Sourcing Odor with Stacy Barnett | K9 Conservationists

In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla and Stacy Barnett discuss sourcing. They cover what sourcing is and all you need to know about sourcing and nose-work.

What is sourcing?

Dogs driving to the highest concentration of odor
It isn’t ONLY the moment of the dog finding target, it’s the entire components of the dog’s drive as they search for the scent

Overview of the components of a search

A large component is your dog not being in odor all of the time
The dog has to seek out the odor, driving to the source, getting to the source, and alerting to the source

What does sourcing LOOK like in our dogs?

Look for the “aha” moment
Look for an emotional shift
If they understand the game, they will get excited

How to handle our dogs to help them (without creating MORE problems)

Reinforce the “aha” moment and put emphasis on driving to the source. After that, you can start adding the final response/the alert
It’s more important to focus on the sourcing, rather than the final response, because once you learn to read your dog’s sourcing body language, you won’t necessarily need a final response
Allow your dog to work independently, don’t help too much
Try to teach your dog to not pay attention to your behavior and focus on sourcing
Consider what you’re doing with your body pressure
Be mindful of human precision vs dog precision
Don’t underestimate your dog

Exercises for building a dog’s ability to source/drive to odor

Set your exercises up for success
Thermal puzzles
3-dimensional searches

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Fenzi Courses: Scent Theory & Dynamics, Introduction to Nosework, Nosework Games

Where to find Stacy Barnett:

Scentsabilities Nosework
You can support the K9 Conservationists Podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/k9conservationists.
K9 Conservationists Website Go Fund Me

Stacy Barnett is a top nosework competitor and trainer, being one of only a handful of teams with multiple Summit Level (SMTx3) titles in the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) with her dog, Judd. Stacy has been a faculty member at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy since 2015 and is an international clinician for seminars around the world. She is a licensed Judge for for AKC Scent Work where she was also retained in an advisory position for the AKC Scent Work program for 2 years. Stacy is the author of the popular blog, Scentsabilities Nosework, and hosts weekly educational webinars.

With her degree in Chemical Engineering and her understanding of fluid flow dynamics, she has a deep understanding of odor movement. She believes in utilizing Scent Theory and odor to educate and craft the highly competitive nosework dog as well as bringing enrichment to dogs using Nosework as an activity to build confidence. She prides herself in being able to bring creative solutions to build odor obedience, confidence, drive, and motivation for the sport. Her mantra is CONFIDENCE, MOTIVATION, SKILLS and STAMINA.

Full Transcript of “Sourcing with Stacy Barnett”

Kayla Fratt (KF) 00:12

Hello and welcome to the K9 Conservationist podcast where we’re positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs, join us every other week to discuss ecology, odor dynamics, dog behavior and everything in between. I’m your host, Kayla Fratt. And I run K9 Conservationists where I trained dogs to detect data. Today I have the absolute pleasure of talking to Stacy Barnett about sourcing which is having your dog find the precise location of the highest concentration of odor. You guys are really going to enjoy this interview so let’s get to it. Stacy Barnett is a top nosework competitor and trainer being one of only a handful of teams with multiple summit level titles in the National Association of canine scent work. So that’s an SMT and she’s gotten three of them with her dog Judd. Stacy has been at a faculty member at Fenzi Dog sports academy since 2015, and is an international clinician for seminars around the world. She’s a licensed judge for AKC set work, where she also retained in an advisory position for the AKC scent work program for two years. Stacy is the author of the popular blog Sensibilities Nosework and hosts weekly educational webinars and I can attest to her Sensibilities Nosework just been awesome. With her degree in chemical engineering and her understanding of fluid flow dynamics. Stacy has a deep understanding of odor movement, and she believes in utilizing scent theory and odor to educate and craft the highly competitive nosework dog, as well as building bringing enrichment to dogs using nosework as an activity to build confidence. She prides herself in being able to create to bring creative solutions to build odor, obedience, confidence, drive, and motivation for the sport. And her mantra is confidence, motivation, skills and stamina. I am super excited to start this interview but just before we get going with Stacey, I have to remind everyone that our field vehicle repair fundraiser is ongoing. As I record our van is in for exploratory surgery, and we’re keeping our paws crossed for good news. In the meantime, any support you can give to our fundraiser is appreciated even if all you can do is share the link. You can find that link over on our show notes, which are published on K9conservationists.org. So welcome to the podcast. Stacey. I’m so excited to have you here.

Stacy Barnett 02:16

I’m excited to I’m really excited that you reached out. And this is just this is fun. This is fun. I’m stoked. I’m stoked. So

Kayla Fratt (KF) 02:25

Great. Yeah, I’m pretty much always stoked whenever I get to record a podcast but I especially excited to talk to you because I’ve been, I’ve got like an email alert set up for your blog whenever you publish new things. And I’ve been just loving everything you’ve been publishing about sourcing lately.

Stacy Barnett 02:38

Oh fantastic, I love sourcing, it’s one of my favorite topics.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 02:42

Yeah, so why don’t we kind of start out with, like your definition of sourcing and what we mean by that just, you know, because we have some listeners who are really into nosework and scent work some who are conservation dog handlers and then some who may just be ecologists or kind of dog enthusiast. So to make sure that they’re able to keep up.

Stacy Barnett 02:59

Yeah, so I think part of what can help talk about what sourcing is, is also to talk about what sourcing isn’t, because I think people when they start thinking sourcing, they start thinking pinpointing their thinking their dog puts a nose on the hide, right? And honestly, that’s a piece of it, but it’s such a minor piece of it, right? Because I think for me, the, you know, what I consider sourcing is really is a whole drive to source, right? It’s the whole dog’s ability to intersect that scent cone, you know, or that plume of odor, and really kind of push into that and and work the odor and ultimately get to the hide and get to source as close as possible. And for me that sourcing, it’s less the, you know, trying to put your nose specifically on the hive, which I think some people overemphasize and which can cause other kinds of problems. So, you know, I really tried to emphasize the drive in and the pinpointing is just kind of a piece of that. If that.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 04:02

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Stacy Barnett 04:04

Yup.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 04:05

So as kind of let’s draw things out a little bit as far as like the, the components of a search, you know, sourcing is part of that but if, you know, let’s say we’ve just gotten out of the truck, and whether we’re on a trial or about to go and find some bat carcasses, or whatever it is, what are our components of what our dog is actually doing from, you know, truck to alert?

Stacy Barnett 04:30

Yeah. And if we really kind of think about that, there’s a big huge portion of that includes the dog not being an odor. Right. And I think that’s actually a huge component, especially when you start thinking, you know, your conservation dogs, for instance, they’re going to spend way more time out of odor than they’re going to be spending in odor.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 04:48

Absolutely.

Stacy Barnett 04:49

And I think that’s a huge portion of that right. And for for the competition dog you’re going to find at the higher levels, the dogs tend to spend more time out of odor than at the at the lower levels at the lower levels, because the scent cones that we work with is with a competition dogs are actually quite large and when we’re working with a central, I mean, they’re the scent cones get huge, right? I mean, there have to be smelled, you know, although you’re talking about a bat carcass, I’m assuming that that’s probably pretty pungent.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 05:21

They’re pretty pungent. And we yeah, one of the other interesting things we run into is with plants, where those plants may be in the environment for months or years. So those scent cones are really huge and dispersed and not really not always really intense and they’re always like, it just gets super fascinated with environmental conditions as far as amount of rain you’ve had and oh, my gosh, it’s so fun.

Stacy Barnett 05:45

Yeah, I think you know, that there’s a big portion of that where the dog is really dumb in odor. So there’s, you know, the dog has to kind of understand how to hunt without actually being in the presence of target odor, which I think can be really challenging for some dogs because it’s not that the cue is not necessarily, you know, the presence of target odor to start searching and then the, you know, the dogs got to seek out and that is the, you know, they encounter the target odor, and that is the driving to source and then it’s actually the getting the source. I mean, that there’s, you know, I think there’s kind of those kind of pieces of that. And then of course, you have the alert at the at the tail end. So

Kayla Fratt (KF) 06:25

Yeah, yeah, so we’ve got, you know, all the the period of time, which can vary quite a bit where we’re, the dogs actually searching for the odor and then what we’re really talking about today is that period of time where they found the odor, but they have not yet decided to alert and then you know, we’re talking about how to work through that. And then also how to help make sure that they have decided to alert at, you know, kind of the optimal location.

Stacy Barnett 06:47

Yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 06:48

Which always gets interesting too, because I think listeners may notice that we’ve already hinted at it a little bit, the dog sourcing is going to the highest concentration of odor, not necessarily the target, or the hide. So that can be, you know, interesting and confusing, again, kind of circling back to plants, when we’re searching plants, a lot of times, what I’ll notice is my dog casting up a lot and seeming to catch odor in a periphery around a plant. And a lot of times, they really struggle to actually pinpoint into the location of that individual plant because in all likelihood, that’s just not where the highest concentration of odor is. So that’s where it’s nice to have a biologist on the other end of the leash to actually come in and figure out what you’re trying to find.

Stacy Barnett 07:36

Yeah, that can definitely happen. And you know, and also, when you’re talking about your, the scenting conditions, right, and the climate that you’re working in, I mean, you’re out in Montana, it’s a little bit it’s drier, right?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 07:49

Yeah. Generally.

Stacy Barnett 07:51

Well, compared to like, the Northeast where I am, right. You know, we have a lot of humidity. So you know, you’re gonna see your, your odor molecules are going to act a little bit differently in the drier climate versus the more humid climate and everything. You know, and then you have, you know, the amount of the altitude and the sun and all that kind of stuff. So,

Kayla Fratt (KF) 08:11

Yeah, yeah definately.

Stacy Barnett 08:13

So, yeah, you know, I also try to pay attention to my dogs in terms of when they’re actually sourcing before that alert kind of happens. There’s there’s kind of a moment in time where the dog kind of has like this aha. Right, where the dog kind of gets it they go, Wow, uh huh. Right, right. And I think that’s kind of like a big part of it as well. You know, when I started, yeah, dissect those pieces. But yeah, they are kind of go, you know, they are, we are trying to get them to the highest concentration of odor. And sometimes that concentration of voter isn’t necessarily real close to source. And, you know, from a competition perspective, if it’s an pooling odor where you know, that we’re trying to get them away from the pooling odor and try to get them more toward source anyway.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 09:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that’s where, you know, I know, I just finished up taking an odor dynamics course through fdsa, which I’ll link to in the show notes. Yeah, and just, you know, really thinking about as the temperature changes throughout the day, whether the odor and airflow is likely to be going uphill, or downhill and all of these sorts of things. So really thinking through if your dog is showing a lot of change of behavior somewhere or even alerting somewhere and you’re not finding it, you know, thinking through whether the dog is actually just tired and incorrect.

Stacy Barnett 09:29

Yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 09:30

Or if there is like pulling odor somewhere, which is, you know, that’s the sort of thing that I know personally, as a handler, I still really struggle with.

Stacy Barnett 09:37

It’s tough and usually if I’m encountering pulling odor, there’s a couple of different things that I do and, you know, first of all, I have to be able to read from my dog, you know, read my dog and say, you know, is this is source here, or is this really pulling odor and I find that when she’s working pulling odor she gets, the direction that she’s getting pulled in is pretty random but localized or random, it’s not being pulled into kind of one localized position. And then to do then is kind of really, you know, we want to enlarge the area, because at that point, you know, the pooling is happening, sources, not there, you know, sources elsewhere. So you have to start to figure out how to enlarge that area that you’re searching to make that just a little bit bigger. And when you start to do that, you have to kind of then take another assessment and say, well, what is airflow doing, because you want large it in the, in the direction of where the airflow is coming from. Right. So, you know, from, from my perspective, I might be searching indoors, for instance and if I’m doing that, I might be getting lofting, and might be going over the ceiling, right, it could be coming from a thermal that goes hits the ceiling goes across the ceiling, and dumps elsewhere. So I’m going to be thinking about the air flow in that situation, enlarge the area and try to search out the the origin of the odor. And I think if you’re working outdoors, it’s the same type of thing, right. So if you’re getting caught in this pulling odor, maybe there’s, you know, some higher relative humidity because of some vegetation or something. And you’re trying to just kind of enlarge that area, and try to figure out where that where the odors coming from, if you can kind of think about the direction of the airflow, that could be a great direction to kind of enlarge the area and to try to find some in that direction. So that’s kind of what I do when I encounter that but in definitely a challenge. And I think from for a lot of you know, I tried to get my dogs to kind of do some of that problem solving for me in training but sometimes it takes the handler at the end of the other end of the leash to try to encourage that.

You May Also Enjoy: Multiple Alerts to Discriminate Between Targets with Jens Frank

Kayla Fratt (KF) 11:44

Yeah, yeah, definitely which I were planning on circling back to. And I’m really glad you mentioned kind of what what your dog looks like, as they may be encountering more of this pooling odor where we are seeing a change in behavior but it looks a little bit different from what are actually successfully pinpointing. I know, I’ve noticed the same thing. Barley will do a lot of kind of bracketing. So moving back and forth, and crabbing and like, you know, he’s really like, kind of tap dancing around and circling and like, he’s, he’s a border collie so when he gets excited, he starts going down, you know, we start seeing those elbow bends a lot. But I know, I’ve noticed with him, I’ve been really trying to watch all of our searches back again, in slo mo. And when he, when he’s actually got an alert that he feels really confident in, which usually means that it’s correct and not pooling odor and I don’t even know if I want to say correct, but people know what I mean, you know, we’ll be colloquial here his tail will stop wagging the second before he alerts like he gets faster, faster, faster, and then stops and then he goes down. So what you know, and this can vary so much from individual dog to individual dog and within breeds. But what are some of the other things that we’ve really noticed or you’ve really noticed with body language as a dog is working? Maybe changing from that, like not finding anything to sourcing and then as they’re moving down that odor gradient towards an alert?

Stacy Barnett 13:13

Yeah. And I think you actually kind of hit the nail on the head there because you started talking about the emotional shift. Right. And I, you know, I think it’s important to recognize these dogs, they get excited when they know they’re correct, right? They get excited. They’re like, I’m on it. I’m on it. Right. And, I mean, they’re just they, they understand the game and to them it’s a puzzle to figure out. Right. So that it’s kind of like if you if you’re given I don’t know if you remember the Rubik’s Cube. Remember those?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 13:47

Yeah I do.

Stacy Barnett 13:47

Right. So I never actually I don’t think I have, like, really solved it. Right. I used to be stickers, right and move them around, because I used to get really frustrated. So I cheated. I cheated on the Rubik’s Cube I admit it. But you know, let’s say you’re you’re really close to solving that problem. You’re gonna feel this emotional shift. You were like, I have it right and I think that’s what we see it our dogs and we start to see kind of that emotional shift where as they start to get closer, they start to get excited. I was just working my puppy. So I have an eight month old field lab, working line, field lab detection, bread field lab, and she’s really awesome little puppy. So I’m searching with her and you can see her when she’s not when she’s kind of working and she’s not really you know, close to source or she’s kind of getting some odor. That tail is really soft, right? It’s kind of going back and forth and it’s swinging. As she starts to get closer to source. You start to see her she gets like really into it and that tail starts going and what you’re really seeing is that emotional shift, right? You’re really seeing that dog like I am I was there Right?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 13:52

No, I didn’t. Yeah.

Stacy Barnett 14:33

When they get there is like that Aha there like, I found it. Right, and then you get the alert. So, for me, when I’m really trying to train that, I want to see that emotional shift and I want to see that Aha. Because at that point, that’s when I mark the dog prior to the alert in a lot of cases in training, because I want to say, yeah, you found it right, you’re amazing. And then I mark the dog, and then I feed the dog or reward the dog with the toy, or whatever the dog is, you know, is trained to do. I do a lot of food rewards, just for a lot of other reasons in competition training, just because the speed and everything, but yeah, like toy rewards or whatever and then I kind of think about building in if I’m going to be building in a final response, but I want the dog to really understand that the purpose is getting to the hide or to the source of odor, versus just giving me a word, right? Because I think you’ll also find out with a lot of dogs that may have some sourcing issues. They there’s so much emphasis sometimes on the final response without also having that emphasis on the the sourcing of the hide, that when they get frustrated, they start to throw the final response. So I, you know, I really try to in training, try to really focus on that aha moment, right and really try to reword that and then you can start to build in that final response after after you’ve reinforced that aha moment.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 16:27

Yeah, I that’s exactly what I had to do last fall, actually and that was how I started really diving into your blog was I was running, I was running into that exact problem with Barley where he was, especially on long searches was just kind of starting to look like sometimes he was actually catching a little bit of odor, but he was just kind of alerting at times where he hadn’t properly sourced and we went back to really de emphasizing the alert and marking and rewarding the sourcing instead.

Stacy Barnett 16:57

It will come back right? I mean, if you’ve trained. It’s there.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 17:00

Yeah, no, he’s beautiful. Now, it took, I want to say a couple of months of work but like, if I’m being honest about how many training sessions it was, it didn’t take that many. It’s just but you know, we do so many training sessions a week.

Stacy Barnett 17:13

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And when people are, you know, when they’re, they’re running it to sourcing issues, I usually say, you know, get in there and mark when the dog is when they know they’re at the hide, because other people get so worried about their final response. They’ll come back, and I’ll come back, because after you’ve reinforced that, then you can say, Okay, now that you have this beautiful final response that you’ve already trained, right now, you can add that in, and you have all those pieces together. I think as trainers, we get so worried that if we start backing up a couple of steps, right, and we start rewarding before the final response, we start worrying that the dog is not going to give it to us. And I think well. Yeah and I think, as I’ve gotten more experienced with handling detection dogs and search dogs, I’ve gotten so much more confident at reading body language and I’m so much less obsessed with my alerts now. Yes, versus when I first started, I didn’t know how to read my dog. Yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 18:11

So you know, the bracketing or, you know, those heads swings, or any of those sorts of things. I was missing them.

Stacy Barnett 18:18

Yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 18:19

So it was it was so much less obvious to me, as far as what was happening and now I don’t think I want to, but I think I could handle a dog without an alert pretty successfully at this point, because I can really read the body language.

Stacy Barnett 18:34

Exactly. And it’s really kind of interesting and needed just kind of a parallel to the competition handler, right? Because you’re, when you first start in the sport, you’re like, oh, I need the paw. A lot of people want the paw right, or I need look back or I need the, you know, the they want their final response or I want my dog does sit or down. We have a lot of people that when they start they liked the paw because it’s very, you know,

Kayla Fratt (KF) 19:01

Cute.

Stacy Barnett 19:02

Yes, very cute. You know? And, and we see people really focus on that final response, because they can’t read everything else. And then yeah, start to focus, you start to see so much more, my, my dog that, you know, Judd that we’ve mentioned, I lost him about a year and a half ago to cancer and that he never really had like, a really specific final response and he just really kind of made me learn how to read him and it was just kind of actually a really great way of trying to try to understand the dog. But yeah, we go through that same thing and competition. You know, so it’s interesting to say everybody goes through the same growth, you know, yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 19:45

Yeah, it is. It is funny. So, you know, one of the things that you had hinted at earlier was, you know, talking about the handler side of things. So what are some of the things that like common mistakes that handlers might make that impede our dogs sourcing ability and then the flip side of that how can we help handle our dogs in a way that doesn’t create more problems as we’re working on sourcing ability?

Stacy Barnett 20:08

Yeah, I think there’s like, one major thing, right, one major thing, and that is independence and allowing your dog to work independently. I think we get so wrapped up in a wanting to help our dogs and we start to you start to see handlers, they start to get edgy, right, they see their, their dogs start to get kind of kind of excited, like they think they’re near the source and you start to see handlers start to move in on the dog. And the hand starts going toward whatever kind of reward they’re looking for then the dog goes, oh, am I add it right? And then they throw the final response then and what you can find out is that that can actually force a final response away from source or even when the dogs not even in odor depending on how good that the handlers are reading their dog. Maybe the dog

Kayla Fratt (KF) 20:58

Yeah, that dogs just interested in like,

Stacy Barnett 21:01

Yeah, something something walked over here, you know, like, in your case, like, Oh, I think there was a bobcat or whatever.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 21:08

All the time.

Stacy Barnett 21:09

Exactly. You could you can start moving in, and the dog’s gonna be like, Oh, do you want me to alert here? No problem, I’ll do that for you and so the dog is so good at reading our body language, right? And when we start giving them those cues, we have to be really careful. You know, so having the dog be able to work independently is so important. So important. I wouldn’t expect especially for you guys, I mean, you’re probably ranging out like huge, huge swaths of territory there so.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 21:41

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m often letting my dog work several 100 meters away from me.

Stacy Barnett 21:47

Wow.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 21:48

Yeah and I know, I’ve done a lot of, you know, when I’m working on smaller areas, I’ll just practice sitting myself down in a chair.

Stacy Barnett 21:55

Yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 21:56

And like, because otherwise, I can’t, you know, so many of us, we all struggle to really actually stay put otherwise. So I will like, I will put myself in a chair and then last winter, when I was this last winter, when I was really working on a lot of sourcing stuff, I was doing a lot of just turning my back on my dog and walk into random direction or like doing jumping jacks, picking up a stick and putting it back down. And just like, exactly, yeah, I do weird stuff. I pull my phone out of my treat pouch, not my treat sometimes.

Stacy Barnett 22:28

Good idea. Actually, that’s a super idea, I might borrow that.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 22:33

I’m always pulling my phone out to take videos for Instagram but I’m just really trying to like solidify the fact that like, No, I don’t know, anything, my behaviors irrelevant like you, do you. Like I’m right there, I’m keeping up with you.

Stacy Barnett 22:49

But yeah, exactly. And I tried to think about it also in terms of body pressure because our dogs respond to body pressure were going to think that, when we start to move in on the dog, we’re increasing that body pressure and for some dogs, increasing body pressure can instigate an alert behavior. In other dogs, increasing body pressure pushes them right off of the odor. So you know, we really have to kind of know our dogs there. So I usually when my dog is really starting to work odor, I try to decrease the pressure on the dog by just kind of easing back. Now granted, when I work, I’m a lot closer to my dog than what you’re, you know what you’re talking about, although I will do drills where my dog is working out at a distance, because I want my dog to be comfortable ranging out but I do find that when my dog is actually working and starting to hone in on source, easing, the body pressure could give the dog the permission to say, I was I’m sorry, I wasn’t really correct here and maybe this isn’t where source is and maybe look elsewhere.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 24:00

Hang on, hang on. Not yet.

Stacy Barnett 24:01

Exactly, exactly. It’s like nah. That’s not really it. I thought it’d be here, but it’s really not. So by easing back the body pressure, you’re giving your dog the permission to what I call the sniff and dismiss. Right? They kind of go in, they sniff it, they’re like, that’s not it, and then they dismiss it.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 24:18

Yeah.

Stacy Barnett 24:19

And that easing of the body pressure really kind of helps that, you know.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 24:26

Yeah, and I know that’s something, you know, with working Border Collies and, you know, you work with a mini Aussie and just how sensitive they can be and yeah, like I think it’s one of the things that can be tricky for more of these herding breeds with novice handlers is just how sensitive to you know, like, if you think about comparing what Border Collies are so traditionally excellent at which is, you know, agility and herding where, you know, they’re paying attention to whether you’ve raised your hand a couple inches, and then you try to start on doing all of that in scent work. You know, as we were saying, before we got on I think my next working dog is probably going to end up being a lab. I love love love my border collies, but, you know, you really have to find an unusually independent Border Collie or be very cognizant of your body language in a way that I absolutely, you have to be with all dogs. Yeah, I wonder if it would be a little easier with with a lab. If you think about that specific aspect.

Stacy Barnett 25:26

Like the herding dogs, right, because it’s not only the handler that they’re bred to be able to listen to the handler, but also the stock, like they can hear staring down the stock, and they can see a twitch of a muscle, and they’ll react to it. You know, so they have that breeding, where if you look at like a Labrador, they tend to be a little bit more tolerant to the body pressure and kind of like, you know, rude human behavior, right, and just kind of getting into. They’re just very tolerant of that and they’re more focused, I think I personally think they’re more focused more on scent versus just kind of feeling that body pressure inside. I think there’s personally I think they’re super, is a super option for working dog. I’m a little biased, having I currently have three of them. So it’s chaos in the house, which I can’t believe it’s kind of quiet right now. So they just kept working. I worked them this morning. So they’re kind of Yeah, right now, so. But yeah, three young field labs. It’s usually pretty chaotic in the house.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 26:29

I can imagine. Yeah and I mean, one of the things I loved about the job that I had with the organization, I used to work for it, I got to handle a malinois, I got to handle a couple of malinois, a couple labs, a springer, a couple kind of muddy mutts as well as the Border Collies, and really kind of helps you get a feel for it, because it does it is so different from breed to breed, even though you know, you’re all doing the same job.

You May Also Enjoy: Introducing the Conservation Dogs Collective

Stacy Barnett 26:54

And individual tp individual.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 26:57

Yeah, actually,the two malinois I’ve handled have been on very opposite ends of the spectrum as far as

Stacy Barnett 27:02

Oh, yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 27:02

Kind of what that breed is like they both have very similar playstyles when you’re actually rewarding. Lots of punching you with the toy?

Stacy Barnett 27:13

Lots of lots of teeth.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 27:15

So many Teeth.

Stacy Barnett 27:16

Yeah. So many teeth. And you know, the dogs I work there, they’re bred for tug drive, and all of that. So you get a lot of, but they’re also very physical dogs. So you know whether they’ve got that tug, man, they’re in on it. Yeah, it’s very different, very different. But even even the individuals, you know, I’ve got three that are very closely related and they’re so different the way they search. Their drive levels are all high. They’re just very, very different. It’s actually pretty cool. Yeah. That’s pretty cool.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 27:49

Yeah, yeah, that is really fascinating. I mean, it makes sense even thinking about I know. So the other the school I went to, for undergrad with had a very specific learning style called the block plan, where you take one class at a time for three and a half weeks, and then you have a four and a half day weekend, and then you start again. And so it works really well for someone like me who I’m kind of a quick start, I like getting stuff done quickly. I’m terrible at proofreading. My attention to detail is really not my forte but I’m really good at just kind of getting stuff done. Versus my sister who, you know, obviously, we were raised in the exact same household, we’re full siblings. She didn’t even consider going to the school with the block plan because she is someone who like she color codes all of her notes and rewrites them four times and like, that is how she learns and her grades are better than mine but she also takes four times as long as I do to do everything and, and, you know, it’s just it’s not surprising that we see these differences between you know, dogs, even within closely related lines.

Stacy Barnett 28:47

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, two of my girls are half sisters, they have the same, the same mother. And then I have another one that’s kind of cousins to both of them. And they’re just they’re so so different. Even like, you know, like, the whole thought process is everything how they search is just is really fascinating.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 29:09

That’s so cool. So yeah, what else do we have kind of in mind as far as so we’ve got like body pressure being a big thing when we’re thinking about sourcing is there anything else that you know, common mistakes or easy things that we can do on the handler end of things and we’ll get into like exercises.

Stacy Barnett 29:27

Honestly, the one of the big issues is what I call human precision. Right?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 29:32

Oh, okay.

Stacy Barnett 29:33

It is the well that you always hear the phrase Well, the dog should be able to right and it’s always the should be able to right or in and I do I like to call that human precision because we start thinking of things in terms of our brain like well, the hide and this is the problem with working known hides right? Mind hides are great to work when you can, although there is a place for known hides when you train but it’s the you know, the hide is a certain location, we always we find out from the, you know, our competitors side is that the will the dog should be able to put their nose on the hide or the dog should be able to get to the hide or the dog should be able to alert on you know, we’re you want them to alert. And sometimes it’s just a matter of, you know, what you’re seeing and what your assumptions are, you know, in terms of that hide are very different when you start thinking of things in terms of odor movement. Yeah, yeah, it’s like to be able to find that hide five feet in the air, well, it’s in the sun, maybe not. So,

Kayla Fratt (KF) 30:42

Hey guys, Kayla here from K9 conservationists. dropping into this episode to tell you about something that I’m really excited to be adding to our Patreon, we have added two additional tiers to our Patreon, the sensational scientist, and the canine conservationist. So you can still join our Patreon for just three bucks a month to submit questions for us to answer at the end of each episode. You can also still join at 10 bucks a month to submit questions that our experts will help answer. But now for $25 a month, you can join our Patreon and actually join a monthly live training session breakdown. So that means that once a month, we are going to have a video available of me training either Barley or Niffler in conservation dog work and then we will have a live meeting on zoom with adult beverages encouraged where we can go over my training process, what I was thinking about in this session, what I’m hoping to get out of it and what I’m going to do next time. Even better, at the highest level of our Patreon you can join as a canine conservationist for 50 bucks a month. I know it sounds like a lot. But what you actually get to do there is you get to submit videos of you working with your own dog, for me to then help analyze and break down in a kind, supportive and helpful way and that will also be available as bonus content for our other patrons. So while it sounds like a lot for Patreon, and basically what you’re paying for at just 50 bucks a month, is for myself and other really excellent trainers to assess your training and work at it in a really cool teamwork sort of way. Or for 25 bucks a month, you get access to all of that learning. So if you are serious about trying to get into the field of conservation detection dog stuff, I cannot recommend this enough. I’m really, really excited about this program. And especially if you’re listening to this right now, it’s still really new. So you are going to get a ton of one on one interaction, because there’s just not going to be many people there yet. So you can sign up for that over at patreon.com/K9Conservationists, we’ll also be sure to link it over on k9conservationists.org. So you just have to remember the one link and we will make it really easy to find I am super excited about this. Our first offering of this is going to be in July. So at the time that you hear this, you’ll still have a little bit of time to sign up before our first live video analysis. All right, back to the episode. Yeah, I know, I accidentally set a hide and I’d been planning on letting it cook for a couple of hours and when I did, I came outside the wind had shifted, and I had it kind of up five or six feet on a telephone pole and the wind had shifted to where it was blowing all of the odor through a chain link fence out of our plant search area.

Stacy Barnett 33:32

Yeah, yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 33:35

And we were able to work it and we, but it ended up being a much harder problem than I intended and if I did not, I’ve been trying, I’ve been experimenting a little bit just because it’s been so cool for body language and everything, working my two dogs on the same puzzles, because I’ve got like a little six month old, veteran, seven and a half year old and I’ll start them in different places because I’m not having the six month old work like five acre searches yet. But that was one where it’s like, okay, there’s no way I’m even going to try running Niffler on that because it took Barley way, way longer than I had anticipated. But you know, it’s just so cool. And if you’re as a novice handler, the body language and the odor dynamics, I think are just often not taught enough as like a novice handler I wish that I had had like months of that before anyone ever, like let me touch a dog and I wouldn’t have stuck with it. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. But

Stacy Barnett 34:29

Yeah, I personally, I think it takes a certain human to really want to get into that the odor stuff. And that’s probably what pulls a lot of us into scent type, you know, work and stuff like that, where it’s like this, this other dimension, right? And I picture like what this is doing it. It’s so exciting. But I think, you know, like for novice handlers like oh, you know, hey, and I started throwing up the ideal gas laws. They’re like the eyes start crossing. Oh my gosh, I did a seminar, I put up the the PV equals NRT on the on the screen and what? Like they’re

Kayla Fratt (KF) 34:30

I thought we were here for dog training

Stacy Barnett 35:11

Here to train my dog. Know this.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 35:15

And I, yeah, go ahead,

Stacy Barnett 35:19

Just break it down into hot air rises, cooler falls, there’s a whole lot more.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 35:23

There’s a lot more basic. Yeah, I feel like when I get excited, and I’m talking to friends about this, especially friends who aren’t really into dog training, and I start talking about that, the odor dynamics and you know, the dimensionality of it, I’ve had multiple friends kind of stopped me mid sentence be like, are you high, what are you talking about? Because I’m just like talking about these other dimensions and how it moves.

Stacy Barnett 35:48

Oh, gosh, oh my god. Yeah, you know, my actually, my best friend is a cat person. Okay, so she doesn’t have a dog at all. And she has. She’s has cats, my absolute best friend in the whole world for like the last like 12-13 years, whatever. And she’s actually gotten pretty good at setting hides now because she’s because I’m talking a lot about the odor.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 36:14

Yeah.

Stacy Barnett 36:16

And she can finally she can actually set pretty good hides for me. And she has asked, she’s never handled a dog in any kind of other than holding leash. I say here, can you hold? Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, actually, the quantity of the domain of knowledge and this is just enormous. It’s just

Kayla Fratt (KF) 36:37

Yeah, it’s a little overwhelming. Yeah, but ya know, it’s

Stacy Barnett 36:43

Definitely really get into it. Yeah.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 36:47

But again, I mean, when I my very first nosework class I took back in 2017, I think I had well, I took it because I wanted to be an agility class and the waitlist was too long. So like, I think if I had been hit over the head with too much odor dynamic dynamics too early on, I probably would have just wandered out. I don’t know, I’ve had quite a lifelong learner.

Stacy Barnett 37:11

Yeah, me too. And my, my poor students like my, my second level class, I’ve got lectures, like, scent theory, and I worry, I do chase them off. But hopefully they stick around.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 37:23

Yeah, it’s it. I mean, it’s, it’s the eternal challenge of any instructor. I think like, you know, even again, kind of agility is the other sport I’ve dabbled in and, you know, people want to come to class, and they want to run a course and what they probably really need is actually doing drills and, you know, it’s an eternal challenge for any instructor and, you know, I think I’m lucky in the field that I’m in that at least in theory, you know, we know that we’re in this for a profession. So there’s a little bit extra motivation to really get at all the different layers and levels of it versus on the sport side, I can see that being a little bit more challenging to get people interested in all of this.

Stacy Barnett 38:05

Yeah. You know, on the sports side, you know, some people kind of, you know, they just want to kind of dabble in it, they just want to kind of do bits and pieces, and that’s fine. That’s totally fine. But I can definitely see, you know, if it’s the profession, I mean, you really have to kind of understand it, you really have, yeah, but yeah, I do think kind of getting back to the original question where you were asking me, like, I know, me, I’m like tangent, and like, wow, you know, kind of go off on a tangent a lot. You know, thinking about, you know, the mistake that people make is that human precision where they’re not thinking about, really what the airflow does, and, and they set a hide and I think what happens is, instead of saying, You know what, that odor is just not available. As a human, we get so invested, right in the location of this hide, this is where this whole body language of independence comes into play. Right? We start thinking like, well, I set the hide, so I want the dog to find it, right? Like I really want you to find the hide and we start giving all this body language and finally the dog starts reading us instead of the odor. And then they start alerting because we want them to alert because as humans we want to be successful. You know, which then goes back to the original thing that we were talking about, which is like searching without odor because we got so or at least on the on the competitive so we get so invested in in the hide that we forget that that task is actually just searching so that’s more that’s probably more of a competitor competitor issue.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 39:43

Yeah, yeah, maybe or maybe not. Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. And you’re it’s totally I mean, we’ve all been there when you go and you search set out to hide and you know, I know especially as I was getting better at body language or before I was really comfortable with it, you know, trying to trying to figure out the difference between, you know, a clean amiss, and just moving past that. Yep, versus when my dog was actually struggling with sourcing and was working through that, where I do want to kind of like stay put and support them, you know, without moving into their space and pressuring them in any way. But and that distinction, I think can be challenging until you spend a lot of time thinking about body language.

Stacy Barnett 40:22

Yeah, and I look for a dog that is actively searching, because you’re gonna find that some dogs are gonna kind of travel through the area, like they’re just moving through the area, they’re not really actively searching and if they’re kind of traveling through, they’re kind of moving through, they’re not really getting all the information around them. And but if my dog is going through, they’re actively searching. If they encounter odor, they’re gonna respond to it and then I have to kind of I have to trust that and if they go through, they’re actively searching and they don’t encounter it. Well, even if they come through, they come through, like maybe another direction, they still don’t encounter it. Well, you know what, maybe it’s a bum hide, you know? And it’s just, it’s just a little harder to find, or maybe it’s just not available. You know, it’s, yeah, it is odor. Right? It’s not?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 41:11

Yeah, it’s not as as clean cut as we’d like. Otherwise, we probably would have figured out how to replace dogs in my line of work by now.

Stacy Barnett 41:17

You May Also Enjoy: Arousal in Working Dogs Part Two with Liza Rader

All right. Well, you know, they’ve, you know, they’ve they’ve tried to replace dogs and they’ve failed so far.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 41:27

Yeah, yeah, it’s complicated. That is. So yeah, let’s kind of pivot this will be our last question here. Unless at the end, I’ll ask if you’ve got anything else that you wanted to add. But what are some of your favorite exercises, or even and we can drop blogs. And because you’ve got so many great videos, from your website. So anything that you mentioned, we can make sure to try to link to your site in the shownotes. But exercises for building the dog’s ability to source and drive to odor. And, you know, if this is something that people feel like they need to work on with their dogs, oh, yeah, there’s different I like to look at it from different sides of it, right, because we, we talked about what is sourcing is really kind of the drive to source, there are a couple of different things I like to work on to try to build that sourcing capability. Now, you know, people do talk about pinpointing that there is a, there is a need for that. And I do do some of that. But there’s a lot of what I tried to do that builds that pushing an odor I do a lot of things with working with like blowing odor, for instance, or, you know, you could do that, like blowing odor could also be the wind, right? Especially like, if you’re thinking like a conservation dog, where, you know, if you’ve got a dog, and you’re working a five acre field, or a 15 acre field, or 50 acre, whatever you want that you want to be able to set the hide in such a way that you kind of understand that that odor is going to come to the dog so that they they can get in that scent cone and drive into it. There’s doing that there’s also setting up things like thermal puzzles, right, where you might have, you know, the the effects of the sun and the dog trying to work through that. I also try to work through what I call three dimensional type of searches where the dog has to, you know, the odor is moving, but you may have barriers in place, right, and you want your dog to be able to navigate those barriers, to try to drive into source. Whether those barriers are over, under or through around, right, it’s a little bit more dimension to the odor puzzle. And also find that it also increases the commitment on the dog side because if you know if it’s something is very kind of easy for the dog to get to dogs or kind of they’re like, hey, it’s here, right? It’s right there. Yeah.

Stacy Barnett 43:43

It’s right here, right. But once you start to build on to some of the depth to some of that, you start to actually build a commitment to the odor. And I find that the dogs try to work a little harder when you start adding some three dimensionality to it. So I do a lot of that type of stuff. And that I layer in the pinpointing because that, you know, that is actually another important piece of it, I just that’s just not the sole part of sourcing because people kind of focus in on that they forget all the other stuff with the hide. Right? So as you can pinpoint, like crazy, but if the hide is not there, he guess what? Right?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 44:23

Exactly. Yeah, you gotta get to within a couple feet of it in order to be able to start pinpointing.

Stacy Barnett 44:28

Exactly, exactly. But people get so focused on the pinpointing like well, guys, you’ve got to get there to begin with. So

Kayla Fratt (KF) 44:35

Yeah, I love the idea of yeah, like pushing through. And I know you’ve also one of the other things I’ve noticed you’re writing a lot about is like these deep accessible hide as a way to really help the dog kind of source and push into things. So if you want to talk about a little bit.

Stacy Barnett 44:48

Oh, sure. Yeah. And I really, I love deep accessible hides. And so let me tell you a little bit of a story. I was flying out. thing was going to it was going over Europe anyway. And I was gonna go teach a seminar over there and I had a tablet and I had upgraded myself to first class because I’m like, You know what, I need a good night’s sleep. You know, I use miles or whatever, just use my miles and I upgraded myself. So anyway, yeah, I’m there. And they’ve got these really incredible chairs that you’re sitting in is almost like a seat within a seat. That’s kind of weird. Because you can recline, you could do all that kind of good stuff. Well, I have my tablet there, and it slipped. And it fell in between the seats. And it wasn’t like normal airlines seat because you had to, I could kind of see it. And it was kind of out of reach. sticking my arm, I couldn’t quite get to it, like my fingertips are just a couple inches away from it. And, yeah, there’s a whole purpose to this. So I’ve got my arm in there, I’m stretching, I’m stretching, I’m stretching, I couldn’t get it. This the the the airline attendant, she’s got her arm in there, this is all pre COVID. We were all kind of close together, got her arm in there trying to stretch to it. Finally, we get to it. And it kind of occurred to me because later in the seminar, I had set these deep accessible highs. I’m like, that is the tablet in the airline seat. Right? Right, because you’re reaching and you’re trying to get to it, and it’s just out of reach and it makes you work that much harder. Right? Yeah. Same thing with the dogs, right? They’re pushing in, they’re pushing in, and they can help us get to it. And it gives them the added layer of commitment to get to source and then when you take that and you’ve done a lot of that type of work, they’ve got that it adds to their drive, it adds their commitments, that when they encounter odor, and maybe it’s not as deep or maybe it’s deeper, maybe it’s completely inaccessible. They’ve built this desire to get to it because they think they can or they think they can almost and what that is actually that builds that desire that builds that commitment. And I end it becomes much easier to find that hides that they can’t quite get to, you know. Yeah, absolutely.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 47:11

Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s been so much fun to kind of been be playing around with lately.

Stacy Barnett 47:18

My airline story, right. But I don’t always fly first class. I don’t want it to sound like I do. Just kind of upgraded myself at the miles, but it’s like, oh, my gosh, yeah, that’s sourcing.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 47:31

Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve all been there where you’re trying to reach something and like your fingertips can touch it, but you can’t quite get your thumb around it. Just like, right, yeah, and how motivating that is. So yeah, trying to and thinking through, you know, how to set that up for the skill level that your dog is at is kind of where this starts getting challenging, I would say and making sure that you’re doing it in a way that, you know, because deep accessible for a really experienced dog and deep accessible for a novice dog are going to actually look a little bit different,

Stacy Barnett 48:02

Which also goes back to body pressure, right? Some dogs are going to be much more comfortable with body pressure. So I’ll give you an example. Although in competition, our dogs are not allowed to go under vehicles for you know, because they’re worried that they’re gonna get hung up. Well, I was working my puppy off leash. And while the, you know, there was a hide on the front of a vehicle, and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And, but it was a great sourcing puzzle to she popped out the front row here it is, you know? You know, it’s yeah, it’s but I think I think, you know, pressure, body pressure kind of comes into it, the dog’s natural ability to respond to body pressure. The other thing that I think, and I want to mention this is I think sometimes we often underestimate our dogs and I think we need to push our dogs a little bit every so often, I think it’s important to take, especially if they have the drive, as long as they have the drive, and they’re not getting frustrated, and they’re not losing confidence, it’s important to push them a little bit on those harder hides occasionally, you know, I’ll give my puppy something kind of hard and then the next day, I’ll diversify a little bit easier and then I’ll do something hard, a little bit easier.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 49:16

Yeah.

Stacy Barnett 49:16

But I think that’s a lot of times the dogs will surprise us and what they what they can do if we just let them and we let them work it out. If we don’t try to pressure them to solve it within a certain amount of time as long and I just kind of keep my finger on the pulse of their motivation because if you start to see the motivation start to dip and the frustration increase. That means the confidence is decreasing. You need to cut it out. You need to stop the search, you know with it with a younger dog, but

Kayla Fratt (KF) 49:45

Yeah, and I know I mean one of the things I when I was speaking to my breeder before bringing Niffler home and kind of as I was choosing the puppy from the litter, I was really adamant about wanting a puppy who was really, you know, optimistic and enjoyed kind of rising to a challenge and I’ve really least seen with both of my dogs. I was just lucky with Barley, I picked him out at a shelter before I was in this field. He’s just, he’s just superb. He’s such a one of a kind dog and Niffler is turning into something a one of a kind dog in a different way. And one of the things I’ve really noticed with Niffler is because we did a good job of selecting the right puppy for me, when I make things harder, he seems to get more excited. He really enjoys that challenge. And I’ll really notice like the next time I take him out, even if I am kind of stepping it down in difficulty, like a surge in enthusiasm from him, because he’s like, Oh my gosh, we’re gonna go do the thing where we work our brains. And yeah, it’s hard and it’s good. And like you get to chew on that problem.

Stacy Barnett 50:43

While I actually when I was looking at puppies, because this Prize came from a really fantastic litter, a lot of the dogs are working toward, you know, they’re working in it. They’re preparing for working capacity.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 50:57

Yeah.

Stacy Barnett 50:58

And when I was looking at her and I was evaluated the puppies, I was looking for a puppy that could problem solve and I could actually see they had like, these pallet piles and all kinds of like, little bitty rubble piles that they could put the puppies on everything. Oh my god. It’s actually really cool. They actually has like a huge like 1000s of pallets. I don’t know it’s like like, like her own rubble pile. It’s amazing.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 51:21

Oh my god, wow.

Stacy Barnett 51:22

Really cool. But I could I was watching and evaluating the puppies to see you know, as they’re watching the they’re the like the either the kennel person or the the breeder whatever. As they’re moving over this rubble pile how the puppy has responded in terms of their physical environment like could they problem solve, moving around the obstacles to follow and I saw Prize, and she really kind of understood how to enlarge your area naturally just start to follow her person. And like, that’s a problem solver. And that’s really one of the reasons why I picked her.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 52:05

Yeah, yeah, exactly. His breeder was did a lot of puppy culture and like barrier challenges. And he was the one he wasn’t the fastest always at the barrier challenge. But he was the one who was he was really persistent and creative with it. Where again, he wasn’t he didn’t always pick the straightest line or the best line. You know, because he was five weeks old. And

Stacy Barnett 52:30

Oh, yeah. And that’s actually a really big challenge of sourcing. In order for a dog to really source, right, the dog actually has to move away from the strongest concentration odor, that a lot of exactly right. And that that is actually creative problem solving because they started to realize I’m in this high concentration of odor and sources in here. So what do I have to do, I have to enlarge the area, I have to actually move away from the highest concentration of odor in order to increase the likelihood of finding the true source of odor. And that’s an amazing problem solving. And that’s really an advanced level of problem solving. And if you can start to see that that degree of problem solving in your puppies is pretty amazing.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 53:17

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was very cool to get to see. So as we’re wrapping up here, do you have anything that you wanted to kind of mention about sourcing or upcoming webinars or any of those sorts of things? But oh, so people can kind of fill this out?

Stacy Barnett 53:31

Shameless plug.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 53:32

Absolutely.

Stacy Barnett 53:34

All right. That’s great. I mean, I do I do educational webinars are not always I mean, a lot of them are focused on competition, but not all of them are. I tried to, there’s some stuff that that’s pretty generally applicable. I do them. Right now. I’m on a short hiatus, just for a couple of reasons. I came back from Florida and just kind of still settling in, but I’ll probably start it up next week. And I do usually like weekly webinars. And you can find them on my website. It’s www.scentsabilities.com. That’s s c, e and t. S abilities and .com. And, and I always have them listed there. But I have but yeah, they’re inexpensive. You keep the recording for like for forever, or at least until I stopped doing webinars, which hopefully is not in the near future. So yeah. You know, you can always listen to the recording, but yeah, that’s awesome. That’s great. Yeah, I would I would love to have more people working.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 54:34

Yeah, yeah, we’ll definitely drop that link into the show notes. And I think this is gonna go live three weeks from now. So there’ll be a couple that’ll have been live between now and then. Yeah, do you have anything else you wanted to add about sourcing before we go?

Stacy Barnett 54:48

Ah, nice. I think we’re pretty good. I’m gonna probably come up with ideas later on.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 54:53

Yeah, sure. Yeah, well, we can always do a part two.

Stacy Barnett 54:56

There we go. Here we go.

Kayla Fratt (KF) 54:57

I mean, it would be cool to do like a another one about, you know, what is the name for the searching before the sourcing?

Stacy Barnett 55:05

Oh, seeking?

Kayla Fratt (KF) 55:07

I don’t know seeking Yeah, yeah, I’ve like we could do we could do an episode on seeking.

Stacy Barnett 55:12

Before the searching is searching

Kayla Fratt (KF) 55:13

Searching? Yeah. Yeah the searching seeking. Yeah. And then the sourcing and then like the pinpointing, alerting. We can always come back and do more about those. Yeah, yeah, I’d be thrilled to do that. And I’m sure our listeners would be as well. So for our listeners, thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you learned a lot and are feeling inspired to get outside and be a K9 conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. You can find show notes and extra information on this episode, including links to everything that we’ve mentioned at k9conservationists.org And you can support our field vehicle repairs at our GoFundMe page. Until next time.