WeSmellBetter Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is this?
A: Reports compiling and organizing data from the Events and Scent Work Trial Results sections of the American Kennel Club’s website.
Q: Why just Scent Work?
A: Because that’s “our” sport, and we feel it’s under-represented in terms of results posting.
Q: Why? I mean, I can get information about my own dog from the AKC website anytime.
A: Yes, and you absolutely should review the information about your dog on the AKC website with great regularity — what we’re doing here is NEVER a substitute for that! However, there are things some of us wanted to know about the sport, like “how many dogs achieved [a thing] so far?” or “how many dogs of a particular breed achieved a thing before my dog did?” or “I lost track — how close are we to an Elite2 in [level]?” And if we were going to go to the trouble of figuring that out for one or two teams, we might as well make it available for everybody. You can read the full (way too many words) Origin Story here.
Q: But whyyyyyyyy? I don’t want Scent Work to be all mean and competitive like the other sports.
A: It’s already competitive, you know… and only we, as competitors, can keep it from being mean, no matter what reporting is done. Our focus here is to celebrate everyone’s achievement! But if you’d rather not know, then just ignore this website, easy peasy.
Q: What are you reporting?
A: The easiest way to become familiar is to noodle around on the website. But, currently, we have
- The Home Page. The most important thing here is a “latest results reported” date with a list of trials before that date that have not yet been reported. This information is how you know whether your results have been processed, very similar to the AKC’s system. We also have some quick stats, a list of Big Achievements within the last 30 days and note of any club that holds a trial for the first time.
- Trial Finder. Like AKC Events, the page lets you filter by a date range and state to find trials that occurred in the past or that are scheduled with the AKC for the future BUT it also lets you filter by element and level. A link takes you to the trial information on the AKC’s website. Tip: Use <crtrl> click to select multiple states if you want more than one but don’t want All.
- Achievements has two reports – Dog Achievements or Breed Achievements, also called “Titles & Qs.” These show all the titles we calculate for a dog or for all dogs of a breed, listing all their Qs and all our Designations. This is somewhat similar to the paid report you can obtain for a single dog from the AKC except that ours is limited to Scent Work. Note that if you run the report for a breed with lots of dogs represented, it’s going to take a while and result in a very large file.
- The Titles tab has five reports. The Titles by Date, Breed and Club reports can be filtered to a specific month or year and can be limited to only level titles or include element titles, as well. Titles by Breed thus allows individuals to see the same data for Scent Work that the AKC provides to the breed parent club on a monthly basis. Titles by Club may be helpful with ribbon ordering, showing past requirements. “First Titles” provides ranking in terms of the date a title was achieved, either across the board or for a particular breed.
- The Clubs tab includes three reports. The “Club list” is just that, a list that can be sorted alphabetically, by total number of trials, total number of entries or average entries, and filtered by a year or all years. The “Club Details” report gives historical information for a particular club about what levels and elements were offered at a trial and how many entries there were, with the intent of helping trial planners see what has been popular in their area in the past. “Largest Events” details the biggest trials and classes, by year or overall. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but it would be really interesting as Fanciers to look at trials that are very large but that also got rave reviews for efficiency and smooth operations; what can we learn from them?
- The Summary tab provides an “at a glance” variety of sport statistics, including number of trials per state and region, counts of the various titles earned.
Q: You show my dog as earning a title in an achievement report but you don’t show the title as part of their name. How come?
A: This is probably our most common question. So, your dog has their registered name with all their titles, and then they go to a Scent Work trial and compete and qualify in a class. The AKC processes the trial paperwork, and that is what they use to publish the trial results. THEN, they process those new qualifying scores, updating your dog’s titles and sending you the certificate in the mail. What we use in our reports is the most recent name that was published in the results. And that’s the one from when your dog ENTERED the trial, not their name from after the results were processed. So their name won’t be updated in our reports until after they get their next Scent Work Q — and that goes for titles they earn in any other sports in the meantime, as well. If the sad day comes when your dog is no longer entering Scent Work trials, and you’d like to have their final title(s) recorded in our reports for posterity, drop us a line and we will update that name manually in the database, in their honor.
Q: My report says “Achievements through [date]” but it doesn’t show my dog’s Qs from our last trial. Why not?
A: If you look at the WeSmellBetter.com homepage, it will list a date through which results are being reported, but also trials before that date that have not yet been reported. Reports only show that first date. Any “missing” results should be from that list of trials not yet reported. It just seems like no matter how we approach this, it is confusing. If you have a better recommendation, let us know!
Q: Why don’t you include NQs? Dog age? Reports by owner?
A: Great question! The answer has to do with the availability of that information. First, with regard to NQ (non-qualifying) runs. Published AKC Scent Work trial results include only the information of how many “starters” there were in a class, and the identifying information of the Qualifiers. The trial secretary knows you entered and does provide that information to the AKC, but it’s not clear that the AKC records it anywhere. So, once all lessons have been absorbed, you are free to pretend an NQ run never happened! A dog’s date of birth is publicly available, although it is hard to say for how many dogs that is a guestimate. But querying the AKC database for the information seems to make their system irritable, and it starts throwing up questions about whether you are a robot after you’ve done a few. Since we effectively are a robot, it seems that proceeding would be acting in poor faith. So we don’t. Lastly, owners don’t seem to have an ID number in the AKC system — they just exist as a string of text characters. Without a unique identifier of some kind, we have no way of singling out the dogs that belong to any one person.
Q: Why don’t you split Poodles into Varieties?
A: We tried really hard, but the data just isn’t there to reliably separate out any of the Varieties. Womp, womp.
Q: How do I check the results on the AKC website?
A: Here is the AKC’s “how to”
Q: Does the AKC know about this? Doesn’t it make them mad?
A: I’d be surprised if somebody in the Scent Work department hasn’t heard some vague mention of our reports. But Front & Finish has been doing effectively the same thing for Obedience and Rally competitors for over half a century, and Bad Dog Agility has been compiling Agility stats since 2011. Although AKC Dog Sports are hugely important to many of us, when you look at the AKC’s business model, they are almost incidental for them; the function of the Registry reigns supreme. I don’t mean they don’t “care” about Scent Work, but that, like any business, they are going to prioritize resources based on revenue opportunity, and, as popular as Scent Work is, it remains small fry in the big scheme of things. Additionally, the software that ties all a dog’s achievements into their registration record is almost certainly incredibly complex, and it has been developed over a long period of time, probably by a lot of different people. That means programmers have to be very cautious when implementing anything new, to make sure it doesn’t “break” anything that was already working. We’d be surprised if the AKC isn’t tacitly glad when it occurs to someone to take the information they have provided publicly and do useful things with it.
That being said, if they decide to change their reporting practices, it will throw us for a loop, at the very least, and if they decide to add Terms of Service that prohibit data scraping, we’ll have to stop.
Q: How can I report problems or make suggestions?
A: We’d love to hear from you! Please use the “Contact Us” tab to open a contact form.
Q: What is an excluded leg?
A: An excluded leg is a qualifying score that doesn’t count toward a title. For the AKC’s CURRENT reporting, there are excluded legs in the Numeric Elite calculations (See “Are there situations where the WSB reports SHOULD be different from AKC reports” below). Otherwise, we believe that our excluded legs match up to those of the AKC. They occur when a Q is earned in a class for which the dog was not eligible. For example, if a dog was entered in Excellent Containers and qualified, but had not yet earned their Advanced Container title, that Excellent Q would be excluded, or thrown out.

Novice A vs. Novice B: The trickier situation is when a Q comes out of Novice A when the dog should have been moved to Novice B. While this theoretically could be because of the handler’s experience level, that would require that a protest be filed against the team with the AKC after the fact — or that the handler stepped up and said “I was wrong, should have been in Novice B.” We aren’t going to know about that.. possibly not ever. But we bet it doesn’t happen very often. More common is the situation where the handler doesn’t realize they need to move to Novice B after they complete the element title in Novice A. In order to calculate titles on this website, we wanted to be sure to understand the rules the AKC applies. Judge Dino Candelaria asked the AKC Scent Work department in May of 2024 and this was the reply:

In other words, if the subsequent trial has not yet closed when the element title was earned in Novice A, then the handler must move to Novice B for that subsequent trial. If the subsequent trial has already closed, then the team can remain and qualify from Novice A in that subsequent trial. Here is a graphic we made at the time to try to clarify this.
Q: Are there any situations where We Smell Better results *should* be different from AKC reports?
A: AKC reports obviously won’t include any We Smell Better Designations (although, for the most part, we sure hope they recognize those as official titles someday, albeit likely by a different name!)
Otherwise, right now, once Elite is achieved for the first time in a level, the AKC’s reports exclude some qualifying scores from counting toward the next level Elite (Elite 2, Elite 3, etc.) The AKC has publicly acknowledged that they plan to change this retroactively to count ALL the qualifying scores without exclusion, but that programming has not yet been completed. So WeSmellBetter will almost certainly show the achievement of Numeric Elites before the AKC report shows that same achievement.
Q: What are “WeSmellBetter.com” Designations?
A: These are achievements that the AKC does not award, but that we think are significant. We note them with an asterisk. They presently include:
- - “Numeric” Detectives — The AKC doesn’t presently recognize anything beyond the first Detective title that is awarded upon qualifying 10 times in the Detective class. We are carrying that to the logical extension of SWD2 for 20 Qs, SWD3 for 30Qs, etc.
- - High in Trial — Trials are not required to offer the High in Trial award; if they do, they must include that in the trial premium. High in Trial winners are not reported to or recorded by the AKC. What we do here is to calculate High in Trial at each level using the AKC’s criteria of ranking the dogs who qualified in all elements offered in a particular level first by lack of faults and then by total time. We do the same with High Combined (odor and HD at a particular level). We calculate for any trial where more than one element was offered for a level. The (x) next to the level is the number of elements offered, 2, 3 or 4.
- The “Super Elite” designations. We will also add numerics to these if all requirements are met twice over, thrice over, etc.
  - “Super Elite” — the team has earned the Elite title at every level.
  - “Super Elite plus Detective” — rather self-explanatory
  - “Super HD Elite” — HD (Handler Discrimination) Elite at all levels
  - “Super HD Elite plus Detective” — self explanatory
  - “Super Combined Elite” — Elite in all odor and HD levels
  - “Super Combined Elite plus Detective” — self explanatory
Q: My achievement report showed one thing — I even printed it out! — but now it shows something different. How could it change?
A: I’m not sure we always know the answer to HOW it could change. Our goal is just to change when the AKC data does. We do know that AKC trial results are sometimes modified several weeks, even months, after they are initially reported. For example, in one case, two digits were transposed in a registration number, so a dog that never competed in Scent Work was awarded a Q while the dog whose number was mistyped initially didn’t get the Q. The owner must have noticed and notified the trial secretary and AKC and the dog that earned the Q now has the Q. For us, the critical thing is data integrity — we want our data to always reflect what the AKC has reported, and so we do “look back” to catch and update any changes made.
Q: What is DemoDogDatabase?
A: When we initially began providing the reports, we did so using a shared Google Drive. We called this system Demo Dog Database. We discontinued updates of these files on October 20, 2024.
Q: I want to do my own analysis. Will you give me your data?
A: No, I’m afraid not. I never saw myself as a gatekeeper, but one big concern I have is that everything we do be for the good of the sport. The foremost purpose is to celebrate achievement, but we can also support constructive critique and the development of proposed improvement. What I don’t want is for the data to be weaponized to use against the AKC, a club or a judge. And I think it’s pretty obvious by the state of the world today that if we push all the data out there, it wouldn’t be long before somebody somewhere was using it to point fingers in a not-very-nice way. So, nope, it’s ours, and we’re going to do our darndest to provide you with what YOU want to see from it as long as that meets those earlier stated purposes.
Q: Are you going to do the other organizations, too?
A: No. All the other organizations that provide competitive nosework opportunities have comprehensive, robust reporting systems that do this same sort of thing already. The only exception to that is the United Kennel Club, but their publicly-posted results do not include enough data to make meaningful reporting possible.
Q: Most Recent Lists
This site will keep track of the last 10 dogs, breeds, or clubs you select when generating reports. These are presented as the ‘Recent’ list that provides a hyperlink to bypass the selection page and go right to the filter page. That way, you can quickly and easily get right to reports for your most viewed items. The ‘Recent’ list will be ordered with the most recently selected item at the top of the list. Only the last 10 items (dogs, breeds, or clubs) will be kept and older ones will be discarded from the list.
Q: Who wants a cookie?
Who doesn’t want a cookie? But the cookies we are talking about here are used by web sites. Many of us hear this and think “tracking cookie,” something our virus software warns about. I guarantee we are not tracking or recording you in any way, and certainly not providing your information to anybody! However, this site does make use of a cookie to store a session ID. This session ID is created the first time you use WeSmellBetter.com and will expire after a year. This session ID, stored in the cookie, is used to provide a list of recently used dogs, breeds, or clubs you selected. The cookie is unique for each browser/device so your recent list will be different between those devices/browsers. This gives you that list of “Recent [whatever] viewed by you” on our selection pages to quickly generate reports for things you reference frequently. The session ID cookie is also used to pass your filter and sort choices to the reports. Most of the pages on this site require use of this cookie, to make full use of the site cookies must be allowed. If you don’t see your recent lists or get an error creating reports make sure cookies are allowed by your browser. And if you’re still having problems, be sure to Contact Us!