All Clear, Go/No Go, And Blanks: Rethinking Detection Dog Protocols with Paul Bunker
“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 exactly why he built his "three-legged stool of imprinting," rotating training aids early so a dog learns the category of an odor rather than one narrow sample. This is a lesson he first learned when landmine dogs, flawless on Yugoslav TNT, drew a blank on American TNT.
During four months of oil spill response in Canada that produced roughly ten thousand confirmed finds, Paul learned dogs can be calibrated to a set concentration, spontaneously ignoring amounts tenfold above or below it.
The catch is that concentration itself changes an odor's character, the way a perfume smells floral diluted and fecal concentrated. This means sloppy contamination protocols can inadvertently teach a dog to ignore the very odor it's meant to find.
Paul untangles three distinct, often confused protocols: the All Clear, used on discrete objects like luggage, where the dog isn't declaring an area clear, only reporting it found nothing; the Go/No Go, a research tool for presenting a specimen and asking whether it matches; and Blanks, unmarked areas searched with no feedback at all, standard in real operational work. Even directional obedience, he notes, functions as a blank from day one.
Key Topics:
● The Three-Legged Stool of Imprinting (03:42)
● Calibrating Thresholds After the Canada Oil Spill (08:45)
● Same Odor, Different Smell: How Concentration Changes Everything (15:55)
● All Clear, Go/No Go, and Blanks (17:45)
● Dealing with Lower-Drive Dogs (28:21)
● Continually Shaping Your Dog’s Brain for Progress (29:14)
● Directional Training as the Hidden Foundation for Blanks (39:22)
● Letting Dogs Resolve Their Own Decisions (47:16)
● Handling Like an Advanced Driver, and a Call for Cohesion (49:06)
Resources:
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