Buried hides have been on my mind lately, particularly the gap between what we know is sitting underneath the grate and what our dogs are actually experiencing with their nose. As handlers, we have the advantage of understanding the physical setup. We know there is target odor down there, we know whether that odor is sitting beneath sand or within water, and we know that somewhere in that process it has to become available for the dog to find. What we cannot see is everything that happens in between.
That “in between” is what makes buried so interesting to me. Before the dog ever encounters odor in the air, it has already had to interact with either sand or water. Once it becomes airborne, the surrounding environment gets involved too. Air movement, temperature, nearby surfaces, people moving through the space and the position of the other containers can all influence where that information is ultimately available to the dog.
So rather than thinking only about the physical location of the hide, I find it more useful to think about buried as a sequence: SOURCE, SUBSTRATE, AIR, & DOG!
Each part of that sequence has the potential to change the odor picture. Sand creates one type of problem, water creates another, and then the air around the containers adds another layer again. By the time the dog responds to what they are smelling, quite a lot may have happened between the odor source we placed and the behaviour we see at the other end of the leash.
That is really what I want to explore here: not simply where the hide is, but how odor may become available to the dog and what that might help us understand about the way dogs work buried hides.
Visual model only - not a literal map of odor molecules.
The illustration above gives us a useful starting point. Sand and water are both used in SSANZ buried searches, but physically they are very different environments. Under the current rules, the sand hide uses dry river sand with the odor source contained inside a stainless-steel mesh tea infuser and covered by 25 mm of sand. In water, the scented Q-tips are loose in 100 mm of potable water. In both cases, a secured metal grid prevents the dog from physically accessing the substrate.
The image is deliberately conceptual. We cannot see the target odor moving through either substrate, and I do not want to pretend those blue lines are a literal representation of individual molecules. What they give us instead is a way of separating two very different parts of the problem.
Sand: moving through the spaces in between
A container full of sand looks like one solid mass, but at a smaller scale it is a collection of individual grains with spaces between them. Those pore spaces create possible pathways through the substrate. That gives us a very different mental picture from odor moving freely through open air.
Rather than imagining one plume travelling straight upwards from the scent vessel, it makes more sense to think about movement through an irregular network of tiny spaces. Those pathways may branch, narrow, reconnect or allow odor to become available at different points across the surface of the sand. Conditions such as moisture, compaction and temperature may also influence that picture, which is one reason I think we need to be cautious about assuming that odor must be strongest directly above the physical location of source.
The important piece for me is not whether we can perfectly predict the route. We probably cannot. It is recognising that the sand itself sits between source and the air the dog is eventually sampling. The dog does not have the same access to source that they would with an exposed hide, and the information available at the grate has already been influenced by that substrate.
Water: a different substrate, a different odor picture
Water gives us another problem entirely. The compounds contributing to an odor do not all interact with water in exactly the same way. Some can disperse or dissolve more readily than others, and volatile compounds that become available to the dog ultimately have to make the transition from the water into the air above it.
That is why I do not think water should be visualised in the same way as sand. Instead of narrow pathways through little air spaces, it is more useful to imagine a broader and more diffuse environment in which odor compounds can spread through the water before some of that information becomes available at the water-air interface.
Once again, the illustration is not telling us exactly where clove, birch or another target odor is at any given moment. It is helping us separate the concepts. In sand we have a porous medium with constrained pathways; in water we have a fluid environment where dispersion and air-water exchange become part of the picture.
Both ultimately lead to the same next stage: air.
Once odor is airborne, the search area gets involved
I think this is the other half of buried that can easily get lost when our attention stays fixed on the containers themselves. Once volatile odor becomes available in the air above the sand or water, the substrate is no longer the only thing influencing what the dog encounters. The surrounding environment now matters in exactly the way it does in any other nosework search.
Air movement can carry odor away from the hot container. Nearby surfaces may alter where it travels or where it becomes available. A person walking through the space can disturb the air. Ventilation, temperature differences and outdoor breeze can all change the picture again. At that point, the dog's problem is no longer simply “which container contains source?” It is also tracing airborne information back through an environment to work out where that source originated.
That is why I find it useful to separate buried into two questions. What does the substrate do to the odor before it reaches the air? And then, what does the surrounding environment do with that odor once it is airborne?
Those are related questions, but they are not the same one.
And then we have the dog
This is where the conversation becomes much more interesting to me from a training perspective.
Many dogs have learned a very particular pattern around source. They encounter odor, work toward stronger information, get closer, pinpoint and commit. If we have trained a final response, we may have spent a considerable amount of time reinforcing an even more specific picture, such as a strong nose freeze directly at source.
On an accessible hide, that can make perfect sense because the dog can physically get very close to the strongest available concentration. With buried, the source itself is inaccessible. The odor the dog is working has already interacted with either sand or water, and once it reaches the air it can be moved again by the surrounding environment. Yet we can still find ourselves expecting the dog to produce exactly the same behaviour we see when source is physically accessible.
If a dog investigates one edge of the grate, moves across the container, lifts their head to resample, leaves and returns, or compares one container with another before committing, I do not think we should automatically interpret that as imprecision. It may simply be what gathering enough information to solve that particular odor problem looks like for that dog.
The more useful question may not be, Why won't my dog put their nose exactly where I know the hide is? It may be, What information is my dog getting here, and what are they doing with it?
Change of behaviour matters
This is one of the things I particularly like about the SSANZ buried rules. A formal indication or trained final response is not required for the handler to call alert. Instead, the rules specifically reference the judge observing a change of behaviour from the dog, and that expectation continues as teams progress through the levels.
SSANZ defines change of behaviour as behaviour that makes it clear to the judge and/or handler that the dog has encountered odor. That language matters, because it shifts some of our attention away from waiting for one predetermined final response and back toward reading the dog throughout the process.
When a dog encounters odor, perhaps they slow down, change their breathing, alter their head position or suddenly become much more deliberate. Maybe they leave a container and immediately return to it. Maybe the way they sample the grate changes, or they repeatedly come back to the same area after comparing it with the containers around it. None of those behaviours need to be identical from dog to dog. What matters is understanding what change looks like in the individual dog in front of us.
What does that actually look like?
This is where video becomes much more useful to me than trying to describe every possible behaviour in words.
In the footage above, I want to look at several different Scent Squad teams working buried hides at our Corban Estate trial. Rather than watching for one universal “buried indication,” watch what happens to each individual dog when the odor picture begins to matter to them.
Where does the first change happen? Does the dog stay close to the container, or do they move away before coming back? Do they sample across the grate or favour one particular area? Do they compare neighbouring containers before settling on their answer? How much of the dog's decision appears to be made directly over the hot container, and how much information did they gather before they got there?
Looking at several dogs side by side is useful precisely because they will not all solve the problem in the same way. One dog may become very still and precise. Another may need more movement. Another may work out, come back and compare before committing. The common piece is not the final picture. It is that each dog has encountered enough information to work their way back to source.
Training the problem, not just the picture
Buried hides are a really good reminder that the dog's job is not to make odor look the way we expect it to look. Their job is to solve the scent problem, and our job is to recognise when they have enough information to give us the answer.
We can learn more about the way odor behaves. We can use illustrations to help make invisible processes a little easier for our human brains to picture. We can study video and look for patterns across different dogs. All of that can make us better handlers. But none of it gives us the dog's nose.
We still cannot stand where they are standing and smell exactly what they smell. So perhaps the most useful question in buried is not simply, Where is the hide? It is: Where is odor available to my dog, and what is my dog doing with that information?
Because between source, substrate, air and dog, there is a lot happening before we ever say, “Alert.”
A special acknowledgement also goes to Brittany Jones of Fitztography, whose photography is featured throughout this post.