Where Did the Odour Go?
Understanding Pooling Odour
Have you ever watched your dog searching and wondered why they’re so interested in an area where you know there’s no hide?Maybe they’re spending ages investigating a corner, working along a wall, or repeatedly returning to the same spot. You know the hide isn’t there, but your dog seems convinced there’s something worth investigating.
So what’s going on? Well, there’s a good chance they’re working with odour that has travelled away from its source.
Odour doesn’t always stay where we expect
One of the things we need to remember about nose work (scent work, i will use these interchangeably) is that odour doesn’t just sit neatly around the hide.
It moves!
Air movement, temperature, the environment and even the objects and their surfaces in the search area can all influence where odour travels and where it collects. Sometimes we get what we call pooling odour. This is where odour accumulates in an area away from the actual source. And this can make things quite interesting for our dogs!
Is your dog actually wrong?
This is something I think is really important for handlers to understand. Just because your dog is showing interest somewhere other than the hide doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing anything wrong. They might be detecting target odour. They just haven’t worked out where it’s coming from yet.
Think about that for a moment. We know where the hide is, especially in training. Our dogs don’t. They’re working with the information available to them, and sometimes that information can be a little complicated.
What should we do as handlers?
This is where I think we can learn a lot by simply watching our dogs. When we see them investigating somewhere unexpected, it’s tempting to step in and help. We might move towards the hide, encourage them to search a particular area, or assume they’ve become distracted.
But what if they’re actually working through an odour problem? What if that area they’re investigating is giving them information they need? Sometimes we need to give our dogs a little more time to work things out. That doesn’t mean we should never help our dogs. It means thinking about when our help is actually needed.
There’s always something to learn
One of the things I enjoy about scent work is that our dogs are constantly teaching us something. The more we watch them, the more we start to recognise how they respond to different odour pictures. And sometimes, what looks like a dog struggling might actually be a dog doing some really good problem solving.
So next time your dog becomes interested in an unexpected area, take a moment to watch what they’re doing.
You might be surprised by what you learn.
Want to know more?
In our latest K9 Nose Time podcast episode, Where Did the Odour Go?, Danielle and I talk about pooling odour, the challenges it can create, and what it means for our dogs and us as handlers.