No.

Right.

We do.

We train them all clear.

Now, first of all, I think terminology needs clarified here because, again, I've seen some confusion on the Internet that when we train the all clear protocol, and it's probably not a good term for the actual protocol, what the dog isn't saying is no target is present.

What the dog is saying is I did not detect my target.

So we're not saying that anywhere is clear.

This is very cool.

That was fascinating.

Yeah.

So the lesson learnt from this project was go and do a reconnaissance before you train the dog.

So it was based in, um, the British Virgin Islands, Anegada, which is the very last island in the Virgin Island chains, and the last British One of the British Virgin Islands.

So in this case, Anegada is sand-based.

All the others are volcanic-based, but it's flat.

I mean, you can literally almost see across the island.

Yeah

And why would you say that is probably happening in most cases?

Again, I think it's communication of the target odor within its natural environment.

And you're not presenting that clear communication of what the target odor smells like during your training phase.

Part of the problem there is that you're just relying on the actual smell of a truffle, whereas as discussed, once it's buried... that smell changes both in quantity and quality.

And threshold is one problem in that if we always train the dog on a high threshold of odor, one, the dog's sniffing behavior reduces because I have no reason to run around sniffing hard.

Why work hard when I can just run around with my mouth open and hit a brick wall of odor and it's not difficult? So to increase sniff behavior, we reduce the amount of odor and we reduce the threshold.

Also, we've done research, and I was part of one of the research trials that demonstrate that if you train the dog on a large amount of threshold of target, and then the target is presented in a lower threshold, the dog will naturally ignore anything tenfold below the amount it's been trained on.

My question is, when you were saying three presentations and that's the transition phase, does the handler know where those things are or are you relying on the dog? Because obviously with truffles, if we're talking about finding an actual wild truffle that isn't known or doesn't you know another dog hasn't sniffed it out first and left it there that's not going to be super easy uh to do or how would you then counter that argument or is that just a case of knowing your dog and having a hell of a lot of reps in the bank um and knowing changes of behavior um yeah just curious to know how you would handle that question

Yeah.

Um, and I think that's very important.

You know, and even now, I mean, Poppy, she's what? Seven and a half, at over 10,000 confirmed finds under ice, under water, on the hot beaches, you know, is a solid, solid dog.

And even though, you know, she's probably one of the best dogs I've ever had the pleasure of working with, I still sniff on click on target odor more than any other part of the detection sequence because, you know, that nose to source is the most critical point, and I wanna get that really ingrained in her, that getting your nose to source or as close to source you can is the most important thing.

Not the sit, not the staring at it.

You know, nothing else is as important as me being able to read the change of behavior and the nose goes to source.

So I still do that more than anything else, and I think, again, you know, when I tell people this, that you don't wait for a trained final response, no, because in real life I don't always get a trained final response.

Yeah