# training buried problems



## Jennifer Michelson (Sep 20, 2006)

I would love some experiences with training buried problems. Remus is 20 months old and doing very well with the HR training. He has a good indication (bark with an added natural toe touch) and is proficient at buildings, outside of vehicles, cracked open trunks, high hides, etc. We have done some buried and it is more frustrating than anything else. 2 problems--1 he really wants to get his nose on the source (like I taught him to do!), so if it is buried (or inaccessible in rubble or under something), he digs/tries to access before barking. 2 he is moving pretty fast lately and if there is a scent pool, works hard to find the source in the tree, bushes etc. 

My plan is to do buried exclusively until he 'gets' it. He is pretty literal and when he learns something it really 'sticks'. We have been doing high and he is currently convinced that it is all up in the trees--he is even now leaping as high as he can to scent better...

My conflict is burying vs the digging. Shallow and he can dig it up, which reinforces the digging. I have buried the source too deeply and he gets no scent (or it is too faint for him to figure out with his inexperience). I tried burying it a 6ish inches and leaving it overnight to perc--ended up with a big scent pool which he searched very well but with nose off the ground (and getting a little stuck on a tree).

I have been told to have sources lightly covered for now and leave it our for an hour or so. And also it might help to add a verbal cue that it is buried. I have 'helped' him with the buried searches by asking him to search and directing him to scent low with my hand sweeping along the ground (never leading him to the source, being very general). I have been taught by people who believe in letting the dog learn on their own, being very patient in waiting for the dog to work it out, minimal cues etc, so I am trying to be very careful not to get my dog dependent on me for any search work. 

I believe that I will be able to fade out the real digging when we are more confident on the buried hides--when he digs it is not purely for self rewarding--he deeply sniffs the dirt as he moves it and sometimes tastes it. There are some hides where he scrapes the surface and decides he is right pretty quickly and barks.

I am a bit frustrated with the buried, because everything else has been so easy so far for us. He is my first HR dog (2nd SAR dog) and, again we have been moving along nicely. Remus is a high drive, very motivated dog. This is a little bit of a hang up and mainly due to my inexperience, so any training tips/experiences would be greatly appreciated. I am enjoying the complicated nature of HR training and really understanding how different it is from live find.

Thanks!


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## Nancy Jocoy (Apr 19, 2006)

This is just some ramblings because buried is still long on the learing curve........(but see way below what helped the most)

How much have you done with small scattered bones. That seems to help me with getting into the right frame of mind for buried - working more focused with head low to naturally slow him down and get used to working in tha rhythm?

Have you also worked plenty of problems where there is NO visual cue to the dog (something to alert ON like a rock or a tree stump to mark it for you?)---Where he can't push aside material for a visual confirmation?

I have allowed a little confirmatory scratch-n-sniff then prompted the alert --

We have also done lightly covered "pour outs" instead of leaving stuff out overnight ... make a series of holes/fill/ mix in some "juice" in one and the blanks are just the dirt you need to proof on anyway. 


Some of what has helped us really has been working old cemeteries (There is a good seminar in September in VA at Canfields with Lisa Higgins where you get to work pre civil war shallow unmarked slave graves. ---- The scent pool IS huge but it would be even bigger with a freshly buried person so they have to have the time to work it out.

*And for buried ....... well Jim is probably the resident expert on that so I am waiting to her HIS advise and shut up*.


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## Bob Scott (Mar 30, 2006)

Also consider the length of time the training aid is buried. To short of time and the dog can start associating the scent of disturbed soil as the "find" and not the actual training aid. 
It's not different in that aspect then proofing off of any sort of container or surgical gloves that many use to handle their training aids.


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## Jim Delbridge (Jan 27, 2010)

My dial-up connection at home is giving me fits, so this may not go through.

Terms to know in buried problems (sorry, but to do buried well is scientific and requires some foundation):

Porosity - measure of spaces between objects

Permeability - measure of how well a substance can flow thorugh a medium.

Take a styrofoam cup and cut the top half off. Look in the foam and you see lots of air space, so styrofoam has high porosity. But, put coffee/tea/whiskey in the bottom part of the cup and it stays there....poor permeability.

Diffusion - the measure of how a substance of high concentration moves away towards volumes of lesser concentration. Example - drop an open vial of red food coloring in someone's clean swimming pool and watch the red dye move away from the bottle. Wait long enough and the color of the dye in the bottle and the pool will be the same....this is called reaching equilibrium thorugh diffusion.

Oh, and I truly hate the term expert....I've been labeled that multiple times in corporate work and it really means a drip under pressure that people can fingerpoint at when things don't go the way they expected them to EVEN if you told them it wasn't going to fly....there's rarely any extra money in it...And, if you were right, people then take it for granted.


So, one example was "I buried the source too deep and the dog couldn't find it due to the dog's experience level." - That could be true OR the source wasn't left in the shaft long enough to diffuse either along the seam (usually highest permeablity location) or through the medium for whatever reason. I buried a long femur 36 inches to the top of the bone being very careful to leave no trace of my work. I waited a month and ran dogs known to make buried finds over the area and there was no scent behavior.....It was summer and a very dry month. I waited another dry summer month - no interest. I waited a third month with 3.7 inches of rain, the last being a week prior...both dogs found the buried bone on separate days. Did the dogs suck at scent? No. The scent had not yet diffused to the surface as it was an historic level bone(no tissue, no adipose, no marrow), the soil the bone was resting at was cooler than the soil above it.....hot goes to cold....and the soil was dry, so moisture did not help diffusion.

When I do bone burieds, I usually do them a month prior to working them to allow diffusion to take place. Realize that if you are working your dog on bones that they have been in their resting place for years or decades. If I'm in a hurry, I'll bone distilled water down the shaft to speed up diffusion. (If I do this, I dig at least three other holes and fill them with water as well to avoid creating a dog that finds wet spots...so far the blanks have always been futile work for me, but it keeps the naysayers at bay.)

Ok, I tend to be very old school in how I train my dogs in that they work only dry bones and cleaned teeth (microwaved to cook the pulp out of the inside or I consider them a decomp source) for their first year of training from 5-6 weeks of age to one year. At the end of that year, they usually have already started buried work with teeth and bone. I consider one of my dogs ready to start buried when they can find a single tooth on surface (which I consider harder than buried for reasons we can go into later). At that point they get to work areas of decreasing overlaps where I can use outside markers to insure their targeting at source. I set up a grid system with flags 20 feet or more out from the source location in 4 directions. First overlap I start with on burieds are 10 feet apart, then 8 feet apart, then 6 feet apart, down to 2 feet apart. I stop at 2 feet horizontal overlap because the hardest cemetery I ever worked had the bodies side-to-side where the heads were 2 feet apart. The historian that set me up was trying not to crack up at me and my dog because my dog literally was looking side-to-side due to scent from buried skulls so close. Fortunately for me, she was better at this than I was and committed to targeting by literally dancing from side-to-side with her paws, one paw landing over one skull and ther other over the next skull. We ended up doing three rows like this with about 20 bodies per row. I had to go with the dog and marked each target with a flag. The hsitorian finally let me know this town had been very frugual and buried people as they died immediately next to the last person that died, families were not separated.

Anyway, I realize that most dog teams train opposite the way I do and train their dogs first on tissue and mix in skeletal (and some dental). When using a bloody source such as a placenta as your burial, realize that it is very blood rich and with high porosity and high permeability soil the scent will travel very fast and go quite a ways. If it's everywhere and the dog can't target then consider the medium it's in.

I advise against starting out in sand. A lot of people because it's easy to dig in. Realize that sand is highly porous, highly permeable, and dogs love to dig in it. I thought I'd be creative with my second dog and poked some teeth two feet into a sand pile I was using to do some concrete work with. My dog showed me. She located the teeth by digging a six foot tunnel from the other side of the sand pile to the teeth. It took me 2 months to break the dig as it had been so much fun for her. Oh, and she just had to show off by taking one of the teeth and spitting it at me when she found it.

To inhibit the dig, realize that a buried does not have to mean getting out your post holes diggers and cutting a 3 foot deep shaft in soil. Go find a nice embankment where they are preventing soil erosion by using large gravel that's like six inches in diameter...small boulders comes to mind. Take your work gloves and pull away some of the rocks, place your source and cover it up with the rocks. You now have a high porosity, high permeability buried that hurts the dog's paws to try to dig through..a natural correction.

Before I start my dogs on their buried grids, I transition them into the concept by using depressions with rotting leaves, wood debris, rocks, whatever is present naturally. The rotting leaves are nice to force them to work through methane to find dry bones and teeth that put off an entirely different scent picture than decomp. 

Overall to do buried work, the dog has to slow down. A fast down must be slowed down, so start with stronger sources that can be muted except near the source. If you must use a placenta then look for soil with a high clay content that will inhibit diffusion. Select sites that will channel the scent into predictable paths.
Example, I tortured my two dogs recently by burying a used placenta (3-weeks aged and decomposed) in a wash with trees on either side, but not a lot of root growth in the wash itself. I buried the source 27 inches per my tape measure - soil put into a bucket as I brought it out with post-hole diggers, continued digging till I got to my desired depth by tape measure, got all my tools out of there, moved the bucket, went and dug up the used to placenta from it's previous hole....It's interesting to see when the flies show up...on this occassion, the flies showed up at six inches above the source. I used a plastic trowel to recover the source carefully...that's all I use that trowel for; thus, preventing contamination. The placenta was like pink sponge at this point. Anyway, put it in it's new hole, pour soil from the bucket, packed it down every couple of inches with a handy dried branch that got burned soon after. I replaced the 2 inches of rotting leaves that had been in the wash prior to my excavation and dropped a couple of dead brances over that for nice measure and to help me remember my spot in the woods. I waited two weeks, we had a very nice 1 inch downpour (we'd been experiencing drought conditions). I waited three days after the rain and started the experienced dog an acre away to see what he could find. Not surprsingly, all the trees were conducting scent up the bark in the immediate vicinity due to chimney effect from sun and wet soil diffusion. The leaves now had scent in them due to some of the scent wicking up the roots into the leaves. Scent behavior was evident in about an 80 foot radius from the burial. Scent was stronger at the downslope of the wash. Experienced dog showed me scent perimeter then worked across area till he came to the downslope of the wash and worked up the wash and past the burial then turned back due to stronger scent behind him (area search dogs that work a scent cone could realistically do this problem as they work the border of scent versus no-scent....they tend to circle the area in problems like this. Dog showed me chimney effect on the six trees in sun in the immediate vicinity of the burial. He alerted on the one that was 18 inches away, but I told him "closer." He went back to work and happened to disturb some of the leaves covering the burial and the light bulb went on. He moved the leaves aside and began his own detailed search, locating the buried, targeting the seam. Total time to find was 18 minutes 11 seconds. Time to get in the right area was around 2 minutes. I stayed back from the dog an average of 40 feet and observed until he gave first bark. I came in, he was trying to decide between tree and ground, chose tree and then I told him closer. Time from that to finding the actual buried was about 2 mintues of fine searching on his part. 

I would not work only buried at this point, but I would avoid highs. When the dog starts doing look-ups in scent rather than nose-ups, it's time to back off the highs for a while. I would put sources all in locations the dog can not quite reach which are detrimental to digging. The problem with fixating on buried and only buried is it can create a dog that then alerts on scent pools with no source because the scent concetration is similar. But, if you can teach the dog the concept of finding the highest diffusion concentration of scent, buried or not, then it's light bulb will come on. Look for wood piles, lumber or firewood, stacks of rocks, rubble piles (you can have a field day with scent migration in a rubble pile.)
I would avoid bloody sources right now and stick with wet teeth, bones, dried tissue (take one of those placentas and make sun jerky with it - if it gets wet, it will get very strong again.)

On cemeteries, orthodox jewish cemeteries are full of non-embalmed remains with false bottom coffins as that culture wishes to return to the earth. Find a rabbi and pitch what you do with your dog. Wait until you've fixed the digging as you'd have to guarantee that your dog won't destroy their grounds. Any time you work a cemetery, be respectful of whose there as you never know who is watching. When ever I work a cemetery, I spend time asking questions about the beliefs of those there regardless as to whether it's an abandoned ghost town cemetery from before our Dust Bowl, or native american burial grounds, or a contemporary active cemetery. I worked a criminal search near an active cemetery and afterwards asked the cemetery if my dog could quickly work the unmarked graves. They took me to an area, my dog located five graves in four minutes. They were impressed and I could put in my log that my dog was on task that day of the search. It was win-win for everyone.

Civil war graves can be in lead coffins with bodies that were embalmed with arsenic, so be careful if the soil is wet.

I've also worked some pakastani graves that were not embalmed, so ask around to see what cemeteries you can work and who might be buried there.

An old established grave is usually mostly bones (except for adipocere formation in wet soil). The grave is like a bowl where the soil becomes saturated with scent over time. But even then I find the dogs have their favorite locations in a grave to alert on. My dogs invariably target the head because of the bone and teeth density there. A lot of dogs started on tissue/decomp first tend to target the pelvic region as that's where the bulk of the tissue and adipose tissue decomposed and saturated those bones.

The key with buried TRAINING is to have no visible markers at the source site, but have a system establshed where you can verify the dog's accuracy. You have to decide how accurate you expect your dog to be. Allow it to alert three feet away from seam of the shaft or the soruce and the dog will continue to alert at that concetration level. Expect it to be closer and the dogs usually work it out if you have the patience.

With burieds also realise that if the soil is colder than the air then air pressure will keep the scent down in the soil. Realize that if the air is very humid and the soil is very dry, then humidty will keep the scent down. Work a buried where the soil is warm compared to the pre-dawn air temp and the soil is damp compared to the air, then life is good and you'll think your dog rules the world of buried. It's basically the scent is there for the dog to find and if it understands the game then it will want lots of paychecks.


Even with all that, I've just touched on buried work.

Hope it helped rather than confused. 

Jim Delbridge


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## Nancy Jocoy (Apr 19, 2006)

Add - Lots of neat info. I guess the expert comment is that I really only started learning burieds late last year (other than the typical certification type problem) and I think it is something that takes a lot of time and study to get good at. 

A comment you made earlier about bones a while back stuck though and working with dry bone has really helped my dog slow done and work more thoroughly - before we did a lot of that he would just run over small sources. Now he can still work at a good clip but learns to put on the brakes and detail on his own.

We are now at the point of trying to clean up everything we can and build a body of knowledge for the next dog.

We have mainly clay soil here so scent tends be held .....and a lot of strange underground water movement (lots of streams that just disappear and come out downhill, etc.) 

Anyway - the old pre civil war slave graves. Neat thing there is no embalming, relatively shallow.


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## Jennifer Michelson (Sep 20, 2006)

Wow, great info. Thanks all!! I will have to go back and read Jim's 'book' a few times to make sure I get all the info!

Bob--smart ass Remus has already been testing the disturbed soil thing. I always have false holes/disturbed soil in the area where I plant the source. He often shows some interest in the false holes. On our last training he indicated on the disturbed soil near the source for the first time. I waited him out and he continued searching and hit the real hole. My issue is not being confident on what I am going to get with each buried.....time vs depth vs source type vs soil type vs wet or dry.. I hate being new!!

Jim-- quick questions--I have disarticulated hand bones from the bone room....would those be good to work with for slowing him down with small surface finds? Are these good to bury--how long do I bury dried bone to be sure scent comes up? We have mostly clay soil here, I can do woods with heavy leaf litter, I have a mulch pile I can use....

He does have a tendency to want to touch/taste etc his sources, especially when they are new to him. Obviously I have been as careful as possible to keep him from doing this....I worry if I scatter small bones he will pick them up--clearly I want to reward the find and get him to indicate instead of playing with it. Is this just cuing the indication or can I set it up so he cant pick up the bone?

I will be back for more!!!! BTW--I have no problem with terms etc-I was a scientist in my former (pre-kids) life and love details!!


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## Jim Delbridge (Jan 27, 2010)

Buried is as much an art as science. The art comes into play in how your work your dog without affecting the outcome, but thoroughly searching the area. The science becomes essential to explain to those that call you out what the optimum working conditions for your dog to get into scent. Someone on the the K9 Forensic list moved from the east coast to Oklahoma. We got together to work blinds to see what the other dog team was all about. She'd heard me talk about finding a single tooth before, so she set one up in a track of muddy road. Fortunately, for me and the dog, she used a decomp tooth and it was mud, so the moisture made it an easier problem. Rather than having to direct the dog to grid, it picked up scent and went immediately into its own 2-foot wide grids through the area. The other handler wasn't that impressed that we made the find. She was floored that the dog went into its own tight gridding system. That dog and I had done over 300 cemeteries by that point, so she knew the drill and made me look good. I simply played Howard Cosell and did play-by-play commentary as she worked. Getting her (and me) to that point was thousands of baby steps of training.

My current dog and I worked a nasty area search last year where we were assigned 40 acres of large boudlers, woods, and streams that went in and out of rock. My dog only hit on one place and this was a waterfall where the pool below again dissappeared into the rocks. It took me a good 10 minutes to explain to IC that this meant remains were above us and not downstream. They requested we scale the waterfall (60 foot climb that took us about a 100 yds around to get up to. Up there I found the water source coming out of more rocks by my dog hitting on the water source and not above it. I informed IC and went back to clearing my 40 acres. I learned later that they had another dog team confirm our findings. The other dog team told them the same thing, but they still drained the pool below the waterfall to find nothing....which I told them would be the case. I was only allowed out of my investigator duties for one day, so didn't get to go back with my dog. Way uphill an area of lots of bones was found. The dog team that worked it ended up selecting animal bones. There was lots of hog activity in the area. My dog looked good because the subsequent dog team confirmed our find and it was assumed there was human bones mixed in with all the animal, but they didn't feel confident in working more dogs to sort them out....not my call.

If I was in your area, I would start setting up problems with bones in water upstream and see if you and your dog could work the scent downstream up to the originating point even though it goes in and out of the rocks.

Oh, and another way to lessen digging is to put bones in a suet cage and nail them down in about 18 inches of water on a beach. Stake them down so that turtles aren't tempted to take them. Leave the area for a couple of hours and work shoreline. As the source is in only 18 inches of water, the dog should be able to target the source without digging. My dogs will try to pull the source out at about a foot of water, but not deeper than that. Some dogs will just go under. It depends on the dog. I would expect to see the dog both taste and snorkel near the source. Snorkeling is what I call when the dog shoves their nose in the water and blows bubbles to work scent in water.

As you stated you have a lot of ground water, working shoreline and buried is very similar for you.

For the clay, the biggest problem is in summer when the clay actually adhears to the source and hardens as the moisture is baked out. Here, places with high clay content will crack in the summer then swell back together after rains. I've dug out sources that were wrapped in clay that it almost appeared like a pot around it. Several times I simply saved them in that condition and used them as surface sources to teach the dog to deal with the clay barrier.

Jim


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## Jim Delbridge (Jan 27, 2010)

**
Jim-- quick questions--I have disarticulated hand bones from the bone room....would those be good to work with for slowing him down with small surface finds? Are these good to bury--how long do I bury dried bone to be sure scent comes up? We have mostly clay soil here, I can do woods with heavy leaf litter, I have a mulch pile I can use....
**

A good use of the small finger bones is to wedge them in cracks. Look for ground locations with cracks deep and wide enough that you can wedge your finger bone down into them but the dog can not pull them out with it's teeth/tongue. It doesn't have to be a natural setting to train for grid work. One exercise I like to do periodically is to place single clean teeth in concrete driveway expansion channels. You can even make them easy for beginning dogs by pouring water over the teeth and into the concrete about 30 mintues before working. ( I'd advise working this in shade as a single tooth in sun will give you fits. The scent will rise straight up from the tooth and be no where else around it. If the dog hits the thermal and follows its nose straight down then it can locate the tooth, BUT most dogs are moving as they hit the thermal. The nose drop is not past the tooth and the dog misses it. Once in a while I'll set this up to torment handlers to see if they'll cue their dog. If they are honest then I'll move to create shade for the tooth with my body between the sun. The scent falls and spreads such that the dog suddenly can locate it.) 
Some driveways are not kept clean, so dirt, debris, gravel can begin filling in the cracks. So, you can use this to migrate the dog a bit further into buried without having to worry about losing your source except maybe if the dog eats the tooth.

If you have a lot of deep woods where the soil is more compost than aggragate, you can use this as well. The diffusion can be a booger though. Be prepared for targeting to be off at first much like a water problem.

Jim


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## Megan Bays (Oct 10, 2008)

Wow! Great thread!


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## Bob Scott (Mar 30, 2006)

"Porosity" 
"Permeability"
"Diffusion"

Sounds like the soils class when I was taking horticulture classes :wink: but very applicable in this instance.
Great read!


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