“I love dogs, I want to be a dog handler.”
“Hang on a minute, you want me to do what?
With how much training time!?”
While typically only trained on a handful of odours, detection dogs are expected to find tens or hundreds of different quantities and variants of those few substances in any number of hide locations and scenarios. In most disciplines the vast majority of the training takes place in a small number of training venues, with a small number of training samples, packed in to a busy training day. Using this set-up, the dog’s performance must be suitably maintained across different variants of their targets, in operational settings with often very low target density. To make this task more challenging, training time is generally very limited, as dogs that are training are not working.
This talk touches on different approaches to maintain operational capability and discusses ongoing research in odour memory to understand how we might split limited training time to maximise training for operational effectiveness.