Show notes
SUMMARY: Julie Symons is owner and head dog trainer at Savvy Dog Sports and she joined to break down what it's like to compete in a nose work trial, plus we talk introducing handler scent to your nose work dog. Next Episode: To be released 7/06/2018, featuring Donna Hill, talking about owner-handler trained service dogs and what it takes to get a fantastic recall. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we have Julie Symons, owner and head dog trainer at Savvy Dog Sports, to talk about scentwork. Welcome back to the podcast Julie! Julie Symons: Hi Melissa. It's great to be here again. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. Just to refresh everyone's memories, can you share a little bit about who you are and the dogs that you share your life with? Julie Symons: I've been training since the early to mid-1990s. Started out, I think, obedience, like most people probably did, and then agility came on the scene, and then I got my first purebred dog. What I was really drawn to from the very beginning was the versatile sports that I got into with my dog and how much I enjoyed the cross-training. I've stayed with the Belgian breed so far and really enjoyed that journey, and starting to look at some other breeds as well. I also incorporated my Savvy Dog Sports training, I have my own training center now, and I just very recently, haven't really gone public with it, gave my notice at my corporate day job that I've been at for 30 years, and my last day is July 6, so that's pretty exciting for me. A lot of change going on. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Congrats. That's so exciting. Julie Symons: My two dogs that I have, Savvy, who I can't believe is 10-and-a-half. She's done everything I wanted her to do. She is a breed champion, she has her MACH 2, she has her TDX, she has her UD, and she has her Elite 1 nosework trial. Right there it shows my love of versatility, and how well dogs enjoy and that we can train across different sports. Obviously all this occurred over her lifespan up to now. I didn't do it all in one year, obviously. But we're focusing on nosework now and enjoying trialing her at the Elite level, and just want to see how far I can go with that before she's just not able to trial. And then I have my baby dog, who's not really a baby anymore, Drac, who's a Belgian Malinois. I got him because I thought having two different genders would work out better in the household, and it really does. They get along great. He's 2-and-a-half, and he's out of most of his hormonal peak. He was a late bloomer, I think, and I think with boy dogs they mature a little slower. I'm really, really seeing the days of adolescence in our past, and really see the potential in how I can get a little bit more … not that I wasn't serious, but more serious and formal with his training coming up, so I'm really excited about that. We trialed in nosework and confirmation so far with him. Melissa Breau: Awesome, and that's reassuring to hear, considering I have a year-and-change puppy, a boy, still definitely maturing. Julie Symons: I wrote a blog about that, I believe, and I saw somebody recently asking and I haven't had time to reply, but I am experiencing the first time for myself having an intact male. The last year I've been busy with other stuff, I'm still training him, but I didn't put any pressure on him or myself, and he's really come along. For example, in agility classes I couldn't get his nose off the ground. Now he stays in the whole class without sniffing the ground. It just was waiting that out and working with him, letting him acclimate, and not putting the pressure on either one of us. Melissa Breau: So, I wanted to talk about trialing in nosework. I know you have this webinar coming up on achieving nosework trial day success, so I was hoping you might start us out by walking us through what a nosework trial looks like. I know it's super-different than some of the other sports that are out there. What that looks like, how it works, and when everything goes well. Julie Symons: Absolutely. One thing that's interesting about it, at least in the Nosework Association, which is the main venue that most of us got involved with, is you get maybe 30 to 40 dogs, total, at a trial, and you are staying in your parking lot with the dogs inside because they usually are in locations where it's not like a training building and you can't crate anywhere else. So you have to get used to working out of the car, and your dog does have to get used to hanging out in the car all day long. You have to deal with, handle the different temperatures and weather concerns you may have, and when you get there, especially with the Nosework Association, they don't want a lot of dogs hanging out and wandering around because, as many people know who do nosework, a lot of it is geared toward supportive reactive dogs. In the AKC venue it's just like a regular AKC trial, but most people are still very courteous of that. A little bit different situation in their locations, but for the most part you're at a school or maybe a Boys Club of America or something that you're just going to be waiting outside with your dog. They have a running order, and there's a briefing, so you meet with maybe the host, the judges, and they talk about some of the logistics and the situations of how the day is going to run. They tell you if there are back-to-back searches, are you going to run and then go back to your car, and then they take you on a walkthrough. So you go on a walkthrough — most trials you get a walkthrough, some of them you don't, depending on the level — you get a look at your search areas, and then you come back and ask questions about the areas, if you have them. And then the judge or the certifying official, depending on what venue, will go over how many hides you have, if it's a level of known hides, and your time limit that you have to search. Except for AKC, where they do a lot of spectators if there's room, you are generally in there searching, nobody else can watch. There's a few people in the room that are timing and judging and videoing and things like that. It can be a very low-key situation. For some dogs it can be a little worrisome, when you go into this empty room with one or two people can actually be more concerning for a dog, versus having people around all the time, and then you're just working in that environment. Those are some of the "how a typical day goes," and you end up sitting outside your car and you meet your parking lot neighbors, because you usually don't know a lot of people, especially if you go out of town. Of course I know a lot more, and everybody does as you go to more and more trials, but it's not like you go with your friend who also entered, because the odds of two people getting in, most of it's a lottery system, is not likely, so you're usually traveling by yourself and meeting new people. It's a good question you asked, because it is a very different trial day compared to other sports. Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there how hard it is to get into trials, and looking through some of the webinar description and some other stuff, it seems like maybe that leads people to sign up for a chance to compete even if they're not sure they're really entirely ready. How can a handler ensure their team is truly ready to trial? What advice do you have there? Julie Symons: I would say luckily at least I know my students are prepared to enter. I'm always happy when some of them are even unsure if they're ready, and I assure them that they are in most cases. They have the skills, they may be concerned about the level of difficulty or the differences, and I'm also proud of some of my students who realized, I shouldn't move up in AKC, because you can get your novice title on the weekend and move up in the Sunday afternoon trial, but you might not have taught multiple hides or the second odor. So I really admire my students who realize, Why would I move up? I'm just going to run bumper legs and go home early because I don't have those skills. Why would I put my dog in there? But I do see the occasional teams, now that I can spectate in AKC, I hate to see the teams that aren't prepared, either the handlers or the dogs, and I'm hoping it's less of an issue. I think more of it is, as you said, getting into trials is challenging, so when you can only get into maybe two trials a year — and that's changing, so I don't want to scare people off with that type of cadence — but you can't make the same mistakes in those two trials a year that you have. Back to being ready for trialing, if you have a good foundation and you know the skills that are required at that level, I would say that you're ready to enter. We all run into something that we haven't expected, or just not had a good trial day, but it's mostly just know what's expected and make sure you have trialed in those novel situations that can prepare you, because all of the trial situations you're going to be in are novel and new, with new people around. Melissa Breau: I know you've also talked about the importance of taking inventory of training gaps and handling mistakes. How can a team do that before the actual trial, especially if, like you said, there's maybe two trials a year that they're going to compete in? Julie Symons: You definitely see your training gaps. They usually surface when you're trialing, because that's when we're nervous and so we're acting a little different, or the place is novel and we just aren't our normal selves. That's something that we do have to, as best we can, combat that, like, develop good mental strategies and just realize that everybody's nervous. If you go there with the idea of, depending on what your goals are, if you just go there and do your thing and not worry about passing or whatever, you actually usually do pass when you take that pressure off of yourself. When you do trial and some of these training gaps surface, you know that by purchasing the trial video. So how you can inventory your gaps is either videoing your blind training searches, if you're in classes or whatever, or definitely your trial video. What you can do, and this is what we did in my Shoulda Woulda class, is we had people review some trial videos that didn't go as well. A trial I would say doesn't go as well is if you don't find all the hides, or if you get a no from the judge — you called an alert and the judge said no. And that's the worst thing to hear at a nosework trial. So you watch those videos of those experiences, and you take inventory. You say, "Oh, I was crowding my dog, I talked my dog into a hide," or "You know, I never taught my dog to search over 4 feet, and that's why that's a gap I have." By watching your trial video is where you're going to really see those gaps, and then you literally want to write them out, list them out. One of the neat things about that class that I didn't really anticipate was it kind of … not forced people, but it had them go back and kind of organize their trial videos. They went back and re-watched them with a fresh set of eyes, and they said, "Wow, I sometimes don't watch them a second time," or "I haven't watched all these." It was eye-opening to them to go back and not just watch them to watch them, but to watch them with a purpose of saying, "What didn't go well here?" We also of course in the class go over what goes well, because we want to stay positive and be aware of how well we're doing. But since we're focusing on trialing better, you have to know what didn't work when you trialed and how to not do that mistake again when you go to your next trial that you got into. I just was reading something on Facebook that somebody said. We were like, "We always remember that one mess-up that we had, and we can't let go of it." And somebody said, "You know, I drove eight hours, I didn't sleep the night before, I was busy at work, the first one in my day I just blurred an alert, and all that stress and tiredness and everything, it was over." So we need to be in a better state, go there with the right, I guess, tools and strategies to start off the trial well. Sometimes it's that first search that is the most stressful, definitely, and maybe we're going to make some mistakes. So if we just can hold it together and learn to be in that moment and having a plan, and that's what we did in the class is people had trials coming up, it was really cool, and we said, "What are your goals? What are your goals for your next trial? What are you going to do differently? What are you going to do the same?" These people are going to trials and passing and placing, and I'm getting goose bumps talking about it, and it was such a rewarding experience because we were looking at the trial experience not in a different way but just in a specific way to inventory and to just know it's OK. We need to own our mistakes. Somebody actually shared with me that it was so refreshing to have this topic in the class, because every time they talked to somebody who went to a trial, they would always blame the trial site, the hide placements, the people, the dogs. Sometimes we need to own where we have training gaps and how we can improve our handling instead of blaming other things. Melissa Breau: What were some of the common "holes," or some examples of the holes that people discovered? Maybe if you'd just walk us through a little bit of problem-solving? Julie Symons: Yeah — this is neat. I had a guest, a lecturer, Holly Bushard. From a judge's perspective, she listed what she believed were the common handler mistakes. But these are my list, so if you want to know what Holly thinks, there's definitely some overlap. I also just had a recent judging assignment, as my first AKC judging assignment, in North Dakota. It was fun. You're in the best seat in the house, and I was nervous because I was, like, I want my high placements to be good, and I want the dogs to be able to find them. So this is what I saw there, as well as I see when I'm teaching. I think the number one hole that we have is not covering the search area. Just to back up a little bit, sometimes your gaps are your handling. Our handling is the problem. If you cleaned up some of your handling, then that's going to go better. Some of the other, and I can get to those later, are actually your dog's skills. Those are the types of gaps that we would find: our handling and our dog's skills. The number one hole is not covering the search area. What happens is our dog shows interest in an area, and it could be pulling odor, which means odor has blown, maybe you even found that hide, but then it also collected further down into an area. Or you say, "This would be such a great place for a hide," and your dog maybe showed a little bit of interest, maybe it wasn't because of picking up some odor there, and you're sure there's something there, so we stay there and we stay there and we stay there. I just did a class recently, and most of the people in the class stayed about a minute and a h…
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