Short Dogs & AKC Scent Work

 A couple of weeks ago, someone in the Texas Scent Work group (it's a great group, Caroline Oldham moderates, if she let me in, I bet she'll let you in if you ask nicely 😀) with a question.  The poster noticed that there were very few small dogs among the Detective titleholders, and wondered whether it is true that small dogs don't succeed as much in the upper levels of AKC Scent Work, and why that might be.  While it's easy to jump to the idea that upper levels include higher hides and short dogs are at a disadvantage for those, a lot of people made a lot of very sensible additional and alternative observations, including some I'd certainly never considered before.  It was a great discussion! 

But then it occurred to me -- if we look more closely at the data, does it actually support this hypothesis about short dogs?   I started by looking at our Detective report from Demo Dog Database (DDD), the project in which my husband and I scrape data from the AKC's publicly published results for Scent Work trials and make them available to handlers as a companion to the AKC's Titles and Points Progression report.  Any DDD data I reference in this blog post uses the AKC Scent Work results through June 22, 2024.

Sorting the Detective titleholders by breed, I got this: 

First observation: there seem to be a few over-achievers!  Labs, GSDs, Goldens, Border Collies and the All American dogs account for 40% of the 323 Detective titles earned as of June 22.  For the sake of this particular question, I disregarded the Detective "multiples" we calculate at DDD -- each dog of a breed only counts as "one" no matter how many more than 10 Detective Qs they have. 

Now, some of the All American dogs could very well be small.  But it kind of seems like everybody that isn't a Lab, GSD, Golden, Border Collie or All American Dog has the same disadvantage -- they aren't one of those 'breeds' - so I took them out of the mix.  

I rather arbitrarily assigned an asterisk to dogs that I thought might be considered not necessarily small, but short in stature, with a breed standard of height at the withers of less than 15".  Some of the dogs searching could well be oversize, who knows?  And Eskies were on the bubble and I didn't include them as short.  But, looking at that, 25% of the "non-overachiever" breeds that earned Detective titles were short dogs.  That didn't seem too shabby.  

However, Miniature American Shepherds, Shelties and Corgis were right up there in numbers, all Herding dogs.  And we know what powerhouses Beagle noses are for the Hound Group.  The "many dogs with Detective titles" breeds might have more in common with their Group brethren than with other short dogs.  So let's look at numbers based on AKC Group.  

While Detective is definitely the Ultimate achievement (for now), using the Detective numbers also limits the data quite a bit.  And, really, the question was "is it true that small dogs don't succeed as much in the upper levels," with Detective being the easiest to quantify at a glance.  So I pulled data for a table by AKC Group that shows persistence from "every dog that got at least one qualifying score" to how many earned each level title, and then included Detective.  The percentages shown for each level are out of the number of dogs that earned at least one qualifying score.  While it would be very interesting to know the number of dogs that attempted at least one search, qualifying or not, that information isn't available by group or breed.  

This held a number of surprises.  For starters, I'd just assumed that the list would start with All American dogs.  Look at you, Herding and Sporting!  Over twice as many Herding dogs earned at least one Q compared to All American... and I have to believe there is pretty extensive correlation there between "dogs that have ever competed" and "dogs that got at least one Q in Novice," don't you?  I'm not sure why I thought most entrants would be All-American, and I would have thought there would have been more Sporting dogs than Herding.  

The second interesting thing was the general consistency in the persistence percentages.  One unknown here is time -- have only about 50% of the dogs that earned a Q gotten an overall Novice title simply because they are new to the sport and started more recently?  Or is there actual attrition, discontinuation of the sport? 

The third interesting thing was that a noticeably smaller percent of All American dogs that got a Q have (so far) gone on to earn their SWN.  But the persistence across the board for SWA are quite similar.  

At SWE, however, the Toy Group begins to lag, and by SWM, there *is* a visible difference.  Now, we know that most of the Groups also include lots of short dogs.  So we can't really deduce anything about short dogs from this, necessarily.  We can, however, say that dogs in the Toy group that start in Scent Work do not seem to complete Excellent or Master titles at the same rate as the dogs from the other Groups, which does speak to the original question posed.  

It seemed like the next thing to look at might be the persistence across levels of individual breeds.  I'll post that information once I have it pulled together.