Melissa Sowa has been judging since buried hides had to be placed using a drill. She's competed through Summit in NACSW and detective in AKC, and judges for AKC, C-WAGS, and USCSS. When she talks about what works and what doesn't in this sport, she has seen it from just about every angle there is.

And a lot of what she comes back to is the same idea. Take your time. At the start line. Covering your search area. Moving up the levels. Paying your dog. It shows up everywhere in this conversation and in everything she sees as a judge.

We also spend a lot of time on the handler side of things, because in scent work we talk a lot about training the dog but there is just as much to work on as the human half of the team.

What we talk about:

• Detective search coverage, what covering an area really means, and what Melissa does before she calls finish
• One hide syndrome, why it's real, what causes it, and what to do about it
• How competing at Summit changed how detective search areas feel to her
• Memory as a skill, she said she has a horrible memory and walked us through exactly how she trained herself out of it
• How you start the search is how it's going to go
• What organizational psychology taught her about rewarding her dog
• The pay discrepancy between training and trialing and what to do about it
• Don't rush the levels, why staying and getting more practice can make a real difference
• Why you might pay for a lack of nos at the lower levels
• What she sees handlers do that costs them Qs, things that have nothing to do with the dog
• Influencing your dog, her thoughts, and how she idiot proofs her own dogs in training
• USCSS and the stupid handler trick, yes this is a real competition element
• Two judge stories, one involving a metal detector, one involving a monsoon
• Seven questions with Melissa, signature distractors, what her dogs would say about her, and what happened when she played a kitten meowing and frogs chirping as audio distractors at trials

Find Melissa:

vforcedogtraining.com

Facebook: VForce Dog Training

Alert! Scent Work is a podcast for competitors, the parking lot conversations you'd never get to have at a trial, with the judges and community members you wish you had more time with.

Listen to the podcast and find everything here: https://www.AlertScentWork.com

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