Why does this website exist?

When Ziva joined our family in 2013, I was fortunate enough to live in Eastern Iowa, one of the nation’s “sweet spots” for dog training and competition opportunities. In 2011, Nancy Reyes had given a presentation to our training club in which she mentioned nosework, and friends immediately became involved with the sport. The club was soon offering classes and supporting the development of local trials. Thus, Ziva grew up next to nosework.

However, as my friends and their dogs achieved success in the sport, Ziva and I did not. Instructors struggled to help me find something that would motivate her, as she was uninterested in either food or toys, and applause only helped for a while. Competing seemed to really stress her out. It wasn’t unusual for her to refuse to eat the morning of a trial. We tried every food we could think of to change her mind and ran every medical test we could think of, but nothing seemed to help. Finally, I more or less gave up — our friends were having such a great time in nosework but Ziva and I were relegated to the sidelines.

In 2018, our other dog, Zac, died suddenly of hemangiosarcoma. As we all grieved, Ziva’s unwillingness to eat became an absolute refusal. This time, when a veterinary internal medicine specialist took biopsy samples of her intestines, she was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. It took a while to find the right treatment; Ziva’s recovery was slow and was complicated by a particularly bitter winter. Desperate for some mental stimulation and light exercise, I pulled out our old nosework supplies. Within a week, she was eagerly searching the first floor. Within a month, she was searching the whole house pretty much every day.

By the spring of 2019, I had an entirely different dog at my side, healthy, motivated and loving nosework! A new puppy came to live with us and Ziva showed him the ropes. Isolating at home in 2020, we enjoyed the many wonderful games and even titling options similarly frustrated nosework instructors offered online. In 2021, I retired and we moved to Arizona, where Ziva earned her AKC Scent Work Master title in the next spring and where we met wonderful new friends, an active, joyful nosework community.

As I see it, nosework saved Ziva’s life, and has given us both so much — I had become a Smellevangelist. I wanted to tell the world how important nosework is, to write a testimonial. I could see the outline — “from agony and despair to being the nth Standard Poodle to earn the SWM title!” Now, I just needed to solve for “n”.

But that turned out to be trickier than I had ever imagined, as the AKC doesn’t publish anything beyond a title count by breed each year. Putting tallies from those reports together, it looked like Ziva was likely somewhere in the first 15 “Non-sporting Group” (i.e. Miniature or Standard) Poodles to be awarded the SWM. “One of the first 15” just wasn’t the hook I was looking for, though.

I asked the AKC how I could find out more specifics, and they replied that New Titles are reported to each breed parent club every month, so I should ask the parent breed club. Emails I sent to the Poodle Club of America officials to ask about the report went unanswered, though.

I griped about this to friends, as one does, and they shared their own frustrations with the difficulty of compiling results for Scent Work. Apparently I also mentioned this a bit too frequently with my sainted husband, Doug, aka The Coder. In what I imagine was self-defense, he started to look at what it would take to “scrape” the AKC’s Scent Work trial results and compile that into what we hoped would be useful reports. I mean, if we were going to do the work for me and my dog — Ziva was the 5th Non-Sporting group Poodle to earn the SWM — we might as well do it for everybody.

On February 29, 2024, we published our initial reports, calling this the “Demo Dog Database,” a nod to the unique phrase used only in AKC Scent Work along with the “information gathering” nature of the reports, similar to the role of the Demo Dog in a search. There were definitely some hiccups; we didn’t realize the AKC Trial Results don’t include the first weekend of trials that were held in September of 2017. But we found them elsewhere and entered them manually. And then it turned out that many of us in the Scent Work community didn’t actually understand the criteria for titles, so that our title calculations were inaccurate, even though they were supported by all the data. In the end, though, community discussion and analysis helped encourage not just clarification but change, at least in one AKC award criteria, and we hope that may continue.

We initially chose to make the reports available as Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf) files on a shared Google Drive simply because both format and platform are device-independent. One big frustration eventually emerged, however: it is entirely possible to query a Google Drive about something and get what seems to be a false negative result. As a result, people thought we had left their dog out of the reporting when, really, the information was there, but was not being returned to them in a timely fashion but they had no indication the search wasn’t over yet. So we made the decision to move the information to a website.

And that’s how we got here, and why this website exists. Our guiding principle is to provide information that is supportive of AKC Scent Work and the multitude of clubs, trial officials, volunteers and participants that strive to make every trial better than the last.