K9Sensus Foundation

05/30/2026

So grateful we found Mexi-Q to cater our event. The food has been amazing!!

05/28/2026

Thoughtful Thursday: When the Dog Tells You Something the Label Can't

If you only had one tool to diagnose a stuck behavior, it shouldn't be a quadrant.

I wrote about this in a couple of different posts and in a blog post published on my website. The four corners of the operant quadrangle were built to describe what has already happened. They aren't a tool for telling you what to do next. I've gotten some interesting feedback from it. (I made people think!) I was making a point about which tool you reach for first. When I talk about tools, I'm not limiting them to the way people usually think of them. My tools are the ENTIRE realm of behavior analysis.

Labels tell you what category a behavior falls into. They don't tell you what the dog knows, or what you need to change tomorrow morning.

Take Raven on the wobble platform. She's 11 months. We've been working on environmentals, and a few months ago, she was bailing off a platform. By the label, the session was clean R+. The food was reinforcing. The textbook would say I was doing the work correctly. But the behavior was deteriorating in front of me, and her repeated behavior was telling me why. My body pressure was the actual punisher. The food was riding on top of it. The label didn't see any of that. Raven kept telling me that what I was doing wasn't working.

I was stuck in the 'but this has always worked' and wasn't listening. To be clearer, I wasn't observing....

If you can read the dog in real time against criteria you've already defined, you can catch what the label can't see. The quadrant only tells you what consequence you applied. It doesn't tell you what the dog received.

This is the work. You watch the dog more carefully than the quadrant, and you trust what you see when the two disagree.

When was the last time the dog corrected you about what the problem actually was?

Be curious.

05/27/2026

Someone is excited to start setting up for @ MUTC

All our students, please travel safe!

He’s also excited to be the only dog on travel with me.

05/25/2026

Wishing everyone a safe and meaningful Memorial Day. Today, we pause to honor the heroes who gave everything in service to our country. Their sacrifice inspires us every day as we work to support the K9 teams and handlers who continue to serve our communities. We remember. We honor. We are grateful.

05/24/2026

Final preparations are under way! Loading the trailer tomorrow.

05/21/2026

Thoughtful Thursday: What Does 'Good' Actually Mean?

Two trainers can both call a behavior "clean" and be describing completely different dogs.

One means the dog hit source within a body length and held a sit for three seconds with no handler input. The other means the dog showed change of behavior, slowed, and offered something near the hide. Both call it clean. Both are honest. If those two trainers try to coach each other, the conversation goes nowhere. They aren't actually talking about the same thing.

This is the operational definition problem.

An operational definition takes a fuzzy word, good, reliable, committed, fluent, and turns it into something measurable. Not "the dog has a clean final response." But: within 1.5 seconds of determining the strongest source of odor, the dog begins to sit with paws within 12 inches and holds until released. This isn't 'my dog sat". It's the only way you can tell whether the dog is improving, plateauing, or the behavior is starting to drift.

Without operational definitions, your standard may move with your mood. The behavior degrades, and you don't catch it until it falls apart, usually in the field in front of all your trainer friends. And every word in your conversation with another trainer means something slightly different to each of you. So the conversation can't go anywhere useful.

You've heard me talk about competent, proficient, and fluent. They have definitions. Competent means the dog does the behavior under defined conditions. Proficient means the behavior holds across contexts. Fluent means it's fast, repeatable, and resilient under pressure. Each tier has measurable criteria, and the behavior has measurable criteria as well. So we ALL KNOW what we are measuring.

Most training 'discussions' in our community are fruitless because nobody agrees on what they're talking about in the first place. Operational definitions are how training stops being opinion. They're how you actually know.

What's a behavior in your dog you've been calling "good" — and could you define it the same way twice?

Be curious.

05/21/2026

Check out some new research for Explosives Dogs and buried targets.

" A driving force of v***r transport was confirmed to be evapotranspiration, as conditions with moisture and sunlight resulted in higher concentrations of analyte present. Additionally, stronger adsorption to soil indicated that environments with a higher sand content are likely to have more successful detection of buried explosives. Complementary canine olfactory trials were conducted for comparison to the laboratory study. This work points to environments where detection of a buried explosive device is more likely to be successful or limited."

05/21/2026

Heads up

THE TIME IS HERE! 2026 conference registration is now open. Don't wait. Slots are first-come, first-served. We have another great line-up of instructors this year. Thanks to all our great sponsors who help make this event happen. We look forward to seeing you all there. Share this post with all your friends. Visit us at www.atk9.org to register today.

05/20/2026

In a week student will arrive at MUTC! Super excited for this years training!

05/20/2026

Stop asking which quadrant you’re in. Start asking what the dog is actually responding to and if your behavior is increasing or decreasing. Those are not the same question.

https://www.k9sensus.org/post/labels-don-t-train-dogs-you-do