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Understanding False Alerts.jpg
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Understanding False Alerts: Clever Hans

£15.00

This first session in the Understanding False Alerts series explores the powerful influence handlers have on their dogs’ detection behaviour. Inspired by the famous Clever Hans effect, it encourages you to look beyond the dog and consider how movement, posture, timing, and expectations might act as subtle cues, even when we think we're being completely neutral. If you're aiming for clearer searches, more independent dogs, and truly trustworthy signals, this session provides the perfect foundation to start with.

This first session in the Understanding False Alerts series explores the powerful influence handlers have on their dogs’ detection behaviour. Inspired by the famous Clever Hans effect, it encourages you to look beyond the dog and consider how movement, posture, timing, and expectations might act as subtle cues, even when we think we're being completely neutral. If you're aiming for clearer searches, more independent dogs, and truly trustworthy signals, this session provides the perfect foundation to start with.

In this 20-minute Scent Session, Dr Robert Hewings examines how handler influence can unintentionally generate false alerts. Dogs are exceptional observers of human behaviour, and without awareness, even subtle changes in body language, breathing, or timing can guide a dog toward an indication that is not driven by odour.

This session will help you recognise common sources of unintentional cues, understand why dogs respond to them, and develop neutral handling strategies that support true independence at source. You’ll be encouraged to build self-awareness as a handler or instructor, not as a criticism, but as a professional skill that protects the dog’s learning.

Designed for all scent-detection handlers and instructors, this session is part of a linked series that can be watched individually or as a complete set. Each builds on the last, creating a deeper understanding of why false alerts occur and how thoughtful training can prevent them.

Because when we reduce our influence, we allow the dog’s nose to do the work it was always meant to do.

Scent Sessions are drawn from the teaching on The Scent Detection Programme, our City & Guilds Assured instructor credential. If this way of thinking is how you want to work, the full programme is where it lives — three weeks across the year, eighteen places, one cohort. See the City & Guilds Programmes.