Penny Scott-Fox | Have the Balls to Call It

I don't know if you know this or not, but one of my most memorable trial moments is with you. Do you have any idea what that might be?

Oh, something about having the balls to call it?

Yes. You remember it was my first run ever with you as a judge. I'd never met you before that. How many times does a judge tell you you gotta have the balls to call it? I just instantly went, I like this person a lot. When you said that, do you remember how you ended up saying that to me?

I can't remember whether it was interiors or containers, but your dog had covered the area and you sort of just kept on going and you could have cut the time in half.

Yeah, that's fair. That's a fair assessment. That's the way I remember it too. It was a Master level run. I kept searching the room, but I will say my bit to this story is that was something I was working on, learning to read my dog when my dog was done, and I actually called it more quickly than I had in the past. So I was a little proud of myself, and I think I mentioned that to you.

I'm so sorry.

No, that's fine. I think I told you I was a little proud of myself because I called it, and then that's when you told me that maybe I could have done it a little bit more quickly.

Well, it's just my philosophy, you know? I don't judge a huge amount, but when I judge, I hope that I can give some feedback.

Let me do the intro and then let's get into this a little bit deeper. This is Alert! A Scent Work Podcast. I'm Scot Singpiel, Murphy and Keeva's dad, and I'm super fired up for today's guest. Penny Scott-Fox, Zest's mom. Are there any other dogs that claim you as mom?

Oh, yes, I have Zest's daughter, who's called Tabor. Everybody mispronounces it, so we all call her Tabs. Not quite as crazy as Zest, but she will be.

And Penny's been a part of this sport from the very beginning. The more I learned preparing for this conversation, the more I realized how much scent work has your fingerprints all over it, from judging, competing, hosting huge trials, teaching. I mean, you've done it all, so I can't wait for this conversation.

I'm excited too.

Let's get into this, what I will from now on refer to as TBTC, the balls to call. So how do you coach people through that moment of doubt? That is something that the handler has to train, that ability to confidently call it when it's done. What are some keys to that?

The key is trusting your dog. You mentioned that you dug back to the beginnings. Well, I trained with the best. I trained with Ron Gaunt, who really was the beginning of everything to do with scent work and nose work in this country. He would always say to me, back then I had the very amazing Turner, my flat coat, who won the 2015 Invitational. She was just fantastic. And he just said, you're wasting time. Why don't you know she's already told you that she's done, so I don't know why you're not calling it so that she can go on to the next search.

And I was like, well, what if I miss a hide? And he said, well, if you miss a hide, then you weren't reading her properly. So I think it's just about trust, and you've seen me with Zest. Everybody knows me with my dogs. I have a great relationship with them, and I truly trust them in scent work. I may not trust them in other walks of life, but I totally trust them in scent work.

So if she looks at me and says, I'm done, I'll call it always. And then if I miss a hide, then oh well, we'll get it the next time. It doesn't happen very often, to be honest, but I think we're Detective qualifying score (Q) number thirty nine or something ridiculous. So, wow, it works, but you just have to take the gloves off and trust your dog.

So let's break down that trust your dog. What are the things you have to do as a handler when clearing a room to then be able to trust your dog when your dog is done? Reading them is a big part of it, right? But what else?

The key is the value of odor. The way I start dogs off, they're always going to drive to odor no matter what. If we're in a room, and let's face it, most of these Master rooms are pretty small, really, I expect the dogs to drive to odor. So if there's no odor for them to drive to and they tell me they're done, then I'm going to assume they're done.

And I always encourage my students who are new to Masters to go around one direction, change direction, go around the other, and then call it, because if they can't find it one way and they find it the other way, then that's great. But if you go clockwise and then counterclockwise, then you've covered the area, and if they're not driving to any hides, then it must be that there's nothing there.

Right. There's not a plume available.

Correct. Correct. Now, that being said, there are incidences where the hide itself may not be particularly stable or it may not be available, or it may just be one of those days that somebody put cypress out and it got lost in the air conditioning, and that's just the nature of the beast and the nature of the sport, and there's nothing you can do about that. And I can't train for that.

What I'm hearing is I think that being able to clear a room is a skill set that advances with time, and maybe one of the very first beginning parts of that is this idea of going around the room one way, going around the room the other way, making sure your dog's pushed into all the corners and the spaces, and then just going, you know what, it's time to call it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you can become more nuanced in your training. I'm trying to train my dog to have that hunt drive, but sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he needs a little bit more encouragement to go into the places we didn't cover, and that's my job as a handler. So maybe that's the next part, training him to be a better hunter.

True. Well, that's creating drive. And everybody knows about my bowl exercises and how that creates drive. That's what I do all the time, and I even do it with Zest now. Before a trial I'll do my bowls and I'll throw food at the odor and it makes her go nuts.

And even now you're getting back to basics before a trial. Basics are important, it sounds like.

I do it all the time. I have bowls in my car, and if I'm early for an appointment or something and I feel like getting Zest really wound up, then I'll bring the bowls, and she starts screaming, and then I just throw a hide into a bowl and then I throw food at it.

And what that does is it stimulates not only moving food, but food and the sound of the food hitting the bowl is just sensory overload. And for most dogs I'm going to say that flips a switch and teaches them to drive.

Got it. And even if you have a veteran dog, just keep doing that. I love that. That's a great piece. I'm going to try that as soon as we're done.

I do it all the time. And send me a video and I'll tell you if you're doing it right, because there's a way and there's a way to not. We're too controlling. You have to let your hair down and just let it go.

And don't forget, I'm a real control freak, so for me to let it go with my girls is, to tell you a story, for Tabor all I did with her is bowls and then I entered a trial, a Novice trial. Never seen buried before, never seen containers, never seen anything, and we took her to a trial because she just drove to the hide.

Right.

It was an experiment. I wanted to see if it worked. Anyway, my rule of thumb, depending on the dog's drive, is if the dog doesn't find a hide between the first thirty or forty five seconds, then there's no hide there.

Okay. And that would vary. That's a good piece of advice too, right? Think back to Novice and Advanced, and how long did it take your dog to find a hide? You know, fifteen, twenty seconds. And if you go into a room and your dog's not getting something, showing odor behavior within the first twenty or thirty seconds, I think that's a pretty good rule to follow. I like that one.

I was very lucky with the fabulous Turner, because if it was blank, she would just lie down at the threshold. Everybody hated me. She'd say, I'm not going in there because there's no pizza crust for me. And I'd be like, clear, finish. And they'd just say, you didn't even search. I said, she doesn't want to go in. That tells me there's nothing in there.

Tells you everything you need to know. So I want to talk a little bit about the history and your origin story in scent work. If I got this right, you're one of the founding instructors with the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW), which really set the foundation for the sport. Is that a correct statement?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

All right.

They selected seven people, of which I was one. At the time I was head of behavior at Pasadena Humane, and a lot of the scent work started down in the Long Beach Shelter, the S-P-C-A-L-A, and they wanted to bring it to another shelter. And I was there, and so they approached me and I said, hell yeah, why not?

At the time I had a Borzoi called Harry, who was spectacular, and he died three days before the first ever NACSW trial. They created an award in his honor called the Harry Award, which became an award for the NW1 dogs. The highest scoring rescue dog would get the Harry Award, which was huge, and I got to present it all over the country and it was really emotional.

He saved my life. He killed a rattlesnake and died doing it. And for years that was a big thing, and sadly they've dropped that now. But for ten, twelve years it was a big thing, and people all over the country would email me saying, oh my God, my dog won the Harry Award, we feel we've been touched, you know, and it was just lovely. It was a fantastic honor. Even for the years that it ran, it was an amazing honor for an incredible dog.

So Harry passed and so didn't compete in the first NW1 trial, and I then got Turner. And Ron, God bless his cotton socks, said, well, we've got to catch you up. So Turner and I had really private lessons with Ron to make sure that I caught up with all the other people so that we could then go on to compete in the next NW1, and we did it in two, we did it in, I think it was about a month.

So NACSW was kind of the origins of the sport here. Where did it come from before that? How did it end up here and how did it end up in your life, other than just somebody saying, do you want to try this? Or is that really how it was?

That's exactly how it was. It was just that Ron came up with the idea. People may say this differently, but my recollection was that he would test a lot of dogs for detection. He trained a lot of army and police dogs. He would evaluate a lot of dogs that could do the scent work part. They just couldn't do the no matter what part.

So that's how it all started. He was just like, there are all these dogs that can do the scent work part, and how amazing would it be to give them that opportunity to become working dogs and create a sport. And so he teamed up with Amy Herot and Jill Marie, and the rest is history really. It was extraordinary what they did.

How did you have the skills at that point then to be one of the first, what was it, the founding instructors?

We were founding instructors. Stop training. I was a trainer, and it was very easy to see how. It's not difficult, Scot. It's very easy to get dogs to find odor. If you reinforce the dogs correctly for finding odor, it doesn't take long for them to go, oh wait, this is really fun, I can run around and sniff and I get paid for it. It's great.

Later the American Kennel Club (AKC) comes along, and that was what I was involved with. So I kind of at first thought, well, this is the end all be all, right. But it didn't really start until, I think, 2017 or something like that. Were you one of the very first judges at that very first AKC trial?

Oh yeah. You were there. I was there. And it's a really great story if you're ready for this. So I get there and it's where the Master National is going to be, which is another conversation, and I'm going to that of course with my little Zest.

So we get there, and at the time the lady in charge was a lady called Stephanie Kimmerly, who I love and became very good friends with. And I said to her, do you know what you're doing? And she said, I have absolutely no idea. And I said, can we just go to the bar and sit down and have a glass of wine and I can tell you that I can help?

I said, because based on what's going on, you've got warm boxes next to dogs in crates, you've got odor in the same room that the dogs are being crated. They just didn't know what they didn't know. It wasn't that they were bad, but they just didn't know. And I said, I can really help you. And I know Laurie Schlossnagle was there and Judith was, and none of them really knew because they hadn't really been involved with NACSW like I had.

And I said, if you don't mind, I can get really bossy and I can fix it. And they said, please do. And so that's what happened.

You judge for AKC, I know that. Do you also judge for NACSW, and are you involved with other organizations nowadays?

I was a CO for a while, and then when I went to the AKC, they thought it was a conflict of interest, so I said, okay. And I love it. I love it. I'm lucky to be part of a really fabulous club here in Southern California. We put on ridiculously huge trials. We do like fifteen hundred runs a weekend. It's insane.

But we do it because we know how to make it work, and I'm not shy. I'm happy to hire ten judges, and I'm happy to just get it done. So we're able to offer these unlimited trials and run a Master trial all day long, and it's fine and it works. The only thing we have to limit now is Detective, and that's kind of sad, but I can't get more than forty five dogs through Detective in a day.

So you are an advisor to the board for the Scent Work Club of the San Gabriel Foothills, and those are the trials you're talking about, some of the biggest in the country.

I think they're the biggest actually, but yes.

What makes a great trial experience for competitors? What do you really try to keep in mind when you're putting together those huge trials?

We strive, we really strive to get novel search areas, but what we do that makes it different is we give the exhibitors an option to say what time they want to come. They tell us what time they want to come, then they run their dogs and then they leave, so they're not sitting in the parking lot for hours.

I love your structure, that you can actually then, it's not an all day thing. For some people they might enjoy that all day experience, parking lot talk, getting to hang out with people that they've come to know over the years. But some people just kind of do want to get in and get it done, so I think that's awesome.

It started because of COVID. And then what we do is we do video walkthroughs the night before, so you can watch the search area before, which saves an enormous amount of time. We don't do all-competitor briefings. You can be briefed on the line if you're not sure about something, but I can save probably three hours.

The thing I love is that you're looking for cool places to search, because to me, as a competitor, when I first started, I didn't care where I did the game. But now I'm getting a little bit more discerning. I kind of like these places that recreate an environment that I might be doing detection dog work in, even though I'm just a sport handler. So I love that that's really a priority for you.

Oh, huge. Especially the Detective trials. We've searched a wedding venue that was a zoo. We had giraffes in the background whilst we were searching. It was nuts. A lot of the dogs were really freaked out by the lions.

We've searched water parks. We've searched a lot of churches. We're doing a golf course in October that I'm judging, which will be kind of fun. The crazier, the better.

Let's shift to your judge perspective. What's your goal when you're setting a search? Are you thinking about testing specific odor skills, creating a certain kind of a challenge, or something else entirely?

Always. I'm always trying to test the level that the competitors are coming in on. Even now, even though I had a huge part in writing the rule book, I always remind myself of what that expectation is.

And then I always go, if you ever see me, well, you didn't because you were running under me, so you didn't see me setting searches, but I go and sit in the search area for at least twenty minutes. Not so much containers and buried, but exteriors and interiors. I'll sit there and I'll just hang out in the room, and normally I'll make a decision about what I'm going to set very quickly.

But then I just go, let me make sure that I'm not being really stupid and that I'm not doing something that's really asinine or detrimental to the dogs. I'm known for setting threshold hides. I'm known for setting mirrored hides. I'm known for setting pretty inaccessible hides, but I shake it up.

People always say to me, oh, you know, Penny's always going to do a threshold. I say, but maybe today I'm not going to. I'll do a threshold if I think the search area warrants a good threshold and I can test it. So that's not going to happen every time.

You have some Penny Scott-Fox specials, it sounds like.

I also really rely on my demo dog to tell me that it's right. So if you allow your dog to do the search, you're going to be fine, as long as you don't overthink it and start thinking, gosh, would Penny do that? If you say that, then you're dead in the water, because if you start thinking that you're going to think like me, then good luck to you.

Don't even try to get in that head, people. That's Penny's advice there. I think competitors also talk about fun searches. You talked about fair searches, which I love, but fun can mean a lot of different things. So what makes a search fun to you?

I like to see the dogs working out the odor problem. I don't like to just see dogs go hide, hide, hide and all be really easy and everything be under a chair. I like to see them working.

I did a search recently where it was a truly inaccessible hide in a bunch of chairs, and Zest just ran around the outside, looping around the chairs. And I knew there was a hide there, and I just had to wait for her to make a decision. I'm not going to call it until she makes a decision. That's just our relationship. She would love it if I called it faster, but I'm not going to.

And then she eventually said, okay, enough running around the chairs, there's a hide. She sat, and that was kind of fun to watch.

Is that your same philosophy then when you're setting what would be considered by competitors a fun search? You like to set hides and they're fun if the dogs and the handlers have to figure out the puzzle a little bit.

Yeah, I like them to have that aha moment and go, oh wow, that's what that was. Or, wow, my dog's going up and down the wall, but there's no hide there. Wait a minute, could it be behind us? Oh wait. And then the dog's driving to the hide and them going, wow, okay, I read my dog correctly and that's what that was. And they'll remember that, hopefully.

Yeah. Giving the competitors opportunities to work it out. I like that. I never really thought of it that way, but I know that some of my funnest experiences are when that happens.

When I'm asking myself, all right, he's looking up, what could be going on here? Because it's not up, it's too high, so what could be going on here? And then when you have that little light bulb go off, well, what about behind you? Maybe there's something low behind you, and you turn around.

Or when a judge sets something that you're like, could that really be where it's at? I've never seen that. If it's under a chair, we've all seen so many under chairs. But if it's in a strange location and the dog works it out and leads you to that, and you're like, what, oh cool. That's fun for me too.

Yeah. I set a Detective search recently in a church where there were probably a hundred chairs all around the outside of the church and inside and all over the place. And I didn't put a hide on a single chair, and everybody was just stunned.

I didn't put a hide on a single chair. I said, nope. Do you think I would remember which chair it was? I said, how on earth would I remember, with a hundred chairs, which chair I put a hide on? I said, way too complicated for my brain. If I've got to judge forty five dogs, I'd just rather not make it too difficult for me.

That's funny. I was reading on your website that your training philosophy really emphasizes building trust, clarity, and confidence, I'm going to say that again, trust, clarity, and confidence over perfection. You've trained obedience, etiquette, Puppy Preschool, a whole bunch more. How do you bring that philosophy into teaching scent work specifically? What does that mean?

It means, people overuse this word, but then sometimes they don't really know what it means, it means that you trust your dog. It means that whatever happens, if your dog tells you. So I always have trained final responses on my dogs, so that changes it slightly.

If my dog sits, whether I think there's a hide or not, I will call it no matter what. No matter what. And I have lost NACSW titles for it with Z, because early in the days she would not sit and I would walk away, and they'd be just like, are you nuts? It was obviously odor. I said, she didn't sit.

I said, I'm not going down that slippery slope. If I start losing my final response, then I'm lost. But I feel confident with my dogs that if they sit, then it has to be a hide or they're in the presence of odor and the odor is doing something weird. That's certainly a possibility, but I never even go there.

I just assume that my dog is correct, and that creates this bond that we have no matter what the sport, where we're a team. I think sometimes in scent work, dogs and handlers aren't a team, and the dogs are just being let loose in the search on a hope and a prayer that they'll find odor and that the handler will call it correctly.

I think that's kind of sad. I think you're kind of missing out on a whole other level of teamwork with your dog by participating. You know, I judge a lot, well, not a lot, but when I do judge, I see a lot of not participation in the handler, and the dogs are just doing the search. They don't really need the handler. They could actually just go and find the hides and go back to the car and get their own cookies, and I think that's kind of sad.

Part of that though, I'm going to say, I have to defend myself a little bit because I think I was one of those handlers as we moved up. In the beginning levels you don't have to do a lot, right. I've learned since then, now that in the beginning levels with my second dog, that you can do stuff. You can observe your dog, you can start to learn their odor behavior.

But at first my dog just went out, found it, sat down and I'd call alert, and that was that. Becoming a teammate is something that hasn't even entered my realm of thinking until we started moving up into upper levels. So I love that you're saying that because I see myself in that a lot, where I'm just standing there watching my dog as opposed to being a teammate, and I have to learn what being a teammate means.

Well, I mean, I think each case is individual too. Being a teammate may be driving the car, filling it up with gas, making sure you've got the cookies, getting there on time, doing the walkthrough, preserving your dog. Maybe that's all it is.

I think that if people could have more fun with it instead of just wanting to get the titles, it would be much more exciting for them.

Yeah.

You know what I mean.

I want to come back around to this idea of building trust. When you do have a moment where Zest or one of your dogs does the trained final response, you call it, it's not right. That can be such a hard moment to then go into the next one and still have that trust, or go into a trial a month later and have that trust. How do you come back from that?

Zest would only make a mistake if it was poor hide placement, and I can say that with confidence.

Yeah. Let's come to my level where maybe I don't have, maybe we're not quite at the level you're at. How do I come back from that? How do I rebuild that trust with my dog?

It's just one moment of sniffing time that the dog made a decision and it wasn't quite right. You just say, oh well, too bad, give them a kiss on the nose and just start again. It's not a big deal.

They're dogs, and so they do make mistakes. And I truly, I'm going to put this out there because I think it's an important distinction to make, I don't think the dogs really make mistakes. I think that sometimes the way the odor is moving causes them to alert, whether it be prematurely or in the wrong place, purely and simply because of the hide placement.

I don't think the dog's really making a mistake, and that is a little bit controversial and people get a little bit overexcited when I say that, but I think that's true. I've trained a lot of dogs and I've trained a lot of dogs to the top level, and it's because I trust them completely.

If my dog does the same thing two or three times, then now that's a training issue. That's not a trust issue. So that's how I rebuild that trust.

And then you go and get your plastic bowls and you throw food at the odor and get your dog all excited again. It's a recovery. You have to just recover from it and go, well, it's just what it is. You need to come out to camp, really, because that would blow your socks off, and then just move on.

It happens. I compete a lot in agility. We do not double qualifying score (Q) every time. I do not win every time, but I walk out of that ring every time learning something and go, "Well, you know what, we didn't qualify, but God, her dog walk was fantastic. I love it."

And that's how you have to be. It's the same with scent work. So you got a no, but why did you get a no? Were you convinced that the hide was not behind you, it was in front of you, and it looked like a good place to place a hide, so you just kept them in there too long?

Another philosophy would be if they're not making a decision, but they're sort of noodling around, maybe there's nothing there, but we think there has to be something there, so we keep them in the area too long, so then they false. That's actually handler error, not dog error.

I've only gotten through half my questions, so I hope that you're willing to come back on.

Oh, I'd love to. This is the best thirty minutes for years. This has been great.

There's one more question that I want to ask that's really particularly timely right now. You did serve as the first AKC scent work rep, and now we're about to see the very first AKC Scent Work Master National.

Back in the early days, was there ever talk of a big national event like this, or did you imagine the sport would grow in this direction, or what are your thoughts in general about the Master National coming up? And I'm sad I can't go. I'm excited that you can go.

So I have a couple of thoughts about it. Yes, I think we knew it was going to be huge. Apart from anything, anything that the AKC does is going to be huge because people want the titles. That's not good or bad, it's just what it is.

It's fairly easy to get a Novice title in scent work, so we knew it was going to explode. Obviously with anything like that you always want to have a big championship at the end to make the best of the best. I'm a little nervous, to be honest, because they're going to be running four hundred dogs, two hundred dogs through each search area.

I don't know what that's going to look like. I don't know how to train for that. I can't. So I'm feeling a little bit like I'm going in with my hands tied behind my back, because I can't recreate two hundred dogs going through a search. I don't know how they're going to do it. I don't know how they're going to do four searches and get two hundred dogs through four searches in a day.

We can talk about it when I get back. I'm going to have fun. I think there are going to be some flies in the ointment. Also don't forget, they've just changed the specs for buried to come into play the first of October. So we're going into a Master championship with new specifications for buried, which I think is a little concerning.

I can train for that. They've basically made all the searches speed searches, which is fine and smart. I personally, and I said this to a couple of AKC people who came to my retreat, it would have been nice if they'd just chosen the Master Elites and the Master HD Elites and had about eighty dogs go and see what we can do. Instead we've got just Master titles, so that's why they've got such big numbers.

With eighty dogs it would be a much more viable thing. We'll see. I'm going. I wouldn't miss it. I'm sad about the venue. The venue's been used a lot. It would have been nice to have had something a little bit more exciting. It's not the best place for scent work. I've judged two breed specialties there and, of course, the inaugural scent work.

There's not a lot of novel places to go, but I'm sure they'll come up with something and hopefully they'll keep it straightforward and simple. That's the best way to go.

So how are you training for it? How are you training for the speed events? Are you thinking about this differently than you are for your normal Master events that you might run?

Yes, I am.

Do you want to expand on that, or is this a Penny Scott-Fox secret?

It's because I can't give away all of my secrets. My biggest concern is cypress, which I don't like. I'm sure I've told you that because it disperses so quickly against the other odors. So I'm doing a lot of training with cypress up against other odors, just to get Zest used to the fact that that could be an option.

Normally in a Master search I don't often set cypress unless it's a single hide in a single room and it's standalone, because the nature of the odor is so volatile. So that's really my main focus, just getting her reacquainted with cypress and knowing that it could be out there with the other odors.

I'm not worried about speed. We're pretty fast. And it's a numbers game, so you're just going to have to count hides and call finish before two minutes. That's what it is. I have some strategies, but I'll talk about them afterwards. They might not work.

You've just guaranteed yourself another appearance on the podcast.

Fantastic. Well, it's lovely. I love it.

Let's go ahead and wrap this thing up. I'm wrapping it up with a segment I call Seven Questions. This is Seven Questions with Penny Scott-Fox. I'm going to ask you seven questions, just looking for quick, top-of-the-mind answers, just one or two sentences. Are you ready for the lightning round? This is just like Master National. It's a speed round.

All right, here we go. Question number one. When you're judging, seeing competitors succeed, you love it when…

They leave the search area happy. It doesn't matter whether they qualified or not, but that they leave as a team and they're happy.

What's one thing you wish more competitors knew about being a judge?

How hard it is to stay consistent.

What's your dog's favorite reward after a great search, and get specific.

Tabs gets to carry her, believe it or not, her obedience dumbbell back to the car. She thinks that is the most exciting thing on the planet after a search. She loves it.

Zest says it's all about food. It's just the best food. So I always have, when I'm searching, we use Charlee Bears in case she gets overexcited because she thinks the food's too high. And then back at the car she'll get steak.

What's one piece of advice you'd give your beginner self in scent work? I mean, you're going to have to go back a ways.

To try your best to enjoy the learning process and to not rush it. I think people, including me, just wanted to get up there, and it happened so fast.

What's the best compliment you've ever gotten at a trial, and it can be either as a judge or a competitor?

It's a little mini story, sorry, but you have to hear it. When Turner won the 2015 NACSW Invitational, the last search of the day was six hides, six minutes, in a huge conference area. We had dinner there the night before.

She spent the first four minutes licking the floor, not finding a single hide, and I was just like, "Oh my God, T, what has happened to you?" and she said, "Just hang on." And I said, "Okay, Turner, are you ready?" and she said, "Got it."

And she knocked it out of the park and we won the whole damn thing by finding six. The people went nuts, but they went nuts because they said, can we just take your pulse, are you okay? And I was just like, yeah, I'm fine.

And that to me was the epitome of relationship. I knew we were going to win and I just totally trusted her and I let her do her thing. She loved it. She got to lick the floor for four minutes and then she turned on the super jets. That was her.

If your dogs could talk, what do you think they'd say about you as a handler?

In scent work, they enjoy my team support. In agility, Zest wishes I could run faster. Tabs doesn't care, but Zest thinks I should be able to run faster, really.

Do you have a signature distractor, like a distractor you take with you and it's going to show up at a lot of different trials?

No, I kind of forget about distractions. I find them rather annoying, actually.

They're telling you that you're done, I think, is what they're telling you. So we can wrap this up if you'd like.

It's fine. The person went away. It's fine.

What's one thing that delights you about scent work after all these years, as a judge or a competitor?

It's just the sense of accompaniment. My gosh, my dog went into a room or a huge exterior and found three Q-tips dipped with some kind of oil and found it, told me she found it, I paid her, and she went on to do it again.

I find that quite amazing actually, that we can have a huge exterior and there's one little itty bitty Q-tip way on the far side, and my dog will run all the way across the field to get that Q-tip. That's kind of delightful.

It is. And even after all these years, that still amazes you, and I love that.

Yeah, it does.

Penny Scott-Fox, thank you so much for joining me. I think our listeners are going to be taking home a lot of clarity, maybe even a little TBTC, the balls to call, inspiration, I hope. If people want to connect with you, train with you, learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?

Just through my website, Scott-Fox Pet Dog Training. And I'm very good at getting back to people if they get in touch, for sure.

Got it. So that website is scott-foxdogtraining.com. If you want to check out that for Penny Scott-Fox. That wraps it up for this episode of Alert! A Scent Work Podcast. Be sure to follow the show so you don't miss what's next. And remember, whether you're in the search area or on your podcast feed, just call it Alert! A Scent Work Podcast.