Over the last decade, I have watched the rise of what I call the “Kong culture” in detection dog training. In some circles, it has become almost a religion. Question it, and you quickly discover that challenging popular beliefs is not always appreciated.
Let me begin by saying this: this is not an attack on sport dog trainers.
Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working with many exceptional sport trainers. Some of them are among the most structured, detailed, and technically skilled trainers I know. I have learned a tremendous amount from these people, and I continue to do so. Good learning theory does not belong exclusively to sport or operational work. Excellent training principles can emerge from both worlds.
My concerns lie elsewhere.
I become hesitant when concepts developed in highly controlled training environments are presented as universal truths for operational teams. Real operations are different. They are messy, unpredictable, stressful, and often unforgiving. Dogs are confronted with contaminated scenes, complex odor pictures, unusual hiding places, environmental distractions, time pressure, and very real consequences when mistakes are made. Operational environments rarely resemble the clean, highly standardized training setups we often see on social media.
Too often, I see operational handlers being told exactly how they should work by people who have never deployed a dog in a real operation themselves. Of course, one does not need operational experience to understand learning theory or to contribute valuable ideas. Some of the best technical trainers I know come from the sport world.
Dictating how the work in operations
However, when individuals without operational experience begin dictating how operational teams should perform in the field, I become cautious. Sometimes, what I see are “wannabe problems”: theoretical concerns generated on training fields and projected onto handlers who face genuine operational challenges every day. The Kong discussion is, in my opinion, a good example. Many trainers promote Kong imprinting as the gold standard for detection dog training. Some even present it as the only correct way to train detection dogs. Such absolute claims should always encourage critical thinking. Is the recommendation truly based on operational evidence, or could financial interests, personal branding, and ego also play a role?
My greatest concern is not philosophical. It is practical.
Operational dogs often work in environments where a false indication can have enormous consequences. Imagine a dog indicating on residual Kong odor in luggage at an airport. Depending on the context, this could result in the evacuation of terminals, delayed flights, disruption of operations, extensive searches, and substantial economic costs. In operational detection, ambiguity is not merely inconvenient. It can become a liability.
Kong is a very loud odor
Another concern is the enormous difference in odor intensity between Kong and many operational target odors. Kong possesses a very strong and distinctive odor profile with a relatively high vapor pressure. And you cannot change that by using a smaller piece, the vapor pressure will stay the same! Explosives, narcotics, and many other operational target odors often produce odor signatures with extremely low vapor pressures. Some operational odors are little more than whispers in the environment. My concern has always been straightforward: are we truly teaching dogs to recognize and work through these weak operational odor pictures, or are we unintentionally conditioning them to respond to strong, highly salient training odors?
Motivation problems
There is also another aspect that receives surprisingly little attention: motivation. The Kong is not simply an odor. For most dogs, it is already a highly familiar reinforcement object. It is the toy that predicts play, excitement, possession, and reward. From a learning perspective, this makes Kong fundamentally different from a separate target odor that is reinforced by another reward carrying a completely different sensory profile. Think about this. When a dog searches for Kong, is the dog searching for a target odor, or is it searching for the smell of its favorite toy? Operational detection dogs are expected to search for odors that have no intrinsic biological or emotional significance to them. The explosive, narcotic, accelerant, or human remains odor itself should become the predictor of reinforcement, while the reward remains something entirely separate.
This separation creates a cleaner learning picture. The target odor predicts reinforcement, but the target odor itself is not the reinforcer. With Kong imprinting, this distinction becomes blurred. In my view, this introduces an additional motivational variable that deserves far more scientific investigation than it currently receives.
Sniffing frequency and search walls
I also remain skeptical about another popular claim: that training dogs to locate tiny pieces of Kong hidden in search walls somehow improves sniffing behavior or increases sniffing frequency. To date, I have not seen scientific evidence supporting this claim. Dogs naturally increase their sniffing frequency when they encounter biologically relevant or interesting odors. Research has shown that dogs routinely shift into high frequency sniffing patterns, often around 5 to 7 Hz, when actively sampling odor. They do not need Kong to learn this. It is part of their biology. What creates excellent detection dogs is not the presence of tiny Kong pieces hidden in concrete blocks.
Excellent detection dogs are built through experience.
Experience with many different odor concentrations. Experience in numerous environments. Experience with contamination, distractions, inaccessible hides, difficult airflows, novel surfaces, operational stressors, and realistic search scenarios. Stamina is not created by repeatedly searching the same wall containing identical hides. Stamina is built through carefully planned exposure to increasingly complex operational challenges.
The popular search walls made from concrete blocks certainly look impressive on social media. They provide a standardized training environment and can be useful for specific training objectives. However, we should be careful not to confuse attractive training setups with operational reality. There is currently no evidence demonstrating that these walls inherently improve the search capabilities of detection dogs compared with well designed, varied, and operationally relevant training scenarios.
Learn to be comfortable in double blind scenarios
The famous stone search walls hide another important problem as well: handlers and dogs are often not learning to work double blind. Watch many social media videos and you will notice the same pattern. The handler knows exactly where the Kong is hidden and immediately delivers reinforcement as soon as the dog shows interest in a particular location. But are you absolutely certain that the dog responded to the tiny piece of Kong?Or did the dog respond, at least partially, to subtle and unintended cues from the handler?
When you know where the hide is located, it is remarkably difficult not to influence your dog. Decades of research on the Clever Hans effect have demonstrated how easily animals can respond to unconscious human signals. Small changes in body posture, gaze direction, breathing, leash tension, movement speed, or simple expectation can all influence canine behavior. Because the handler already knows the answer, these effects are often masked. The training appears successful because the dog repeatedly “finds” the hide.
However, operational deployments are double blind by nature. The handler does not know where the explosives, narcotics, or human remains are hidden. Therefore, if we do not regularly train under double blind conditions, we risk creating teams that perform exceptionally well in familiar training setups but struggle when confronted with true operational uncertainty. And understand that dogs will quickly learn the difference between training and operations, just be way how the handler reacts. And that can have a huge influence on the expectation of the dog!
For me, double blind training is not an optional extra. It is an essential safeguard against Clever Hans effects and one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure that dogs are truly responding to odor and not to us.
Training for social media or real operations?
Social media often rewards what looks good. Operations reward what works. For me, the ultimate question is always the same: does this training prepare the dog for the reality it will encounter in the field? If the answer is uncertain, we should remain curious, critical, and willing to challenge even our most popular traditions. That is why I no longer follow the Kong hype. Not because I reject innovation. Quite the opposite. I actually used the Kong method myself many years ago. At the time, it made sense to me, and like many others, I saw value in it. But over the years, as my operational experience grew, as science advanced, and as I critically evaluated my own training data, I gradually moved away from it. And now you know why.
Where did the curiosity go?
For me, this also raises an important question. If we have been using exactly the same method for more than twenty years, where did our creativity go? Where did our curiosity go? Where did our drive to renew and improve go?
Every single day, scientists and trainers around the world are discovering more about odor chemistry, vapor pressure, contamination, odor movement, canine cognition, learning theory, and dog behavior. New technologies allow us to study dogs and odors in ways that were unimaginable only a decade ago. As trainers, we should embrace this knowledge. We should continuously challenge our assumptions, critically evaluate our methods, and remain open to change. Because if we stop questioning what we do, we stop improving. Tradition alone is not evidence. The fact that we have always done something in a particular way does not automatically make it the best way.
Progress in detection dog training has always come from people who dared to ask difficult questions, who critically analyzed their own work, and who were willing to abandon old beliefs when better alternatives emerged. So yes, we need to move on. Not by discarding everything from the past, but by building upon it, refining it, and continuously searching for better ways to prepare our dogs for the realities they will face.
In the end, operational success is the only opinion that truly matters.
