K9 Detection Collaborative

“What am I doing that’s setting my dog up where I feel like I need to reward for effort?” Our hosts, Robin Greubel and Stacy Barnett, explore what it means to “ask your dog a question” in training. Rather than guessing why a dog is struggling or rushing to a fix, they recommend deliberately testing one criterion at a time to find out what the dog understands and where the breakdown is. Stacy shares how simplifying the setup revealed that Jack needed to see a container to recogni...

“There are 100 ways to train a dog. And you’ve got to train the dog that’s in front of you.” Our hosts, Robin Grubel and Stacy Barnett, unpack the role of markers in scent-detection training—and why a clicker or verbal “yes” isn’t a magic button. They explain the difference between a marker that signals the end of a behavior and a cue that asks the dog to do something. They also discuss how a click can accidentally become a cue for a trained final response if it’s used the same way eve...

“Ultimately, it is an art. There is an artistic side to dog training.” Our hosts, Robin Greubel and Stacy Barnett, are back with Paul Bunker of Chiron K9 to discuss the finer points of calibration and communication between dog and handler! Paul revisits breed temperament. As a few quick examples, pointers and chocolate Labradors are "pedantic," holding out for their exact target odor, while spaniels and Malinois generalize liberally and are more prone to false alerts. That liberal drift is ex...

“Don't trust your dog. Trust your training.” Our hosts, Robin Greubel and Stacy Barnett, sit down with Paul Bunker of Chiron K9. His path from an English farm to British military explosives work eventually led him into conservation detection projects around the globe. Deemed too short for the London police, Paul joined the British military in 1982 and was later tasked, after a fatal minefield accident, with training dogs to clear a safe path to stranded casualties. It was thanks to that proje...

What to listen for: "The future of leak detection isn't one technology replacing another. It's collaborating with this whole process and working together to save our water." In this second half of their conversation, our hosts, Robin Greubel and Stacy Barnett, talk with Lolita Shaffer to move past the why of water leak detection dogs and into the how. A Cherokee Nation–funded study sent two golden retrievers across 30 miles of pipe in five days, flagging areas where acoustic crews later confi...