Be Curious

Being chronically curious isn’t just a philosophy for me. It’s a practical skill, especially when I’m teaching odor.

Every search is a conversation. When something doesn’t go the way I expect, curiosity is the difference between learning and blaming. Why did the odor behave that way? Why did the dog commit there and not here? Was the hide placed in a way that created an unintended picture, or did I just uncover a hole in my training? Those questions matter. A lot.

Odor doesn’t follow our plans, and dogs don’t read our training procedures. If I default to assumptions instead of inquiry, I risk teaching and then reinforcing the wrong lesson. Curiosity keeps me honest. It forces me to look first at my setup and my criteria before I decide the dog “made a mistake.”

This is especially critical with young dogs. Puppies and green dogs are building their first mental models of how odor works and how problem-solving feels. If I rush to fix a behavior without understanding what caused it, I’m shaping patterns that will show up later under pressure. Being curious slows me down just enough to make sure the dog is actually learning what I think I’m teaching.

A lot of that work never makes it online.

There are countless sessions that end up on the cutting room floor because social media isn’t built for process. You can’t post uncertainty or troubleshooting without a flood of commentary about what you “should have done,” usually without context, and often without curiosity. So people post clean reps, tidy outcomes, and finished pictures.

Training dogs, especially in odor, is messy by design. The mistakes, the near-misses, the “that didn’t work the way I thought it would” moments are where the real information lives. But because those moments don’t survive the rules and pressures of online spaces, trainers start believing they’re the only ones dealing with them.

They aren’t.

Curiosity is what keeps me grounded when a search goes sideways and when the internet gets loud. It reminds me that my job isn’t to look competent; it’s to be effective and fair to the dog in front of me.

So when I say be curious, I mean it literally.

Be curious.