Komu's certification exam, first attempt.

Unexpectedly, Komu failed his certification exam today.  For at least five months, he has been finding cats left and right, giving me clear, unmistakeable signals that a deaf and blind person would have no trouble understanding.  Today, the day of his final exam, he walked past the hidden cat four times, within inches, and gave me no signal whatsoever.  Just before that, he alerted on an empty cat carrier because of the scent of the cat that had been there.  He might have been a little tired because of the muggy conditions, but he wasn't too tired to chase Kelsy around the field afterward.  Also, he performed the decomp detection and signal flawlessly after his failure to find the target cat.

I have been thinking about this all day, trying to learn a lesson from this failure.  It finally occurred to me that Komu may not have had any cat scent available to him to smell, even though he was within inches of the cat carrier.  This might be similar to the situation we had last week with Sage and Toby.  Toby was hidden in a carrier inside a garage, right by a pet door.  Sage, who can detect a cat from 100 feet away some times, had no idea the cat was there until she was directed to poke her nose into the opening.  I puffed the powder bottle by the opening, and the air was being pulled into the garage, vacuuming up any possible scent, leaving nothing for Sage to find.  Cheeto in his cat carrier may have been like Toby in the garage.  His carrier had evergreen branches piled on it for camouflage, and most of the carrier was tucked into the bush.  Suppose that Cheeto was acting like a little furnace, heating up his carrier.  It is possible that air was being pulled in the mesh opening and exhausted into the interior of the bush, eventually wafting out the top.  I wish I would have thought of puffing the powder bottle at the opening of Cheeto's carrier to see if air was being sucked in.   For future tests, I think the cat should be camouflaged in a bush so that air can still move around the carrier.  There may be some other explanation for what happened today, but I can't think of one. 

If it's true that no cat scent was available to Komu even though he was inches away, then we need to consider this scenario in the case of an actual search.  If the missing cat is hidden in a similar manner, how can we compensate for the unfavorable air flow?  I guess one thing we can do is to not assume there is no cat in a hiding place just because the dog didn't alert.  The dog's nose should be one tool, and we should do a redundant check by visually looking in the hiding place as best we can.  Another action I should be taking on cases is to puff the powder bottle by openings to crawlspaces and gaps under sheds to see if air is being sucked in.