08/15/2026
WHEN DID MAKING SCENT WORK MORE COMPLICATED BECOME A SIGN OF EXPERTISE?
In a recent training class, we were talking about scent work trials—
how teams progress through the levels, earn titles, and how things differ among the various scent work organizations (AKC, USCSS, UKC, CPE, NACSW).
When I asked my students if they had any questions, one student raised his hand and asked:
“Yes. What is a Q?”
It was a great reminder.
For those of us who have been involved in scent work for a while, a “Q” is such an ordinary term that we don't even think about it. Qualifying score. Q. Of course.
Except it isn't “of course” to someone who is new.
We forget how many words, abbreviations and phrases we use without thinking about them. Q, NQ, alert, fringe, pooling, converging odor, inaccessible hide, bracketing, sourcing—the list gets pretty long.
That student's question got me thinking about something bigger.
Scent work itself isn't particularly new (or complicated). Dogs have been using their noses for detection work for a very long time. But scent work as a recreational and competitive dog sport in recent years has grown tremendously.
Along with that growth has come an ever-expanding world of classes, seminars, workshops, trainers, webinars, social-media groups, podcasts and different training methodologies.
And, of course, a growing number of people being presented—or presenting themselves—as experts.
At the same time, advances in animal behavior research, learning theory and our understanding of canine olfaction have brought a lot of valuable information to scent work training. I think that's a good thing. I love the science behind scent work and understanding more about why our dogs do what they do.
But I also wonder if somewhere along the way we've started confusing complexity with expertise.
There IS real science behind scent work. Air movement matters. Temperature matters. Humidity, surfaces, topography, buildings, doors, vehicles, sunlight and shade can all affect what happens to odor. Canine behavior and learning theory matter too.
Understanding those things can absolutely make us better trainers and handlers.
But understanding complicated concepts and making something sound complicated are two very different things.
We can describe a dog's experience of odor using terms like volatile compounds, concentration gradients, turbulent airflow, convection and diffusion. There are times when those terms are appropriate and useful.
If I tell a new handler that her dog is “following an increasing odor concentration gradient through a turbulent plume until reaching the area of maximum concentration,” I might sound pretty knowledgeable. But what did I actually teach her?
It might be much more useful to say, “As your dog gets closer to the hide, she is finding stronger, more consistent odor. Watch how her behavior changes as she gets closer to the source.”
Now I've given her something she can actually watch for in her own dog.
I'm certainly not suggesting that we stop using technical terminology. Technical terminology has its place, and so does shorthand among experienced competitors. The problem comes when the terminology becomes a substitute for actually explaining something—or when complicated language starts being used as a way of establishing authority that won't be questioned.
A good instructor should eventually be able to answer a pretty simple question:
“What does that mean for me and my dog?”
If we can't translate what we know into something the person standing in front of us can understand and apply, how useful is that information to them?
I also think we need to be comfortable saying, “I don't know.”
Or, “This is what I think is happening, and here's why.”
Odor movement is complex. Search environments aren't controlled laboratories and dogs aren't measuring instruments. We can use established scientific principles, experience and observation to make very good educated interpretations of what we're seeing, but that doesn't mean every explanation of a dog's behavior is scientific fact.
Using more scientific-sounding words doesn't make speculation more scientific.
I've attended seminars where I could see students' eyes starting to glaze over as the speaker went deeper and deeper into technical terminology. People stopped asking questions. Some stopped taking notes. You could tell that a good portion of the room had been lost.
What surprised me was that the speaker didn't seem to notice.
I've also had exactly the opposite experience. I've listened to brilliant educators and researchers with PhDs discuss incredibly complicated subjects and make them understandable to almost everyone in the room.
They certainly knew the technical terminology. They probably understood the science at a level far beyond most of us sitting in the audience. But they didn't seem interested in proving how much they knew. They were interested in making sure we understood what they knew.
To me, that's the difference between knowing a subject and knowing how to teach it.
Teaching requires more than delivering information. You have to pay attention to the people receiving it. Are they following you? Are they asking questions? Is the terminology helping them understand what their dogs are doing, or are they spending so much effort trying to figure out the terminology that they've lost the actual lesson?
If I use terms like odor concentration gradient, convection, turbulence or v***r pressure because they help explain what's happening, great. But I should also be able to recognize when I'm losing someone and explain the same thing another way.
It's a little like going to a restaurant and being handed a menu so complicated that you need a culinary degree just to figure out what you're ordering. The chef may know every technical term for everything happening in that kitchen, but that doesn't necessarily make your dinner any better.
If students spend more time trying to decipher our terminology than understanding the concept we're trying to teach, I think we've missed the point.
The trainers and instructors I respect most aren't necessarily the ones who can make scent work sound the most complicated. They're the ones who understand their subject well enough to explain it in ordinary language, demonstrate it, use their own experience as examples, answer questions, and help the student recognize it when they see it happening with their own dog.
And sometimes that means remembering that the person standing in front of us may not even know what a “Q” is yet.
That's okay.
That's why they're there.
Our job isn't to show students how much WE know. It's to help THEM understand more when they leave than they did when they arrived.
