Blank Room Comparison

Last weekend, I attended a great seminar with the amazing Julie Symons. I highly recommend her classes at FDSA.  One of the more interesting lessons was a blank room comparison where we ran a blank room, and then later ran a regular search in that same room.  Here are Iona’s two searches for comparison.  
In the blank room search, it is interesting to note that she never really stops moving or hones in on an area.  She can seem like she is in odor sometimes, because when there is no odor, she starts working harder to vacuum up any stray molecule.  She also starts checking deeper into corners and starts popping up more and more often as the search gets longer and longer.  After I called finish, I gave her a treat even though she did not find anything. 
For the regular hide search, she gets on odor almost instantly and starts sourcing.  In a room this small, I would expect her to find a hide in about 20 seconds.  She does the same with the second hide.  After that, she actually looks pretty similar to how she looked in the blank room search (moving and moving without stopping).  I purposefully overworked her a bit in both of these searches because I figure that I will do that in a trial and I want to know what her limit is before she falses.  In retrospect, I should have stretched the blank room search out to 3 minutes to see what she would have done.  

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