Sam Finlayson
Sam is Shire's resident scent geek. Her journey into scent-based training began with her own working cocker spaniel, Ozzie, when she attended an introduction to mantrailing with Alex while looking for an activity that could support him through anxiety and reactivity.
It did. It also sparked what has since become a serious - and fairly all-consuming - interest in how dogs use scent, learn, solve problems and make decisions.
That beginning still sits at the centre of how Sam teaches. She wants to know not only whether a dog finds the target, but what the dog understands, how they reached their decision, what information they used and how the handler's actions affected the search.
For Sam, good scentwork is not simply about producing a successful find. It should give the dog clarity, build confidence, develop genuine independence and help the handler understand what their dog is communicating. The result matters, but so does the process that created it.
Sam's qualifications include Mantrailing Global Instructor and Assessor status, Scentwork UK Accredited Trainer, Tier 1 and Tier 2 Judge and Trial Manager, and National Nosework Association Trials Official and Odour Recognition Test Host and Assessor. She is also a Ford K9 Accredited Canine Cognition Instructor, and her continuing development includes conservation detection-dog handling and membership of The Ecology Detection Dog Britain and Ireland Working Group.
Alongside her practical qualifications and experience, Sam holds a First-Class Honours degree in Applied Social Sciences, specialising in Psychology and Sociology. This feeds directly into her interest in learning and communication - particularly the gap that can exist between what a handler intended to train and what their dog actually understood.
Sam's strength lies in close observation and careful analysis. She enjoys breaking training down, spotting unclear criteria and questioning whether an exercise is really teaching or assessing what it is supposed to. She reads the research, thinks perhaps slightly too much about odour, airflow and hide placement, and is usually the person arriving with another piece of scentwork equipment that apparently needed testing.
But the point of all that detail is to make training clearer, not more complicated. Sam's teaching is practical and adaptable, rather than based around a fixed recipe. She wants handlers to leave knowing not only what to practise next, but why they are doing it, what they should be watching for and how to make good decisions when things don't go quite to plan.
Much of Sam's thinking continues to be tested and refined by her own dogs - Ozzie, Rora and Kes - and her partner's dog, Wilson. Four very different dogs who have firmly demonstrated that no single method will suit every learner.
Meet Sam & Alex
Shire Scentwork is a collaboration between two instructors who arrived here by different routes and bring complementary areas of expertise.
What we share is curiosity: about scent, behaviour, how dogs learn, and how we can become better at reading and developing the individual dog in front of us.
Alex McRobb
Alex is a COAPE-qualified and endorsed Clinical Animal Behaviourist with a Diploma in Animal Behaviour and more than a decade of professional experience across dog training, behaviour and dog-sport coaching. He runs K9 Insight, where much of his work centres on helping dogs and handlers when things are not quite straightforward.
He has particular experience with reactivity, anxiety and stress, and has worked with dog charities on rehoming and behaviour modification. Alex also undertakes expert-witness work in dog-related legal and animal-welfare cases, including those involving the Dangerous Dogs Act.
Alongside his behaviour work, Alex is a Certified Mantrailing Global Instructor, UK Dog Sports Instructor and Detection Dog Trials Manager. Over the years, he has worked with a huge variety of dogs and handlers, from those taking their first steps into training to teams working through much more complex behavioural or training challenges.
That breadth of experience means Alex rarely looks at a training problem in isolation. A dog struggling with a search may not really be struggling with scent at all. Confidence, arousal, frustration, previous learning, the environment or something happening between dog and handler can all change what we see when the dog starts working.
He is particularly interested in what behaviour tells us about the dog in front of us. Rather than focusing only on whether an exercise succeeded or failed, Alex looks at what happened along the way - where the dog became uncertain, what changed their behaviour, what helped them recover and whether the training set-up itself needs to change.
His behavioural perspective is especially valuable when scentwork or trailing is affected by confidence, frustration, stress or environmental sensitivity. Rather than trying to fit every dog into a predetermined method, Alex adapts the training around the individual in front of him. Sometimes that means changing the exercise. Sometimes it means changing the environment, expectations or pace. And sometimes the most useful thing is recognising that the apparent training problem isn't actually the problem at all.
Alex also brings a pragmatic streak to training. He is less interested in doing something a particular way simply because that's how it has always been done, and more interested in whether it makes sense for the dog, the handler and the situation in front of him. That makes his approach flexible, practical and particularly useful when the textbook answer doesn't quite fit the dog.
Alex shares his life with Buck and Aggie, who both play their own part in his training and behaviour work - although Buck is now beginning to hand some of his duties over to his considerably younger colleague. Both enjoy scentwork too, even if Alex doesn't get nearly as much time to train with them as he'd like - so when he steps onto the other side of the fence to compete with them or attend an external workshop, they occasionally take great pleasure in making the instructor look like the student.
Our Philosophy
We take training seriously, but the dogs don't need to know that.
We don't believe there is one right way to train every dog.
Dogs arrive with different genetics, experiences, motivations and ways of solving problems. Handlers bring their own experience too. Good training starts with understanding the team in front of us rather than trying to make them fit a predetermined method.
We want dogs to understand the task, not simply learn how to produce the answer we were hoping for. That means giving them opportunities to think, make decisions, solve problems and develop genuine independence, while teaching handlers how to read when to step and when to get out of the way.
Clarity matters. We pay attention to what we are actually teaching, what the dog may be learning and whether those two things are the same. When something doesn't work, we don't simply repeat it more loudly or assume the dog got it wrong. We look at the information we've given them, the environment, the training history and the way the problem has been set up.
Mistakes are information. They help us see what a dog understands, where there are gaps and what we need to change next.
We take training seriously, but dogs don't need to know that. Scentwork, tracking and trailing should be engaging, rewarding and enjoyable. Progress matters, but so do confidence, curiosity and the relationship between dog and handler.
Ultimately, our aim isn't just to help you train a dog that can find something.
It's to help you understand the dog doing the finding.
Ozzie
Sam's Working Cocker Spaniel and a character in every sense of the word. Smart, intuitive and enormously capable, he has firm opinions on most things and is never shy about letting you know when he's had enough. Simon Prins recently described him as a clown, which seems entirely fair.
He's a dog of many contradictions. One biscuit trapped under a chair constitutes an emergency of epic proportions, requiring immediate human intervention. Yet when he's working, he'll climb onto, squeeze under or push through things he'd normally avoid at all costs, simply because that's where the search takes him.
Ozzie is the dog who sent Sam down the scentwork rabbit hole. He has taught her almost everything she knows or, more accurately, he's the reason she had to learn it in the first place.
He's a devoted fan of the car, where he would happily eat, sleep and spend a surprising proportion of his life. His preferred drinking bowl, meanwhile, is the bath. He'll "wooooo" at the bathroom door until someone lets him in, before jumping right into the bath and waiting for the tap to be turned on so he can drink his "bath juice".
He is, in short, a lot. Sam wouldn't have him any other way.
Rora
Sam's Springer Spaniel and the easy middle child. Sensitive, eager to please and always keen to get things right, she is probably the dog most likely to make Sam look like she knows what she's doing.
Outside, she is a ball-chasing, bog-seeking whirlwind whose favourite activities are searching, swimming and getting absolutely filthy, ideally all at once.
She is also in training as an ecology detection dog, complete with her own goggles, because if there's gorse in her way, she goes straight through it. Along the way, she is developing into something of a scat connoisseur.
At home, she is calm and settled, happy to be wherever you are and able to switch off at a second's notice. She's so settled you could almost forget she's there. Not for long, though, as she's always ready for the next adventure.
Our Dogs
Buck
Buck is Alex's Belgian Malinois/German Shepherd cross. He came to Alex after a difficult start and several previous homes, and has since become his reliable sidekick, both at home and at work. The pair have been through a lot together, and Buck has taught Alex a great deal along the way.
Buck does everything at full intensity, approaching scentwork with a fairly straightforward philosophy: find source and get to it. If that requires climbing something, launching himself somewhere questionable or attempting to go through rather than around an obstacle, Buck sees no obvious problem.
His approach can be spectacularly effective in some types of search and considerably less desirable when faced with a neat row of boxes at a trial.
Buck has had a busy career, and is well known amongst our regular clients. He has worked extensively as a stooge dog, helping reactive dogs learn to cope around other dogs, as well as helping with classes, demonstrations and events.
For a dog who approaches his own hobbies with such wholehearted enthusiasm, he's spent a surprising amount of his career helping other dogs learn to keep theirs under control.
Aggie
Alex's young Labrador, chosen with both home life and future work in mind. Friendly, excitable and enthusiastically Labrador about most things, she is still very much at the start of her training journey, and enjoying every moment of it.
She has already begun her scentwork training and attended the Simon Prins workshop alongside Ozzie, giving Alex plenty to think about as her skills develop.
With Buck getting a little older, Aggie is gradually beginning her apprenticeship in his demonstration and stooge-dog duties. The aim is for her to become a versatile dog who can turn her paw to a bit of everything.
At the time of writing however, her professional development has suffered a temporary setback after she decided to roll in human excrement. She is firmly in the bad books for now, but all will be forgiven once she smells fresh again.
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Kes
Wilson
Sam's Miniature Pinscher, and the newest and by far the smallest member of the team. Nobody appears to have told Kes about the small part.
Bold, independent and extremely sure of herself, she knows what she wants and isn't backwards about coming forwards to tell you. Unfortunately, she has also discovered her voice remarkably early and is experimenting enthusiastically with its many applications.
Regular clients will be used to seeing her at sessions, where she loves to make an appearance and say hello, usually from her perch on Sam's shoulder.
Her training is only just beginning, but she's already making Sam rethink some long-held assumptions. Things that became almost a given after years of living with spaniels turn out not to be givens at all when the learner is a tiny dog with entirely different motivations and her own ideas about how things should work.
Kes is proving that adapting training to the individual isn't just a philosophy. Sometimes you don't get a choice.
Sam's partner Mike's German Shepherd. At around 50kg, he is by far the biggest of all our dogs - he actually weighs more than his three canine housemates put together!
His priorities in life are simple: Mike, Rora and a frisbee. The frisbee comes first, though.
When there's no frisbee on offer, Wilson is Mike's office companion and walking buddy.
Sam has done most of Wilson's scentwork training. His steady, systematic search style makes him a very different dog to work with from the spaniels, and a useful one for testing new ideas before they make it into a session with clients.
Wilson may do his scentwork with Sam, but Mike is his person, and it shows when the two of them work together. When Mike stepped in to handle him at a trial, the pair went on to win the whole thing.
Sam would like it noted that she taught him everything he knows.