Spending most of the time with her nose near the ground, it was obvious from the beginning that my dog, Winnie, was born to sniff. Keeping up with Winnie when she sets her mind on following an interesting smell is a dizzying proposition. One morning, while walking through an as of then uninspected neighborhood, Winnie wanted to catch every unfamiliar smell at once, and she had a hard time picking a direction. Or at least that was what it looked like to me. But Winnie had an agenda.

When she caught a whiff of something and decided it need to be sourced, she started tracking it. She turned, lifted her head, then took us across the street. At the midpoint, she switched direction again. Then her nose went back to the ground. In a zig-zagging pattern punctuated by occasional small circles, Winnie’s determination took us to a front yard halfway down the block from where we started.

Her eyes widened and her sides quivered as she breathed in the smells. She zeroed in on a boulder near some shrubs and “read” the messages of dogs who’d walked before us; dogs who’d peed on the rock and left their mark.

Winnie continued with her quest to find the clearest place on the landscaping in which to leave her own urine signature. Patiently, I waited. Having had no specific plan when we started the walk, we followed Winnie’s instincts. It is what we do best.

Not only does Winnie drag me around on our daily walks, she has been pulling me through search areas as a detection dog for years. What began as a hide and seek game in our backyard grew into a pastime. I enriched Winnie’s life with ways to fulfill her passion. Feeding off her enthusiasm, I found joy in being included as her handler in the nose games. We became Team Winnie, a K9 scent work detection duo.

Since adopting nose work as a hobby, we have competed in trials. Setting goals and keeping track of our winnings, I managed our schedule, planned our trips, and brought Winnie to the start line time after time. My intentions were obvious, but Winnie was operating on a much simpler plain.

Despite my brief interruptions when encouraging her to find my things, her instinctive drive to hunt for the critter under the porch overrides her training every time. No matter the situation, Winnie is more than willing to find the things I want her to, but in the next moment, she is back to her own agenda.

After our walk Winnie came inside and looked for the best spot in which to lie down and capture the most sunlight streaming through the window. For her, it was just what came next. I settled in near her, knowing my proximity would comfort her. Winnie sighed and turned her belly towards the solar rays for peak absorption. I’m truly impressed by how effortlessly dogs navigate life, whether they’re on the trail of a fascinating smell or basking in the sun, they have faith without even trying. Sitting by my dog, I reached for my Bible and read.

With our ability to choose our actions rather than rely on instinct, humans can lead a life with direction. Through faith we trust in God’s character, even when His ways remain an unseen mystery. In the Bible, in Hebrews, Chapter 11, it states, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Humans can strive to live with specific objectives. We can develop a plan from our ideas, but God’s is the last word. Often our plans don’t pan out, and sometimes we’d have been better off if we had a more dog-like approach.

Unlike humans, dogs do not have ideas, and they don’t make plans. They don’t have to develop the qualities that define a life with purpose. It is built-in and comes naturally. Dogs will focus on unconditional love, loyalty, and companionship, while reveling in their interactions with us.

Winnie, who is now a skilled K9 scent work dog, understands her job and loves it. While traveling to trials, Winnie rests just over my shoulder in a large crate with a cushy dog bed set up on a platform behind the front seats. She doesn’t even have to lift her head to keep an eye on me and the open road ahead. When we arrive at trials, Winnie can’t wait to get going and do her thing. She races to the start line and, as described by one judge, “is a sniffing-machine”.

Trialing has always been my plan, but only as long as Winnie was up for the game. I promised to let Winnie guide us. I would not hesitate to slow things down if we reached a point where the competition seemed too challenging for her abilities. But Winnie showed no signs of stopping, so up the ladder we rose.

Winnie went farther than I ever expected. On her journey to the top levels of sanctioned events, she became the first Puggle to earn many titles. Team Winnie ran in six Summit League trials and picked up a handful of individual placement ribbons by placing in the top three. Summit League is an intense two-day event where professional trainers and hobbyists stand as equals. And then things changed.

Competing at the higher levels was taking more out of Winnie than she had to give. We were traveling sometimes for days to compete at the summit level. Traveling used to excite her, but Winnie was no longer interested in sitting behind me in her crate with darting eyes that captured the changing scenery through the windshield. Circling in her crate before lying down, only to stand up again and repeat the action, Winnie struggled to find a comfortable position and rest. Driving was no longer a fun thing for either of us.

At trials, Winnie whimpered and sat up in the crate while waiting for her turn to run. She had always rested in between searches, so this new behavior caught my attention. Her performance while searching hadn’t changed, but that didn’t last.

Winnie would enter a search area because I asked her to. She still pulled me in, but we’d go through the search and only find one or two hides even if there were a lot more. Winnie’s pace was slow, her tail was flat, and her eyes lost the intensity.

I could see some sparks of behavior changes, like a lift of her head or a quickening in pace, when she detected odor, but she had lost the fiery drive to pursue the source and communicate these finds. Winnie’s overall results slid down and her percentage of successful hide finds dropped. The final, undeniable sign of Winnie’s decline came during a trial where Winnie couldn’t even find enough hides to keep her score above half.

We pulled back on practicing, stopped training and trialing, but Winnie’s condition didn’t improve. A visit to the vet revealed some problems: Winnie was suffering from anal gland impaction. We also discovered that Winnie’s immune system was out of balance. She developed environmental allergies and upper and lower GI digestive issues.

Winnie’s health became the only thing in focus. I was hyper-attentive and evaluated everything she did because dogs can’t tell us how they feel or what hurts. Keeping track of her eating and eliminating routine, I looked for any changes. Staying close to her home environment, we adopted a strict routine where I read her natural energy without other influences. With dietary changes, medication to calm her immune responses to allergens, and regular anal gland care, Winnie began feeling better.

On the road to recovery, not trialing or practicing left empty spaces in my calendar. What had been so all-consuming took a back seat. I missed training with my friends, but I wanted to make sure Winnie was going to be okay. Looking at nose work from a distant perspective, it was clear that retirement wasn’t the worst thing.

An eleven-year-old dog who’d done all she could in the sport could retire with honors. Competing was not a requirement. I held hope that Winnie would reconnect with the sport on some small level after she’d had the time to get feeling better, but that was up to her.

Once we got her health on track, we started playing around again with nose work. Winnie answered me with a wagging tail when I asked if she wanted to play games with searches of one or two hides at home. Soon I upped the anti and took Winnie out and about for nose play. When arriving to search at hardware and feed stores, Winnie stood on her hind legs with her feet on the dash and ears perked up as if remembering the fun we were about to have. Then she ran up and down the aisles, ignoring other shoppers as she hunted for hides.

I set up drills with container searches in the garage where the rewards were immediate and Winnie’s precision grew. I brought her odor kit with us even on errands where I could set a hide or two out in a courtyard or picnic area around businesses and shopping centers. Having our great time together again filled me with a sense of deep satisfaction.

Beginning this year, Winnie, my retired K9 sniffing dog, has gone to three trials, and she is looking and acting like her old self again. Last month, during our journey to a trial in Redlands, California, a six-hour drive, Winnie exhibited no symptoms of discomfort during travels and rested comfortably at the trial in between searches. As if to prove to me she is still the best partner a human could have, Winnie searched like a demon. She sourced 16 hides over four searches. Sixteen might be her personal record for hides found in one trial.

Compared to how Winnie had been searching when she didn’t feel well, Winnie now searched with energy. With her tail curled up forward across her back, she took the lead, and I followed. Winnie was there to find odor, and she found so many we emptied all the hotdog chunks in the treat bag. She received a bountiful payout of hot-dogs after her container search. I rewarded her all the way back to the car.

In that search Winnie navigated us around sixty assorted containers scattered on the floor and on the seats of a few chairs. With rigor, Winnie found the containers with odor and ignored the ones with food distractions like meat sticks, chicken, shrimp, and deviled eggs. All the things dogs learn to resist, even when their instinct can’t ignore it. We had two and a half minutes to complete the task.

While managing the container search, Winnie worked with focus, but she only noticed the containers on the ground and not the ones on chairs above the height of her natural line of sight. With a hand gesture, I suggested Winnie look at one box on a chair. She raised up on hind legs, put her front feet on the chair, and sniffed the box. She quickly decided there was no odor and continued to search. With the seed of possibility I planted, Winnie moseyed about the search area and this time she sourced a box with odor on another seat about thirty seconds later.

Working together fostered a feeling of invincibility. I don’t often interfere in any way when Winnie is searching. It doesn’t suit us as a team. Winnie is a strong sniffer and doesn’t require much input from her handler. Winnie didn’t let my direction sway her into a false alert or slow down her enthusiasm. But my suggestion freed up her mind to search higher, so she did, and it paid off. In the container search my contribution worked out, but that was not the case with the exterior search that followed.

The last search of the day, a large exterior area that started on a veranda that ran across the front and down the side of an old historical mansion, and included a courtyard and gazebo, had an unknown number of hides and a small amount of time to search. Because I was preoccupied with covering the area in time, I hurried Winnie along and did not give her an opportunity to source even one hide.

There was very little air movement as Winnie searched, and I misunderstood, or flat-out dismissed her body language when she was in odor. Because of time constraints, I rushed her through places she might have wanted to search longer. She went along with me.

We found none of the three hides. I had interjected my own thoughts into the search, and it disrupted Winnie’s rhythm. Instead of following the odor Winnie detected but that I couldn’t see, Winnie relinquished to my preconceived ideas. Abandoning my faith in her abilities, I failed to read her communications, and we bombed. How could we have missed all three hides?

I could have come away from that search thinking, “Oh, no” there must be something wrong with Winnie. Are her health issues resurfacing? Is she experiencing the discomfort that took her out of the game last year?

Winnie had gone into the search with nothing on her mind. Her objectives were the same, and she probably knew there were hides she just didn’t source them. Because I was pushing for speed, which is not her natural way of working, Winnie sensed my urgency and decided finding odor must not be as important. Winnie’s instinct was to please her handler. Though I am bummed we didn't find any hides in that one area search, that takes nothing away from the overall successful day.

In the first search of the trial that day, at fifteen seconds in, I had called a false alert when Winnie shoved her nose deep into a coiled-up hose under some wooden blocks beneath a utility sink. The search was in a vast storage area/parking lot just outside the kitchen of the event center where the trial took place.

Winnie was in odor from the start line and began sniffing a partition wall made of lattice that stood between the door and the rest of the storage area. She worked odor off the flow-through divider wall, turned around and found a hefty amount of odor collecting behind her under the sink. The source of the odor was on the other side of the divider wall and was blowing through the lattice to the side Winnie was on.

She was not wrong in finding the strongest source, and the alert call was honest. Without skipping a beat, Team Winnie made our way around to the other side of that wall and, BAM! she found the hide. We got the “yes” from the judge and found six more hides in that search.

From the lattice wall, Winnie found a hide on a utility trailer a half a minute later. I even giggled from the relief I felt when she sourced the next hide. Winnie’s nose was not broken after all. That was two hides. From there it was a blur of alert calls and yesses. I was following Winnie with no forethought except to dole out a treat when Winnie said to. Seven hides and we didn’t run out of time. The initial setback from getting a “no” on our first call was all but forgotten.

Nose work is a team sport, and partnering with a K9 will always be the most rewarding aspect of our chosen activity. With each of our unique perspectives, human and K9, we both need to bring our strengths and support each other through our weaknesses.

My full engagement with the moment arrived with Winnie’s rekindled love for the game and her spirited performance. I will honor Winnie’s agenda over my own when I remember to. And Winnie’s loyalty to me will bring her along with my plans when I dare to have one.

Whenever I am with my dog, we win. Winnie never thinks about a hide she didn’t find. Dogs don’t worry about the future or dwell on the past. Instead, they stay present. If they have to pee, they find a place to go. If they are getting hungry, they eat what they find or what we give them. Winnie does not need to see what is coming next.

Following Winnie’s lead, I am reminded that if allowed to become a distraction, the unimportant things block me from seeing the deeper meaning. Titles and ribbons, as far as symbols of success go, are only what we can see. I am reminded of verse 18 in 2 Corinthians, chapter 4, that says, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

If I’m seeking to find joy in life, I need only look to Winnie as an example.

I spent the past seven years traveling and trialing, playing a canine performance sport game I tried not to take too seriously. I soon discovered that following Winnie’s nose was changing me. The beauty that happens between Winnie’s heart and mine when she is capturing and chasing the swirling tendrils of odor and I follow blindly? That is where the magic is.

Win or lose, with Winnie I am always learning. I am convinced that Winnie is giving me many opportunities to live according to the gospel. I feel the challenge to be a better handler is practice for being a better human. Nose work, though just a game we play, has afforded me many occasions to see beyond what was and wait patiently for what is coming next. And as always, I make sure Winnie and I are both still smiling. My plans are steady. I believe in God, and I believe in Winnie.

How the Gospel of Winnie Strengthens My Faith

Finding Balance with an Upward Lean