs out of California, like, I think they basically just do mussels. Though they also do wind farms as well.
Courtney Brown 45:58
Yeah, that makes sense
Kayla Fratt 46:00
And I don’t know if all of the dogs do both, or if she’s because she’s because she’s got like, 15 dogs, so like, maybe some of the dogs only do one, some do the other. I’m not sure. So it’s possible. But even you know, I think about this when you know we’ve got, like, on our website, we’ve got a cute little like, meet Barley. Here’s the projects he’s worked on. Here’s his target odors. It’s like, okay, so do we, when we say that they can find birds and bats? Do we count that as 300 species of birds and 17 species of bats? Or, like, just the two concepts of like birds and bats, because you want to, kind of, like, be realistic about how many species they know. But you also want to, you know, you wanted to look good, you know, if you can say, Oh, well, they’ve found seven. Does that count as seven, or does it count as one? In that it’s bat and that, you know, that’s marketing stuff. It’s a little different. But again, like that, even when you’re looking at birds and bats on a wind farm, which would be the most common thing, where, like especially, we get a lot of people in this line of work, who maybe work on wind farms for a couple summers, and then they, they go back to school, and they, they move on, they leave the field, they get a permanent position where their dog is no longer working. So that could kind of be the dog’s whole career. But it’s still not like, I don’t think it’s quite one thing, even when it is kind of one thing, like, I guess, you know, again, like, yes, there are dogs like Penn Vet’s, Chronic Wasting Disease dog teams, like, they’re hyper specific. And I don’t know if those dogs are doing any other projects, or if they’re really just like chronic wasting disease versus not.
Courtney Brown 47:37
And I think that that’s another really good example of where the specificity is, maybe, like, possible, and, I mean, maybe it’s always possible, but is, I don’t know, more doable, because it is so specific, right? So, like, finding just one species of deer, or, like, one would would be kind of hard to have a lot of things to discriminate against, but like, yes or no answer, Chronic Wasting Disease, not Chronic Wasting Disease. I think when you when you key that, like when you distill down to something so specific, it honestly makes the training project simpler, right? Maybe really, really distilled or really broad, right? Or carnivore. Find carnivore or find so I guess there’s, I mean, I think probably what we’re it, we keep circling back to like two choices, or easier than like four, and you can make those two choices. Whatever it can be carnivore or not carnivore. It can be chronic leasing disease or not chronic leasing disease, but like three species of carnivore and not the other four. Would you agree that’s like, a much tougher training challenge.
Kayla Fratt 48:44
I think generally yes. And like, you might be able to, like, slice and dice carnivore. This is like, God, I would love to, I wish I could just keep doing PhDs forever, other than the fact that it’s very stressful and I’m very tired and very poor, but like, I do wish I could just dive into these questions forever, because, like, I wonder, okay, so you’ve got options. You could do carnivore, you could do pumas only. I think both of those would be pretty straightforward. I bet what would also be relatively straightforward would be all felids or all canids. But again, where it starts getting messy, and this is something that is really common in the conservation world is clients or project partners will come to us and say, Hey, we want puma. We want bobcat. We want let’s say Sierra Nevada red fox, or, you know, kit fox, or something like that. And we don’t want coyote, because there are so many freaking coyotes everywhere that it’s – you waste a lot. You will waste it just time in the field. But then it’s also, you know, say it’s like 120 bucks to get a sample processed. Um, I, you know, you gotta pay for that every single coyote you pick up. Like it’s just not, it’s not generally what they’re looking for. Sure, and coyotes are also just, like, not really considered, like, valuable in a conservation or ecological sense, which is a different conversation, but like, that’s how it is, and that is tricky.
Kayla Fratt 50:11
And then, particularly, then where we come back to is kind of what you’re talking about, the HRD dogs telling the difference between bobcat and coyote scat visually, is, like, it’s really freaking hard. And I was just sitting, I was at dinner a couple nights ago with a professor here at OSU who has used conservation dogs for a lot of his research. And he was like, you know, I’m at the point where I just don’t trust visual ID for anything. Like, I just need genetic ID on everything. Because, like, sure, at the extremes, when you’re got textbook examples, you can tell the difference, but you put sun in the picture, you put rain, you know, someone’s eating a weird diet. Like, yeah, you know. And even for me, like, I’m not confident calling something coyote unless I can, like, see if I can see berries, if I can see grass, something like that, where it’d be pretty unusual for that to be in cat poop, then I’ll call it. But otherwise I’m like, I don’t know, man, so like, you really need the dog to be able to do it, but you’re also asking kind of a hard thing of the dog,
Courtney Brown 51:13
Right. I would imagine that I would much prefer getting getting the project that is either, like, very highly specific or broad enough that it kind of circles its way back to being specific, right, like, but the right. So I guess the difficulty in all of this is just kind of the level of discrimination. I feel like that’s probably a through thread of all of these, because the other funny, the other, like funny case study type thing that I had is my best friend’s Border Collie, who previously has had done so so much scent work. So she was a search and rescue dog.
Courtney Brown 51:56
When she stopped doing that, got hired on as a contract narcotics canine, and so then she changed her target odors to all manners of drugs, and then she retired and started doing AKC scent work and not thinking much of it, knowing the first scent is birch. My friend just bought a random birch essential oil on Amazon and trained her on that. And it looked fabulous. Of course it did. And so she brought her to trial, and the dog absolutely spun herself out. I mean, was like, frantically. The novice search area is not very big, and this is a incredibly fast little Border Collie, so she is just zipping around. And is like, it’s, there’s, there’s got to be something here. And so Brianna is like, what is happening? You are so skilled, you have, you know so much about this. And so really had, like, a bummer of a day. And Bree was like, How weird. Talked to one of the she actually had the the forethought, talked to one of the judges, and was like, hey, is there, like, a pretty consistent, is there a pretty consistent oil brand or something like, Did I miss something here? And they were like, oh yeah, we pretty much always use, like, this particular like, 100% birch oil. Like, there’s, there’s just a couple of sources that people get, like, nosework odors. Got that, trained the dog on it absolutely blew it out of the water. The dog gets high in class, like, every single trial she goes to. It’s basically a shoe in so it was just so she had had so much specificity training, I think probably from more of the like, narcotics background that, like, she was trained to find a particular birch odor, and that was not what was in the trial setting. And she was like, this is I couldn’t possibly alert on this incorrect odor. I know it’s not gonna get paid. I’m not even gonna waste my time, which is so wild to me, versus a dog just being like, like, why wouldn’t they just be like, it’s probably this, like, that’s true that they’re just like, it is what makes it so intrinsically important to bend like, one of the things
Kayla Fratt 53:51
That’s interesting with like essential oils too, is Like, the odor profile is probably relatively specific within that, within like a given manufacturer, within a given batch, like every time they put a drop on a Q tip out of their batch that they bought online, it was probably basically the exact same thing versus even within our conservation dog world, we are constantly giving The dogs a slightly different picture, because it’s coming from a different individual such a good point, the individual had a different diet that day. Even when we’re talking with zoo animals, you know, they get different diets on different days. They might have had medication one week, you know, all of these sorts of things. So there’s always a relatively high level of inherent variability that we have in our samples that, I think folks you know, in the bomb, drug, IED, which, I guess that’s bombs sorts of worlds like they have so much standardization and what they’re procuring and then presenting to the dogs that that, in and of itself, probably. Really creates a ton of specificity, which, again, I think is generally what they want, like, I know in the bomb dog world, which I know very little about, but I know enough to say, like, one of the big things they work on is, like, Hey, if you have, like, gasoline and sugar together, yes, that’s a target. But if you’ve just got gasoline in a car, that’s actually not something to worry about, buddy. And like, we don’t really, I mean, we, we do kind of sort of have this where, like, if a if a fox eats a bat, we don’t necessarily want the dogs to find a fox poop that consists mostly of bat carcass. But I don’t think that odor profile, I mean, we don’t, I don’t know, but I doubt that odor profile actually overlaps enough to be all that confusing to them. Like, we don’t have to do that sort of discrimination. But again, I think, like, we’re just kind of always giving our conservation dogs this, like, kind of fuzzy picture, and it just has to be that way, because there’s no consistent way to go and get the same samples of the same individual at the same time of day with the same diet like we just can’t do that really.
53:58
Totally. So it feels like a little bit self correcting in that the if the dog’s training inherently involves a lot of generalization, kind of throughout the entire early learning process, then they’re going to be a dog that generalizes theoretically quite well. Once they’re kind of operational, they’re going to take that, that learning history, and bring it forward, versus the dog’s entire learning history of like, what is detection is quite specific. Then the generalization is a pretty hard skill to achieve later on, right? That’s probably the right answer. Probably genetics and temperament has has some something to do with it. But I would be willing to bet that it’s, it’s really heavily learning history. And I, yeah, I so I think what we have to do is we have to get litter mate dogs that we, you know, preferably Malinois, because that’s my that’s my jam these days, and you train it for conservation detection, and I will exclusively do highly specific handler discrimination, and nosework odors. And then, I don’t know, a year or two, then we just swap, yeah, and we just see. I think that’s a great plan.
Kayla Fratt 57:15
I think that would be so fun. I don’t think I have the space for a pointy right now, but we could probably find someone in the conservation dog world who wants to get a litter mate pointy for you. Um, yeah. Again, I’m just thinking back to this idea of, like, the Yeah, the combination of the early learning history and yeah, all the training. Oh, this was something I actually was thinking about. And this is not necessarily the case with you and your dogs, but I would imagine as well. When you’re looking at some of these higher volume kennels that are kind of like raising up dogs for DEA, for Border Patrol, for, you know, these bomb and drug dogs in particular, where that level of specificity is really important, they probably have a pretty good idea of whether or not it’s a learning history or temperament thing, if we could, like, get our hands on their right hands on their records, because they tend to work in, like, relatively closed gene pools, and they have more of an ability to or and are probably more likely to, like, wash dogs that aren’t kind of keeping up, that aren’t being given benchmarks, then we are, and they’re probably a little bit less likely to like, get creative within training, because they’re getting the dogs ready.
Courtney Brown 58:31
Yeah, what a good point. I cannot imagine that they look at a dog who is giving a lot of like, what they would consider false alerts, but that someone else might consider a leap, right, a generalization. I can’t imagine that they would be gracious enough to be like, Oh, it’s just really good generalize, right? Like, they’re just gonna say the dog falls, alerts in its garbage and it needs to go somewhere else, right? Like, that is the is the culture, for sure, of a lot of, like, big, high volume, like you don’t how interesting that that a lot of you know what someone would consider false alerts within their kind of system aren’t necessarily if what they’re proofing against is something quite similar, but not, not quite that would be that those would be really interesting, Like training session data to get a hold of of like, are there? Are there specific line dogs, lines of dogs, honestly, potentially a trainer, right? Is there? Is there a training influence that would have a dog be kind of more I keep wanting to use the word optimistic and pessimistic. And I know those have their own like, connotations of the word, like, no one wants a dog to be a pessimist. But like, when I when I say it, I think about it as, like, just how, how much like, kind of burden of proof they need before they believe that they’re doing that they’re giving you the 100% correct answer. Because my Malinois was this way too, and then he, like, we call him just a really hard trier. He’s just trying his hardest to be 100% correct. And so we joke that he will, like, kind of short circuit if he’s not sure, because he’s like, Oh God, it’s this or this, it’s this or this, and it, and it, like, kind of stresses him out to not have the 100% right answer, versus a dog, like, Barley is going to be like, yeah, yeah. This is quite close to what I’ve been trained on.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:20
Yeah, not to anthropomorphize my dog, which, I think is just, I’m a professional dog anthropomorphizer, like he’s like, No, you’re wrong, like he is so sure he’s right that he will, like, tell me that I am wrong when I’m like, No, buddy, I definitely said sit, and you are lying down right now my man.
Courtney Brown 1:00:40
Yeah, objectively incorrect, my friend.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:45
yeah, maybe go back into our learning history, or, like, look at, you know, arousal, or whatever, you know, there’s, obviously, there are like things to look at there, but it is funny, like he is a dog with so much like, chutzpah and confidence. And I love that about him, um, but it also does, yeah, definitely gets us into trouble sometimes. And
Courtney Brown 1:01:05
Yeah, but you found, like, the perfect calling for him, like that would great, which is what you mean about like a sensitive trailing boy, like, maybe too optimistic for that to be something that he picks up later in life. His learning history did not lead him to believe that there was ever only one correct answer, and dogs whose learning history leads them to believe just if you because I do think, like, I think what my dogs are, it’s optimistic that they will find the one correct answer. It is not worth it to alert on something you’re halfway sure about, because if you try hard and believe in yourself, you will find the correct answer. Like, that’s how my training feels, kind of right, like, whenever I’m doing a lot of really specific like handlers, discrimination especially, it’s like, there, you know, there might be 20 articles, and only one of them smells like me, so don’t pick up the one that smells like someone related to me, right? Like that. That wouldn’t do you any good if you continue to work hard, if you really focus and you really use your brain, you’re gonna find me right answer that you have been rewarded for before. Right like that’s
Kayla Fratt 1:02:05
well, you also now we’ve got another thing, yeah, you work in environments wheer you’ve got one right answer. We don’t.
1:02:13
Yes, which goes towards the generalization right from the start for your dogs.
Kayla Fratt 1:02:17
We’re relatively certain Barley was finding scats from five, at least five individual wolves. I know we had a day where we set a camera trap in an area, and we had at least five individual wolves show up on that camera trap, and barley picked up, like 60 scouts in that area. So at least five individuals. He was just like, sure they’re related, sure they’re probably mostly sharing meals. So, like, there’s, there’s some consistency there. But, like, you don’t have a day where you’re like, great, we’re gonna do this individuals track, and then this individual’s track, and then this individual’s track right. Like, that wouldn’t be how you would do it, right? Or do you, is that a way that you would train?
Courtney Brown 1:02:57
Yeah, well, like, for, for search stuff, yeah, we would have had multiple people hiding for a dog in a given day. Like they might have three or four training, like pictures, three or four tracks to run, but there would be, like, a break in between, right? Like they would, they would get an because it’s all about the scent article, right? So they would get a scent article. They would find that track, they would locate that person, check back in the car, get them out later in the day, someone else has hidden for them, right? So it’s in the reset each time, really is. It’s still each session is quite specific. There would be absolutely no reason for them to make a jump in logic of like, and people do talk about, I mean, I remember being conversations in like, when I was doing trailing at seminars and stuff about kind of who collects the scent article, like, there were there, if so, say there’s someone goes missing and their their full sibling is also no longer at the house, right? Like, is not missing, we know where they are, but they went to the store that day, right? And walked away when the Search Dog is there. Well, like, it would have been not ideal for that person to not be there, because that would be a relatively logical jump in it would be a reasonable jump in logic for the dog to be like, Well, I don’t really know where this person went. Like, the scent article, pretty tough, pretty contaminated. And, like, this is a, this is difficult setting. So, like, maybe I will just follow that person that went to work today. Maybe I will go track them to their car in the parking lot of block away, right? Like, that would have been a non, not ideal scenario for a tracking dog. Like, if, if that were the case, we would have wanted to run the track when that person was physically present so the dog can kind of exclude them right from the beginning. Clearly not following; they’re right here.
Kayla Fratt 1:04:41
That’s so neat, yeah, of course. Oh my gosh. Never even thought about well, and I wonder,
Courtney Brown 1:04:45
Right so there are, like, we would still think about things that are that are really closely related, like we would still, I would still have been careful about family members, especially like full siblings. The contamination of the article is a huge, you know, problem. And I do think that dogs can. To optimistically jump to something a little bit easier for them, if they think that that’s going to like, still be the right, get them to their end goal, their reward, right? So we would, we would have been careful for that. But I think that some dogs are probably just inherently through their history and their in their general like genetics, more likely to make that jump, versus there are some dogs who wouldn’t. And I think that based on not generalizing from male to female rats, probably my dogs would have been the kind that would not have made that leap in logic.
Kayla Fratt 1:05:27
Yeah, which I’m sure in a lot of situations is what you want. But yeah, so one of the things I was thinking about as we were talking and I again, I know we got to wrap up, but you’ve never done disaster live, find right?
1:05:39
I haven’t. No, I have quite a few friends that have, but I only ever did wilderness.
Kayla Fratt 1:05:44
I would imagine, like, generally in wilderness at most, you’ve got, like, generally it’s gonna be one person at most, maybe a group that, like, hypothetically, should be together, hopefully, if they’re, like, being smart, loss people, which, you know, big assumption. But in disaster live find you might have a dog, a situation in which that dog is there are multiple correct answers within a given search area. So that actually sounds a little more similar to what we do. Yeah, it’s crazy thinking about like some of those fine scale discriminations within SAR.
Courtney Brown 1:06:16
Well, notably the disaster dogs wouldn’t be discriminating. There would be it would just be live human or nothing, right? They only know, yeah, we had a live humans, and so there would be no, like, scent discrimination. That’s a hard scent discrimination in disaster is clothes. It is a whole part of the FEMA test that there are, like, freshly worn clothing in the pile too, and the dog cannot find the clothing. That was a friend of mine. That was the hard discrimination. For her dog. Didn’t generalize quite like, was quite optimistic about that, and was so confident that clothing is close enough to a person. Or, like, no, it literally was just on a person, and it’s like, right? But, but no, but not that, yeah. So there is no discrimination in that scenario. But that’s another like that would be like carnivore, no carnivore to me, right? It’s, it’s a live human or nothing, right? It’s just find any live human out here. But like for a disaster dog, it would have been quite, quite resource intensive if they were hitting on things that just kind of smelled like humans generally, right? Digging up a pile to find that it was an empty bedroom that someone had been in that smelled a lot like there was human odor, but like literal respirating human is what disaster dogs would be like honed in on.
Kayla Fratt 1:07:32
Yeah. Well, and one of the things I do find fascinating, going back to like Barley, is the times that he doesn’t struggle with Discrimination. Like one of the things I was a little nervous about when we were in Alaska this summer was okay. So all through, like April, May and like the first half of June or so, wolves, easy. Wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves, wolves. Wolf scat is like, generally full of either deer or sea otter. They do eat a lot of other things, but like most of those do things. Wait for the genetic results to prove me wrong on that. But like, you know that’s those are the big high volume things, even if they’ve got other stuff in there. And then the fawns drop, and then all of a sudden, our bears go from mostly eating vegetation to the bears also eating fawns. And I was really worried that as soon as we started having bear scat that had basically the same diet as the wolves, that was going to throw barley off. And you know what? It fooled Toni and me way more than it fooled Barley. We had multiple times where we would do one of the search strategies that we would do is we would do driving surveys where we had, like, forest service roads, logging roads that we could actually just drive. And we’d drive at like, five miles an hour. When we saw it with a scat, we’d pull over and check it out. And then every so often, we would pull barley out and do like, a one kilometer search or something like that. And we would, we would pull over, and usually we got really good at like, like, opening the driver’s side door and, like, leaning out, not there the car, like, not even parking. Like, sometimes you’re like, still going one mile an hour, like we got so got the like, flying bear wolf discrimination, visually. But then, particularly with cubs. Cub scat is often kind of the same diameter as wolf scat, and if the cub had gotten some fawn, because mom had gotten it, Toni and I would get fooled, and we could pull Barley out. And I would have to be, you know, I have to be a smart handler in this moment, not to, like, cue the dog into it, or suggest it.
1:09:34
Right, not point to it, and say, “hi, is this different?” because a dog like Barley’s gonna be like, yeah, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 1:09:38
We’d drive, like, 100 meters past it, I’d tell him to search and then kind of move past it. And we I’ve got some lovely videos of him, like dropping his nose and checking these scats and then continuing to move. And we generally only did that if we weren’t sure. And it was just crazy to me, because I would have really expected that to be a problem for him. But clearly, diet is not the thing. But like, are that marten would be a problem. Like, it’s a must tell it like they’re not even, they’re not even in the same, yeah, not really that closely related to wolves at all. I think the marten probably is just more closely related to because he has done black footed ferret and tayra, which are other, like, kind of medium to small mustelids, right?
1:10:22
So he wasn’t picking up on wolf or marten, it was wolf or some previously learned thing in his catalog.
Kayla Fratt 1:10:28
Yeah, previously learned, closely related mustelid. Yeah, but yeah, like that was really, really surprising to me, and great. It was just Yeah. It was really nice to be able to pull him out and ask him that question, yeah. So yeah, I don’t know.
1:10:48
That’s so cool, because that would have, right, you would think that that optimistic in one setting, that he would be quick to generalize it a lot, but that actually he’s still like, that’s, I think that’s probably a credit to your training somewhere that he like you, he has learned, and he’s like that. He’s been doing this for a while now. So, like, he has learned the the leaps that you want him to make, and and when discrimination is actually, like, the goal, right, which is
Kayla Fratt 1:11:20
The amount of discrimination there is like, Oh, my God, I want to pay him for that. But like, I can’t.
Courtney Brown 1:11:26
I’m not gonna draw attention to it. Yeah, yeah. So would – and I think that we talked about this a lot with the cheetahs, how we handle discrimination in like, a, like a lineup setting. But like, would you go, like, if you if that was a problem, if you were seeing that with the wolf and marten, you did, like, a milk and water, right? A Sarah Stremming term. And I hope that everyone is also listening to that podcast.
Kayla Fratt 1:11:52
And people can also go back and listen to that episode. Yeah. I think most of our – I think many people do.
Courtney Brown 1:11:56
So most people probably heard that one. Um, but for that. Like, do you think that you would do that again? Or do you think that you, like, if you had the ability to circle back and, like, how do you introduce discrimination to Barley, I guess. Now I’m just curious. This might not even need to be in the podcast. Yes.
Kayla Fratt 1:12:15
So when we were I was worried about dog, um, with Wolf, because obviously they’re, you know, the same species. They’ve got different diet, yes, but like, also, some of our wolves eat a lot of trash, and, like, some of the dogs in Alaska are fed, you know, pretty raw diets. But yeah, Alaska raw, not like, you’re ordering zillion dollar –
Courtney Brown 1:12:36
Not your Northwest Naturals, or whatever
Kayla Fratt 1:12:41
So I introduced it at the same time that I introduced gloves, food and toys. So in a lineup scenario, there was basically always a correct answer. I didn’t introduce dog when there wasn’t wolf present, and we just introduced it in lineups. We, I think over the course of, like, I don’t know how many reps, probably a couple 100, we had like, one false alert on dog. And it was even kind of like, he, so his alert is down. He got, like, like, he like, almost like, sternum bumped the ground, and then like, kept moving again. Like, it wasn’t even quick enough for me to respond to it. Yeah. Just kidding. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I can imagine if I really wanted to figure out, I mean, I guess you would want to train a go, no go sort of scenario where then you can, like, put check on queue, and then the dog has a trained response for yes and a trained response for No, and then you can reward the No. Neither of my dogs have that training right now. But like, going back to the bear example, that would be something that would be nice. I think there were a couple –
1:13:47
Which notably, that is a tracking skill, right? So, like, another thing that is important is someone says, this is your point last seen, you present the dog with the scent article. And they’re like, it’s not here. They were wrong. People are wrong sometimes, right. So like Echo does like in the specificity category, if we’re like, tallying up learning history towards generalization or towards specificity, another check on this was in the specificity column of that she does have like a yes, no, she had it anymore. It’s been years, but, but at the time I we did some scenarios where I present her with this, an article we would do, like, our like inventory, and she would attempt to find the track, and if she couldn’t, she would come back to me and, like, give a very deliberate eye contact stand in front waiting for the next queue, because she’s like, it’s not here, right? So then we could, in theory, in a mission, like, go to the next intersection, right? Okay, well, is it here, right? And, like, you could present this, this like check mark, but Right? Just another specificity skill that would potentially not lend itself to easy generalization later down the road.
1:14:47
Border Collie problems. You have to track the behavior chain back so much and be so careful of it.
Kayla Fratt 1:14:47
Yeah, yeah, exactly I mean. And one of the things that I do think would actually be really helpful for Barley would be teaching that protocol and having a way to ask him and have him be correct whichever answer he gives. So that he’s not kind of like skewed towards wanting to say yes, because that’s the only way he could get a reward, yeah. And like in the field, sometimes what we were able to do is that I would basically then keep the search going until he did find a wolf scat, and then we would get rewarded for the wolf scat. We didn’t do that every single time, and I wouldn’t necessarily want to plant things where then the bear Scout predicts wolf scat, and then you could have like, a cue transfer, and then you can start having the bear scat get, like, more salient. Really interesting. Yeah, they just they run backward on that chain so fast.
Kayla Fratt 1:14:59
Oh my gosh. This is a point that I’ve been wanting to make, and it’s come into my brain like three times throughout this conversation. And then we keep, I keep not writing it down. Um, is that I think this whole conversation, and like all of our conversations about discrimination and sensitivity and specificity, and like all these, all our little vocab words are like, part of the reason that I am, like so much of a believer in being a good dog trainer, to be in this line of work and being able to troubleshoot it. Because, again, going back to this conversation I was just having the other night with a professor here at Oregon State who’s hired conservation dogs for their work. You know, we were talking about how, you know, there’s just, there’s so little training and testing and reliability and like all of this within the conservation dog world, and one of the points that I made is I told him this marten and wolf story, and I was like, and I think one of the problems is that you can get a well trained dog, and then you can put a handler through a couple weeks of training, and you can send them out for a three month survey, and as soon as they start getting off. So in this particular example, the dog was supposed to be finding deer and was starting to find rabbit. My guess would be that the handler got fooled by some rabbit scat, paused, hovered, kind of indicated it to the dog, rewarded the dog, and then you’re off to the races. So if you’ve got a dog like Barley, and a less experienced handler, it is so easy to get off track. And even, you know, everyone who heard my conversation with Sarah Stremming, like it took me a couple days and quite a bit of trial and error to figure out how to get us back out of that spiral. And I think a lot of handlers might not necessarily have the skills and the empowerment to get themselves out of that, and particularly if you’re being paired with a really smart herding dog. Although this is not a problem that’s unique to Border Collies, by any means, but they are prone to it, I think, like again, back, way back, when I was at Working Dogs for Conservation, they told me, you know, we really prefer not to put green handlers with Border Collies. You come attached to a Border Collie, so we’ll let you work him. But like generally, our newbie handlers work with the labs because they’re less likely to get screwed up by them. And I think so many people just don’t have enough of a training background and enough of a skill set to start to, like, pause, reassess and have the troubleshooting skills, especially when you’re in the field, day after day for weeks, months on end. You know, figuring out how to, like, fix these problems that show up in real time, and particularly if you don’t know if your scat idea is to the point where you’re rewarding the dog for rabbit instead of deer, then, like, you don’t even know you’re in trouble. You don’t know if you don’t know, yeah, and like, no idea who this handler is. I don’t know what company they were for. Like, I’m not trying to, like, call anyone out here, but, like, it was a really interesting anecdote that I just happened to have over Syrian food the other night.
Courtney Brown 1:18:29
Yeah, well, I think it’s so, like, such an important point, because all of the kind of problems that we’ve talked about, quote, problems, right? Training, training challenges, things that we’ve had to work through that either relate to a dog, generalizing we don’t want to them to or being quite specific when it isn’t in their best interest. We’re assuming that the training is on point and that these are just inherent differences in the dogs and their history, but that like we didn’t mess up the training plan to get them to this point. I didn’t, I didn’t ignore female rats for a little while, and my dogs decide that that wasn’t worth finding, right? You didn’t accidentally reward barley on a bunch of things that weren’t the target odor in a way that he right, like the assumption is that the training is is solid. And so now we can talk about the difference between a false alert and a an attempted generalization, right? But I don’t think that you get to talk about that with like across the board. I think that way more often than not, the similar problems are training problems. Like it’s a foundation problem. Not always is, yeah. I mean, not always, always, yeah, right. Almost always, it is a problem in the training process, not an interesting individual quirk, because, notably, both of us, I think, fix these, quote, problems in like, a couple of days. Yeah, but this wasn’t, this wasn’t a month long problem for me and my dogs. It was just a very interesting initial problem that I didn’t see in other dogs.
Kayla Fratt 1:20:02
Yeah, and you didn’t waste a ton of money on trial entries in the meantime, and I was very careful about what samples I collected, until I was kind of pretty confident that Barley was back on track. And again, right with the marten in particular, we had some you know, it’s pretty hard to mistake marten for Wolf, so that helps, but yeah, yeah, exactly.
Courtney Brown 1:20:24
And you get to like, when, when the training is there, which should always be the first priority, if you’re like, if this is like a prescription, then you get to talk about the cool differences between dogs, the cool genetic differences, the temperament differences, the learning history, how that impacts future work, which is really relevant for your field, especially, like, I think that most of the dogs that are doing the things that I do, they kind of do it for their whole life. It’s kind of, it’s, it’s their thing. But the bouncing around that conservation dogs do, the many different projects, the differences that they have throughout their entire career, it’s kind of like, it it makes sense. It’s, it makes sense that, I guess, like, the training foundation is the way that it is right. They need that.
Kayla Fratt 1:21:06
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s so many context changes that they’re just being exposed to all of the time. And I think, you know, gosh, way back, I think this was actually back when I was, this podcast was CanineConversations. So again, that was approximately 40 years ago, I think now.
Courtney Brown 1:21:26
By the same scale as IAABC being 18 years ago, it would have been 40, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 1:21:31
So I was negative 10 years old, and I did an episode. I think this was also with Sarah – it might have been with Sarah Dixon, actually, it might have been with one of the many other fabulous there. Honestly, I’ve been joking about this for a while. We could have a bomb sport dog conference that was just Sarahs. We could have Sarah Owing only Sarah Stremming, we could have Sarah Dixon, like, Sarah Bruske, like, I’m forgetting a bunch. I don’t know what it is, just the name of the year for crazy dog ladies, but we did an episode way back in Canine Conversations about why sport, doing dog sports is so helpful for behavior consultants.
Kayla Fratt 1:22:17
So back at this point, my main, my main bread and butter was working with, like, really high arousal working dogs that were in kind of, like environments that weren’t quite ready for them. I did quite a bit of, like, aggression, fear, phobias, that sort of stuff. But like, my bread and butter, unsurprisingly, given where I’ve ended up, was the dogs that were kind of, quote, unquote too much the extra dogs. And like, I think the same thing holds through for the conservation dog world, and I think in the working dog world kind of writ large, it’s pretty common to be like, skeptical or nervous about dog sports, like I still in all the search and rescue groups that I’m on on Facebook. Like you see people being really hesitant to introduce their dogs to herding, to agility, to flyball, to like, whatever it is. But I think having the problem solving and troubleshooting and precision abilities that come from training in sports are so so beneficial. And I see it in our students as well. Like most of our students, train and compete in other sports, it helps them almost universally. Niffler and I have started doing agility for this very reason, and it cleans up so much stuff, and it gives again, going back to like the handler skills, because I can imagine so many people going out there with Barley, who’s an exquisitely trained dog, I feel quite comfortable handing him off to novice handlers he’s worked with. He worked with Rachel for her first season back when she was a novice, but I would be worried about someone being able to get him back out of that spiral if they didn’t have really strong training chops. And I love people who do dog sports, and it’s crazy to me. It’s like a big thing in the conservation dog world from some like, very loud noises, that like, we’re not dog trainers. We don’t want to work with dog trainers. Like it drives me nuts because I just – it’s so wrong.
1:24:05
This is my, like, my most cancellable, uh, opinion.
Kayla Fratt 1:24:10
We’re an hour and twenty in, let’s go.
1:24:14
I mean, I think that everyone should have to. I mean, maybe not, not literally, right, but, man, the third party standard, like I started in dog sports, so I didn’t have like, a professional trainer into dog sports pipeline, like I found professional training through doing sports and and just be getting really into my dogs and being like, well, I can probably channel people’s dogs too. That would be more fun than the engineering desk job that I had at the time, and so –
Kayla Fratt 1:24:44
Oh, you’re an engineer. Oh, well, that explains everything.
1:24:48
Yeah, I’m technically I’m an engineer, yeah, by education, but it does actually explain a lot of how I approach dog training, problem solving. My girlfriend has a painting degree. She’s an artist, and it is. Wild our training plans, just like the sit so the same. And then, like my little structural engineer –
Kayla Fratt 1:25:05
My favorite dance instructor I’ve ever had was a structural engineer, and like, we would have entire lessons that were just like, so on the one on salsa, your ankle is at this angle, and your hip is at this angle in relation to your knee, and that means that your shoulder is here, and it was like, oh my god, I hated it. But like, also, he’s my favorite instructor I’ve ever had. Okay, I’m sorry I interrupted your thought.
1:25:25
Yeah, I felt quite called out. That is how I coach my clients, too. I really the there’s, there’s just not a, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a better way to really learn, like excellent mechanics and and like self evaluation, then knowing you’re going to be judged by a third party who’s in my sport, like looking to take points, like, that’s the whole, that’s the whole is they’re looking for mistakes. They’re looking for and so when you have that kind of, when you know that your end goal of your training is going to be that kind of critical eye, not just your personal, like, opinions about how your training sessions are going and, like, not even to mention that, like, all tools, training aids, rewards come out of the picture, right? Like, I think that’s wildly important too, that, like, yeah, there’s just like, not a better way to get better at dog training than doing sports.
Kayla Fratt 1:26:22
No, I agree and, yeah. And, like, Okay, this is, like, honestly, the last point, because we do have to end at some point mostly, you have to drive five hours. But, um, so yeah, Niffler and I just started doing agility. And, um, yeah. So he’s my, like, precise little smarty boy, right? Like, he’s so good at all of the things we’ve been talking to them about today. Like, there’s a reason. There’s a reason Niffler has not come up in these anecdotes. Because, like, honestly, I love where his like, sensitivity, specificity tends to go. It’s just so dialed in. He’s, he’s fabulous at it, other than, you know, now that we’ve kind of figured out the post Guatemala stuff, but you know, he was also two years old. He was a baby, um, but I, like, have been having kind of a hard time with the two on two off for agility, which, for people who don’t do agility, basically, they’re, you know, you’ve got, like, the you’ve got the A frames, and you’ve got these, like, balance beam thinga jiggies, and at the bottom, there’s a section that’s a different color, and the dog needs to get at least one toe into that color at some point for it to count. If they jump off of either of those obstacles without touching it, it’s bad. And that’s kind of a safety thing. It’s also just the rules.
Kayla Fratt 1:27:30
So what a lot of people in agility do, and I am like the babyest agility trainer, so if you’re much more experienced than me, just like, bear with me. I’m talking to the people who know less than me. What a lot of people do is they teach the dogs two on two off. So the dogs will have their two hind feet up still on the obstacle, and they stop with their two front feet on the flat ground, and then they wait for a release cue. This, I guess, is kind of easier to train than the other option, which is a running dog walk, or a running a frame where the dog runs all the way through. That’s what you see at the really, really high levels. If you like, watch worlds on YouTube. That’s what you’ll generally be seeing. But most of the rest of us, the normies, trained this two on two off. So anyway, now that we’ve done with the explanatory comma, I am having such a hard time with it, and the other day, I’ve been trying to do a little bit of it every day for breakfast, for sniffy. And I sat down, and I was like, You know what? We’re just gonna work on some, like, real paw targeting and just see if I can, like, get clickable moments for like, him getting his hind foot onto something. And, oh my gosh, Courtney. I think I realized I don’t know if I’ve ever shaped Niffler to do anything? I think he’s only ever done stuff that I did luring, um, and like, apparently I’m a good lurer, because we have no problems with that, um, and we’ve done scent work. I don’t think I’ve ever shaped him to do a single thing. And
Courtney Brown 1:28:59
I will argue that your scent. Work is all shaping, but dog driven shaping is different.
Kayla Fratt 1:29:07
I think shaping in that, it’s like, it’s a progression. But like, as far as, like, Okay, I’ve got a clicker, I’ve got an object, and now I’m like, trying to work the dog into interacting with that object. I mean, I guess I’ve like shaped relaxation or whatever with him, or like shaped quiet behaviors, but like movement, and it was just crazy to me, where I was like, Oh, this is really hard for us. And I think introducing it to him later on, now that I’m a better trainer, is also kind of helpful. Because again, kind of going back to Barley and some of his stuff, I think his like, throwing his body around and making guesses comes from, like, too much, quote, unquote, free shaping, too early on, I was not as good of a trainer than as I am now, but, yeah, it was just, it was a fascinating little anecdote of, like I had, I had a mat, like a little raised, like foam sit pad that I was trying to get him to put his front paws on and he picked it up quickly once he started realizing that he wasn’t supposed to just lie down and wait for me to tell him to do something. Yeah.
Courtney Brown 1:30:09
I mean, that’s right. I think that there it just all the sporty foundation behaviors and like, training to a third party standard, just like, elevates your training so much. And I also wish this was, this was the hill that I was dying on when I was actively doing search and rescue and other sports, at a time when a lot of people were like, that is heresy. How could you possibly do that? It’s, you know, you’re ruining everything. And I’m like, I don’t think that I am. I think that I’m doing a really good job so, but that’s like, I yeah, I think that you just don’t see you just get such a better eye for dog training. It’s a better eye for criteria, right? Like, what is an indication for scent work, if not the like, the same thing is a two on two off, right? If you, if you were very good at teaching kind of some precise skills, then, like, indications are, like, my favorite part of of training, scent work generally, because it’s the place where it’s really fun. Criteria, maintenance, right? Like, you’re trying to get speed and enthusiasm and accuracy and precision in my indication, because I do sports now, so that, like, matters to me. And I think that, right, like, that’s all of those things coming together can, like, only make a detection handler better at their job, if they’re really skilled at this.
Kayla Fratt 1:31:27
Yeah, I mean, and if there’s still this, so it’s so arbitrary, which I think is good in a lot of ways. And also, like, you know what, if I screw up, Niffler’s two on, two off, and he has to, like, quit agility. Like, I’ll be bummed, because I really enjoy it. But, like, whatever, you know, it’s not his job. So it’s such a nice place for both of us to learn and to play. And like, oh my God, his reinforcement skills, his engagement, his like, interest in working with me, it’s all just, like, totally ballooned because of that. And then, like, the last fascinating thing, and I think this kind of goes back to that concept we hit on a bunch of times, was this concept of like, it either being so narrow or so wide that it makes it easier. The thing that made a breakthrough for niffler on like this little shaping session we did the other day was I switched from the sit pad to I have, like a fit bone, which is for people who don’t know it’s like a big inflatable dog bone shaped thing that’s probably, like, six or eight inches tall.
Kayla Fratt 1:32:27
I was, I was hesitant to use it, because it would be more physically challenging to have him, like reaching up and backwards for it and like it is. It’s a fitness tool. So, you know, having him balanced with his hind feet up on that, and needing to, like, use all those stabilizer muscles in his hips. I was like, Oh, I don’t want to make him do that. But there was something about a) I think it being higher just made it a lot more salient. And b) I think there’s something about concentrating, about keeping his paws on it, like, it’s hard he has to work at it, that actually made it easier. It made it clearer.
Courtney Brown 1:33:00
You made it harder to make it easier. Such a good point. You made it harder to make it clearer. Easier is arbitrary, right? But whatever it takes to get the clarity that you’re looking for in the particular skill, like, that’s the important part. That’s so cool.
Kayla Fratt 1:33:13
You know, actually, maybe genuinely, the last thing fitness training has actually been, the other thing that has been so good for me, like doing Barley’s tplo recovery and having to teach him all of the little like fitness exercises and working your because you’re, I think one of the things that, actually, I really liked about that I am not naturally a precise person. There was a reason that, like, I have never dabbled in rally or IGP or any of these sorts of things. Like, I just it would be really, really hard for me. But in fitness, I see why it matters, the angle of the shoulders and how the hips are stacked, because you want to do it with good form. And having to learn how to do that, and having to video it and then send it to Dr Leslie Eide, who, as we’ve joked about before, is keeping, single handedly, keeping half of the conservation dogs in this country operational.
1:34:03
That’s so funny. So also Echo, because that is who we worked with for her, to get her to a one meter hurdle.
Kayla Fratt 1:34:09
But like, yeah, being able to send her videos and have her be like, hey, rotate your hand from like, facing palm down to palm up, and then, like, bring it in a little bring your elbow in, that’ll help him, you know, stretch more appropriately, while still keeping his balance. Whatever has been so good for me as a handler, and you wouldn’t think that that matters a obviously you want a more fit detection dog, but also it, God, it’s just made us, me a better trainer. It’s helped the dogs learn how to think, yeah, yeah.
Courtney Brown 1:34:43
It’s a whole other podcast.
Kayla Fratt 1:34:46
We really need to wrap up here. We could. We’re gonna turn this into a five hour podcast, if we’re not careful. So where can people find you?
Courtney Brown 1:34:54
We both have to go. I don’t have a huge social media presence. I am on Facebook as just Courtney Brown, my name. My company that I run with my best friend is Einstein K9. We do, like pet dog behavior consulting stuff all across Texas. And, yeah, that’s, that’s basically it, yeah, I don’t, I don’t do a lot of other social media.
Kayla Fratt 1:35:16
Yeah, good for you. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was so fun. You can come back anytime, and we can talk about dog stuff, because this is just the most fun. Just yeah, like, text me when you’ve got stuff on your mind, and yeah. And for people at home, thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a lot and you’re feeling inspired to get outside and be a canine conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. Maybe go sign up for a dog sport class, because apparently that’s where we ended up. And you can find show notes where we’ll link to our discrimination episode. We’ll link to Sarah’s episode with me. Anything else that we mentioned, you can donate to K9Conservationists. We are trying to fundraise to get a film put together about Barley and our field work in Alaska. So check that out under the Donate tab on our website. We’d really appreciate your support on that, and you can join our Patreon all at k9conservationists.org. Until next time – bye!