There’s a place Taylor Swift wants to take you. She calls it the Reputation Room on her current tour, but the space has gone by other names in the past — Loft ’89, Club Red, T-Parties. This cushy, thematically decorated private room has been the final destination for megafans who stand out to her team during concerts by way of extreme cosplay and enthusiasm in order to land a meet-up with their favorite artist.
It’s a democratic way to offer a perk typically reserved for VIP ticket holders or friends of the label, but your chances of squeezing in are slim… unless you happen to be one of the critics covering the tour. After her most polarizing album yet, last fall’s Reputation, Swift utilized the same charm offensive for critics that she trots out for her most loyal fans. In addition to the meet-and-greets, Swift has included screengrabs of positive press coverage on her Instagram story following each show — from the national outlets on down to college newspapers — with thank you’s superimposed.
This isn’t a new practice: She included pull-quotes from the more favorable Reputation album reviews surrounding its release, no doubt thrilling some writers with the possibility that their words — which they’ve slaved over, and dredged from their souls as Taylor did “All Too Well” — might be personally consumed by the biggest pop star in the world. Fandom and criticism have grown closer in recent years, so this is a natural progression of how certain music journalism norms have eroded. But what about when the journalists are eager participants, instead of bystanders?
Screengrabs from Swift’s Instagram story.
This isn’t the first tour where Swift has invited the critics to say hey, either, but it’s made all the more strange by the vaguely anti-press rhetoric baked into the Reputation rollout. At every site of this tour, her show was introduced by a video clip mashing up audio of TMZ-caliber talk shows speculating about her every public move, before she launched into “...Ready For It?” The literally scorching, snake-filled spectacle that followed never really cohered into an extension of that introduction video — probably all the better it didn’t.
Swift hasn’t been criticized for no reason. Her silence during the 2016 election was roundly slagged, given all the pro-woman rhetoric she’s made part of her brand. Last November, her team attempted to silence PopFront, an obscure pop culture blog for writing a post alleging that Swift was an alt-right sympathizer with lyrics openly courting a neo-Nazi audience. It was a stretch, but PopFront quite literally had a Twitter following that would fill up less than one stadium section. Nonetheless, her lawyer William J. Briggs II sent a threatening cease and desist notice to writer Meghan Herning, at which point the ACLU jumped to Herning’s defense. (The blog still lives on the site, unaffected by Briggs’ letter.)
These tactics, while not unheard of among fellow pop A-listers, stand in stark contrast to the folksy, friendly aura Swift tends to give off when interacting with fans and writers. Ilana Kaplan, a freelance writer who reviewed one of her East Rutherford, New Jersey tour stops for L’Officiel, met Swift in the Reputation Room at the show, after coordinating with her PR team. “She was really warm and welcoming,” Kaplan said. “It was really casual, and it came together because I was a fan who had written about Taylor before and had wanted to meet her for a long time.” Kaplan wasn’t alone on the Reputation Tour — Uproxx’s Caitlin White and Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos both posted photos with the pop star this summer, and chose not to comment for this story. (Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield also posed with Swift, and did not reply for comment.)
Conceding some truths — that nothing anyone can write will topple Taylor Swift, even her own undoing by way of crossing the Kardashian-West family — might make it a little easier to rationalize writing from the fan’s perspective. With Swift, though, the access she’s granted to writers blurs journalistic standards. The photos and meet-ups can exist independently from positive coverage, but it’s easy to see how her team might believe there is an irrefutable correlation between the two. And with more and more spaces available to offer positive coverage, pop stars now hold more leverage than before when it comes to rescinding access after a bad review. As arguably the most popular musician in the world, there’s no way for her to collapse this distance while keeping everyone’s role separate and intact. (It echoes Beyonce’s strategy of sending flowers and thank-you notes to journalists who’ve written positive coverage.)
Things have changed a great deal since she clapped back at an unnamed critic, and really anyone who showed her anything less than pure decency, on Speak Now’s “Mean.” The relationships have grown cozier and sometimes more fragile. One reporter was given explicit instructions from her editor to land a selfie with Swift, which turned into paparazzi fodder when Swift grabbed her hand as they walked along a Manhattan street. Just more than a year after 1989’s release, former NME deputy editor Eve Barlow detailed Swift’s attempts at courting press and gaining credibility. Barlow suddenly became a part of her world, after sending a string of positive tweets about one of her London shows. This morphed into chatting with Swift at the same swanky L.A. bars she frequented with Calvin Harris. But everything dissolved when a mildly negative review ruffled some feathers in the Swift camp, and she was removed from the guest lists of Swift events and shuttled out of her universe.
To Swift’s credit as a media manipulator, none of this appears to meaningfully intersect with the fans decked out in Swiftie cosplay. When I attended a recent tour stop in Pittsburgh, it reaffirmed that her popularity hasn’t flagged whatsoever amongst her diehards. It was a world in which Reputation is held on equal footing as Red and 1989 and Fearless, because it is Taylor Swift music performed live — the only thing that matters. The nearly sold-out stadium and extravagant homemade dresses — made of fabric from the Reputation cover’s newspaper pattern, one with objects taped on representing each track on the album, and even Tide Pods repurposed as Tay-Pods — proved that critical narratives tend not to matter in the real world.
But antagonizing the press and negative coverage can have its extraneous effects. Social media allows the most vicious of fans to descend on anyone who levels soft criticism at their favorite artist. Nicki Minaj recently dabbled in some of these intimidation tactics, after writer Wanna Thompson tweeted that she’d like to see Nicki pursue a new direction. A two-pronged attack followed from Minaj and the Barbz — Minaj personally called her “ugly” in a direct message, and her fans filled Thompson’s inbox with hateful messages, including photos of her 4-year-old daughter. Thompson ended up losing her internship at an entertainment blog when the dust had settled.
Noisey editor-in-chief Eric Sundermann, who met Swift at a meet-and-greet during the Red Tour, sees Swift’s press soirées as the state of entertainment journalism writ large and a natural extension of her ascent through the country music industry, where traditional media appearances are viewed as an essential part of the playbook. Her on-again-off-again nemesis, Kanye West, engaged in an even more absurd version of this practice, flying Sundermannand other select journalists to Wyoming in private jets for a Ye listening party. “That was a bit of a lightning rod in terms of this discussion that we’re having. I think my justification for going on that flight was that it was an extremely bizarre cultural moment that I felt like I should witness as a writer,” he said. “And I completely knew going into it that I’m not going to be able to write about this album critically, I’m not going to attempt to write about this album critically. What I’m going to do is write about how weird this whole thing is and how artists have so much money now.”
Swift also has so much money, and that anyone on her team still cares about what people write about her is definitely weird. Sundermann went back and forth a few times about whether she still takes criticism on a personal level. “Maybe she’s really in her feelings about all of this. I mean, why does Grimes get in fucking twitter fights about Elon Musk? No matter how famous you are or how much money you have, there seems to be this core human desire to prove that you’re right or good.”
I’ve thought this iteration of Swift existed on the same plane as Disney or Marvel or the Yankees — a largely unassailable force that will fill seats no matter the level of criticism levied her way, who also takes thorough inventory of how that adoration can turn into dissent. This should inherently make her less relatable than the teenaged dreamer who could excavate heartbreak and turn a phrase better than anyone in music. But I’m not sure if that’s true — at the end of the day, me, Taylor Swift, the mother-daughter team wiping tears away throughout “Long Live” at last month’s show, and everyone you know just want to be liked.
Shawn Cooke is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh.
Hey you! We want to know what you think about The Outline (and you can win some cool swag too). We know you love to answer questions, so take our 5 minute survey.
CULTURE
THE KETO DIET IS A RECIPE FOR DISASTER
The latest low-carb diet trend is merely a rehash of fad diets past.
The latest — or maybe just loudest — diet obsession transfixing the internet says it will help you lose weight, live longer, and improve your memory. Sounds great, you say? Except that these benefits will only bloom once you cut carbohydrates. Familiar story, right? The Atkins diet is back? We’re all gonna start eating eggs and bacon for every meal again until our cholesterol inevitably reaches code-red levels?
No, this new obsession is not Atkins. It’s the ketogenic diet, lovingly called “keto,” popularized by actors, Instagram stars, and the same people who brought you raw water.
If you believe a diet is supposed to be a varied landscape of all the things the world has to offer in moderation, keto may not be the diet for you. Let’s find out if science says it’s worth it.
WHAT IS THE KETOGENIC DIET?
The history of keto goes much farther than an attempt to stem weight gain during our fat-fearing era. In 1921, it was observed that fasting decreased incidence of seizure in epileptic patients. The same year, reports noted cognitive improvement and reduced seizure activity in epileptics who fasted for two to three days (fasting has been used as far back as 500 B.C. to treat epilepsy).
Around the same time, it was discovered that the metabolic change caused by fasting that controlled seizures also occurred when a patient stopped eating carbohydrates. It was then that an endocrinologist named Dr. Rollin Woodyatt had a scientific breakthrough: he found that the compounds acetone and beta-hydroxybutyric acid were detectable in high levels in fasting patients (to be fair, they can also be present in urine in low levels normally, and things like dehydration can trigger a false positive test). These compounds are classified as ketones, produced via the metabolic state of ketosis, which occurs when an elevated level of ketones are produced as a result of the body using fat for fuel as stored carbohydrate is depleted.
THE KETOGENIC DIET KEEPS COMING BACK INTO THE LARGER CONSCIOUSNESS, TO THE CONSTERNATION OF MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS.
Doctors at the Mayo Clinic created a formula that manipulated the ketogenic effect that came with complete fasting by instead limiting a patient’s intake of carbohydrates. This was the genesis of the ketogenic diet. To manage childhood epilepsy, the prescribed diet consisted of one gram of protein per kilogram of body mass — a max of 15 grams of carbs — and the rest of the calories from fat. Et voila: the ketogenic diet was born.
A strict version of the diet is still used to manage drug-resistant epilepsy. But it’s fallen out of favor because the success rate of a large suite of readily available anti-epileptic medications. It’s been observed that children on this diet for epilepsy don’t generally become overweight and tend to lose some weight in the first few months on the diet, but it’s not without its drawbacks. Children on keto tend to have higher cholesterol than other children in their age range and there can be some nasty side effects, including kidney stones. Due to the public’s appetite for miracle weight-loss cures, however, the diet keeps coming back into the larger consciousness, to the consternation of medical professionals.
HOW KETO WAS REBORN AS ATKINS WAS REBORN AS KETO
In 1997, a book titled Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution climbed up the bestseller list for five years after it was first published (this edition of Diet Revolution was little more than a cosmetic overhaul of Dr. Robert Atkins’s 1972 book, Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, which didn’t quite revolutionize diets in the way publishers hoped).
But this time around, America was primed for Atkins’s theory that it wasn’t fat but carbohydrates that caused weight gain. Food manufacturers and consumers had cut fat from their diets but obesity rates continued to rise; something was due to be the new culprit for our weight woes. Dr. Atkins was further vindicated by 2002 article by the science journalist Gary Taubes in The New York Times Magazine. “If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it,” Taubes wrote. “They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution and Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along.”
At one point in the early 2000s, approximately 10 percent of the country was on a low-carb diet. That’s insane. What’s more, people actively started avoiding carbs even if they weren’t on a diet. “A year ago, if you asked consumers what they watch, 11 percent would have said carbs,'' Michael Polk, the chief operating officer at Unilever-Best Foods, told The Times. “Today if you ask, 40 percent of consumers say they are watching carbs. In our opinion, this has evolved into a major shift in consumer behavior.” Atkins was able to build an industry out of his diet advice: Atkins Nutritionals, which cranked out low-carb meals and snacks, was at one point valued at approximately half a billion dollars.
AT ONE POINT IN THE EARLY 2000S, APPROXIMATELY 10 PERCENT OF THE COUNTRYWAS ON A LOW-CARB DIET.
So why did Atkins fall out of favor? Well, the diet’s delightful side effects could include fatigue, constipation, excessive thirst, bad breath, the dreaded meat sweats, and worst, the look your friends would give you when you said you were on Atkins. There was also the fact that the diet wasn’t really sustainable (kinda like most diets, funnily enough). In 2003, a pair of studies in the New England Journal of Medicine found that most of the weight one initially lost while following Atkins was water weight; and subjects who followed the diet typically gained back any lost weight in six months.
Atkins Nutritionals filed chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005, a year after the doctor died after falling on an icy New York City sidewalk. Still, Atkins had a long-lasting impact on the dietary landscape in America. “Sugar free” and “low carb” labels never left the snack aisle. People still fell back on the idea that to lose weight, one simply had to cut carbs. But all the while, obesity rates climbed from 30 percent up to 39 percent of the country, priming the stage for another diet “revolution.”
THE RISE OF THE KETO GURUS
Losing weight has become a challenge to be solved through innovation, and the new diet gurus don’t take kindly to the scientific method. It’s in line with Dr. Atkins’s legacy; he was a huge proponent of alternative and unproven medical treatments beyond just his ideas about nutrition. You almost can’t blame him or the other diet gurus for leaning in on the techno-bullshit market; it’s hard to fill up a 300 page diet book on “eat a bit less and find a type of exercise that doesn’t make you hate life.”
Dave Asprey is one such tech guy-turned-low-carb guru. Asprey is now the CEO of Bulletproof 360, which sells butter-larded coffee and myriad supplements to the masses — and which raised $19 million in Series B funding last year. Over the past two decades, Asprey says he’s spent $1 million to “biohack” his body, turning it into a fat-burning machine and even increasing his IQ by 20 points. (Asprey has also said that he blocks waves out of his cells with glasses and takes supplements to help with the “low oxygen high EMF [electromagnetic field] environment” on airplanes, so.)
I’ll give Asprey this: people have told me that the buttered coffee tastes okay and makes them feel energetic. The coffee is also, of course, keto-approved:
“The Bulletproof Diet uses ketosis as a tool, but tweaks it for even better performance,” goes a blog post on the Bulletproof website. “It is a cyclical ketogenic diet, which means you eat keto for 5 to 6 days a week and then do a weekly protein fast, which lowers inflammation and kickstarts fat-burning. This is much better for your body and spurs weight loss even more.”
But about that weight loss.
Between the butter and the so-called “Brain Octane Oil” that are part of the Bulletproof coffee recipe, any increased energy one feels after consuming it could have something to do with the nearly 500 calories of fat that are in it. As has been pointed out, those calories displace other more nutrient-dense sources of fuel. Asprey also claims that his coffee is better for you because it doesn’t contain mycotoxins, i.e. toxins produced by fungi. Though it’s true that mycotoxins can be dangerous for your health, the possibility of any roasted coffee available on store shelves containing mycotoxins is slim to none. It’s like slapping “this coffee was not made with white rhino horn” on the label.
CALORIES STILL MATTER
Keto devotees sometimes brag about how they eat more on the diet than ever before and still lose weight. On keto, their bodies have turned into fat-burning machines that give the finger to the laws of thermodynamics, or something.
Let’s hold up a sec. Allow me to introduce you to the DIETFITS Randomized Clinical Trial, published in February 2018 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. DIETFITS, which stands for Dietary Intervention Examining the Factors Interacting with Treatment Success, succeeded in busting a slew of dietary theories. Microbiome is responsible for everything? Nope. Predisposition to success on one diet based on genetics? Nah. Low carb over low fat? Uh-uh.
Over the course of a year, 609 participants were randomly sorted into low-fat or low-carb diet groups. They were given instruction on healthy habits and choices, along with practical advice on how to stick to the diets to which they had been assigned. Additionally, and possibly most importantly, they were instructed to keep their caloric intake limited similarly in both groups.
It’s fairly common that, initially, low-carb dieters see more weight loss. This is because glycogen molecules bind with water, and once you’ve burned through your most readily available source of energy, you’re also down a few pounds of water weight. Over time, that weight loss of the low-carb group evened out with the low-fat one; there was ultimately just a 1.5 lbs difference in weight loss between the two groups — the low-fat group lost an average of 11.7 lbs the low-carb group 13.2 lbs. This is a difference reflective of which group took a shit before or after going for their final weigh-ins.
IT’S FAIRLY COMMON THAT, INITIALLY, LOW-CARB DIETERS SEE MORE WEIGHT LOSS. BUT IT DOESN’T LAST.
A few variables were tested in conjunction with weight loss. One was initial insulin secretion, specifically to see if it had any affect on loss in each diet group. It did not. They had also checked a few genetic markers that were suspected to give dieters pre-dispositions to success either on low fat diets or low carb diets based on previous studies. However, genetics were shown to have no effect.
But the most important takeaway from the study is that similar numbers of participants lost and gained similar amounts of weight in both groups. As Examine.com shows in its analysis of the study, charts comparing weight loss (or gain) from each group are almost identical.
In the beginning of the study, all participants were instructed to consume either ≤20 g of fat (if in the low-fat group) or ≤20 g of carbs (if in the low-carb group) for the first two months, after which they could increase either their fat or carb intake to levels they felt they could sustain indefinitely. By the end of the trial, the vast majority had not been able to maintain such low levels. The final dietary recalls reported an average daily fat intake of ≈57 g (low-fat group) and an average daily carb intake of ≈132 g (low-carb group).
Part of what makes a diet work in the long run, of course, is a person’s ability to stick with it, and most diets that cut out an entire food group or macronutrient are not sustainable.
Curiously, this study was funded by the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), a group with the aim of producing “conclusive results in the next decade” in a sometimes confusing nutritional landscape. They claim our nutritional guidelines are “based on inconclusive science,” and though their website doesn’t directly indicate any bias, their research so far focuses on the effects of carbohydrates on obesity. This was the second published study that received funding from the institute. In the first study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2016, researchers hypothesized that a low-carbohydrate diet increased energy expenditure. Results said otherwise:
The carbohydrate–insulin model predicts that the KD would lead to increased EE, thereby resulting in a metabolic advantage amounting to ~300–600 kcal/d. Our data do not support EE increases of that magnitude. (...) In summary, we found that a carefully controlled isocaloric KD coincided with small increases in EE that waned over time. Despite rapid, substantial, and persistent reductions in daily insulin secretion and RQ after introducing the KD, we observed a slowing of body fat loss.
In layman’s terms: people burned marginally more calories at first, but there wasn’t evidence that the diet increased caloric burn in the long term.
I suppose it’s not a surprise that, per an investigation from Wired, NuSI seems to be having trouble scrounging up financial backing lately.
KETO AND LOW-CARB NOW HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM AS LOW-FAT
Remember those insanely awful Snackwell’s cookies and the chips that gave you anal leakage? We were willing to suffer so much for the price of “weight loss.” Snackwell’s. Christ.
We soon learned that low-fat diets only work if a dieter is also controlling their calories. Five thousand calories of broiled dried out chicken breasts, kale, or anal-leakage chips is still 5,000 calories. Low-fat content or not, those calories add up.
Low-carb has become the new low-fat. During the early Atkins era, snacks included cucumbers, beef jerky, and pork rinds. Now there’s a wealth of low-carb snacking options; there are junk-foody low-carb recipes all over Pinterest; a low-carb aisle at the grocery store. There are low-carb replacement foods and ingredients for low-carb replacement foods. It’s Snackwell’s 2.0.
REMEMBER SNACKWELL’S? LOL.
Want candy but you don’t want to stray from keto? A low-carb peanut butter cup has about the same calories, gram per gram, as a Reese’s. Want to slap all that bacon between something other than lettuce wraps? Some low-carb bread will run you $7.99 per loaf whereas bread that doesn’t taste like sadness with the same number of calories per slice is generally about half the cost. How about chocolate? A chocolate brand that boldly calls itself ‘The Good Chocolate’ is sweetened with a sugar alcohol commonly associated with some nasty gastrointestinal effects when consumed excessively. It’s also $8 for a 2.5-oz bar, and about as calorically dense as a Hershey’s bar. Low-carb flour? Not surprisingly, it costs more than normal old flour, and the more expensive one has more calories.
BACON: A BALANCED BREAKFAST?!
Here’s the thing: Low-carb diets absolutely have a track record of working. A 2017 study in Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviewsshowed significant weight loss, improvement of health markers related to diabetes, blood pressure, and cholesterol in participants who followed the diet for 10 weeks. If you have been advised to lose weight by your trusted medical professional and your doctor or dietitian says this is appropriate for you, a low-carb diet can help you lose weight.
But low-carb diets don’t work because of how people seem to think they work — more specifically, through something called the “insulin hypothesis,” which says that removing carbohydrates from your diet stabilizes insulin and blood sugar levels, subsequently increasing your metabolism and reducing your hunger. This hypothesis has failed several studies. A review study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2017 reported it as “carefully controlled inpatient feeding studies whose results failed to support key [carbohydrate-insulin] model predictions.” Sad.
A common belief among keto devotees is that your body not only switches to burning fat on keto but that a low-carb, high-fat diet turns you into a “fat-burning machine.” Now that you’re not eating pizza crust, your body is going to burn through all of its own fat, calories and laws of thermodynamics be damned. But you don’t magically burn off your love handles just because you changed your fuel source. As much as the three macronutrients have different uses in the bodies, when it comes to gaining and losing weight, calories are calories are calories.
Someone trying to follow the keto diet to a letter may not even go into the much-desired state of ketosis. Sure, you can buy those little piss strips that react to ketones in your urine to reassure you that you’re “in ketosis,” but you’re probably wasting your money. Ketones are present in low levels in your urine even if you’re not on a ketogenic diet. Measuring ketones via blood is far more accurate (if not overly invasive for a diet), but to measure them for weight loss in the first place is borderline useless, especially in urine.
One of the most extraordinary claims in Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution was the metabolic advantage hypothesis, which theorizes that the inefficiencies in the fat-burning process caused an energy advantage (in layman’s terms, it was hypothesized that using fat for fuel causes you to burn more calories). Unfortunately, a 2006 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said that calorie per calorie, you’ll lose the same amount of weight on both a ketogenic diet and a reduced calorie, controlled carb (but not ketogenic) diet. Amazing what you can get people to believe when you sell some books.
Studies also contradict the claim that the ketogenic diet will help your Crossfit performance, or whatever. A 2018 study published in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness reports that a low-carb diet inhibited cardiovascular performance. Want to check that half marathon off your bucket list? Science says eat your carbs. Multiple studies have shown similar results. The best news I can tell you about keto is that a 2017 Journal of Human Kinetics study said that it can help maintain a lower body weight, which can help athletic performance. But the study also said that “some aspects regarding the effects of long-term LCHF diets in athletes are still unexplored and in need of investigation, including (...)Strength, power, psychological status, and perceptual-motor performance after weight loss.” So, take that with a grain of low-carb salt.
SO WHAT DO I EAT?
You could pick any of the countless diet books on the market, follow their plan to the last calorie, and lose weight. This is because — as study after study has shown — calories and dietary adherence matter more than anything for weight loss. You can gain or lose weight on any combination of foods. People have lost weight on twinkies, McDonalds, juice, plants, and obscene amounts of meat.
It’s important to remember weight loss alone doesn’t necessarily cause all health markers to improve, and a diet causing weight loss does not mean it’s appropriate and healthy for everyone. Some foods are better than others at making weight loss and maintenance easier for different people, so balancing a diet is a fairly personalized thing. If your doctor gives you the green light and keto works for you, do it. If low fat works for you, do it. If plant-based, paleo, Mediterranean, or one of the zillion other diets help you improve your health and your relationship with food? Do it. There’s no one right way to eat for everyone, just as there is no miracle diet plan for weight loss.
And please, talk to your doctor and a registered dietitian when considering a new diet plan. And maybe just have a piece of bread and don’t worry about it.
Listen to an interview with Yvette on The Outline World Dispatch.
Yvette d’Entremont is a contributing writer at The Outline. Kyle Griggs is an American animator, illustrator and director based in LA and Sydney. She makes GIFs, prints, short films and installations.
Hey you! We want to know what you think about The Outline (and you can win some cool swag too). We know you love to answer questions, so take our 5 minute survey.
Professional dog trainer Sarah Owings claims her Labrador retriever Tucker was a “stir crazy boy in his kennel” when she first met him at the Glendale Humane Society. Tucker came from a breeder of field line retrievers — high-energy working dogs that, in order to be mentally and physically stimulated, require some sort of regular routine, like retrieving ducks or search-and-rescue. Owings, who promotes the use of positive reinforcement over punishment, said she learned that Tucker’s initial guardians had attempted to curb his undesirable behavior with harsh training methods. “None of it was effective, just really stressful for all involved,” Owings said. “After four long years of what sounds like a nearly continuous battle of wills—human vs. dog—it was decided the best thing for all involved was to find him a better home.” After adopting Tucker, Owings quickly realized that what the dog needed most, aside from a healthy diet and a less aversive training regimen, was a job. Tucker’s job is doing nose work.
Nose work is a relatively new dog sport that mimics the types of tasks performed by drug detection or search-and-rescue dogs. In various indoor and outdoor venues, nose work dogs sniff out q-tips that have been infused with essential oils like birch, anise, clove, or cypress. During competition, dog-handler teams scan a designated area for a certain amount of odors in a predetermined amount of time. Dogs must communicate to their handlers that they’ve located a hide, pausing with their nose on the scent until the handler calls the word “alert.” Judges award points based on the dog’s timing in targeting all of the odors that have been hidden throughout the course. They subtract points if a handler misreads his or her dog and calls an “alert” where no odor is present. According to Owings, “Nose work is the fastest growing dog sport in the U.S.,” outpacing popular events like agility, conformation showing, and competitive obedience.
Watching a dog do nose work demonstrates the immense power of scent detection and working drive that almost all dogs possess. Whether it’s sheep herding or simply gnawing on a chew toy, most dogs enjoy having some sort of “job” to keep their bodies busy and their brains occupied. In nose work, once dogs understand that their task is to find a certain scent in exchange for a reward such as food or toys, they tend to happily scan even the most distracting environments with determination and focus. The intricacies of a nose work dog’s behavior while working is endlessly fascinating to observe, especially because each dog searches differently and each dog-handler team naturally forms its own unique method of communication. Some teams prefer to compete off-leash, for instance, while other dog-handler teams stay close together as they work through a search area. Each team also creates a system of “alerting” that a hide has been found, as a dog sits, pauses, wags its tail, closes its mouth, or otherwise communicates to its handler that they’ve located the scent.
Tucker sniffing a fountain. Photo by Marcella Winslow, courtesy of Sarah Owings
The late Ron Gaunt, an experienced K-9 police officer, detection trainer, and handler, created the sport in 2009 along with trainers Amy Herot and Jill-Marie O’Brien. The trio then founded the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) in order to organize trials and competitive nose work events. NACSW is the oldest official organizing body for nose work, but there are more than a dozen others offering official title competitions. There are several different variations of the game, and exact rules vary depending on the venue and event. Dogs may search for scents hidden in boxes, buried underground, spread outdoors, or scattered throughout locations like schools, churches, or anywhere willing to host a trial.
Penny Scott-Fox, one of the original seven trainers who Gaunt, Herot, and O’Brien approached to help start the sport of nose work, hosts the prestigious Turner Trials at the Mountain View Mausoleum near her training center in Altadena, California, each year. Scott-Fox named the competition in honor of her flat-coated retriever Turner, who won the NACSW National Invitational, arguably the sport’s highest achievement, in 2015 before passing away of cancer the following year. (“She was a spectacular search dog,” Scott-Fox said of Turner.)Over the course of another three days at the mausoleum for her own annual Turner Trials, a select group of dog/handler teams that have achieved Elite status — the fourth and highest level in NACSW — compete in multiple challenging searches. In this year’s event, Owings and Tucker placed fourth overall. All dogs, of course, are good dogs, and therefore all dogs are winners. As long as dogs like Tucker are able to exercise their natural desire to sniff and have a job, they tend to leave competitive nose work events happier than they arrived.
The author’s dog, Hazel, performing nose work. Photo by the author
Scott-Fox believes that nose work should remain an accessible hobby even to those who don’t wish to compete at the highest levels. “Everyone can do it. You don’t have to be super fit, and it creates a lovely bond between dog and handler,” Scott-Fox said. “I just want people to have fun with their dogs.”
Although facilitating a search for essential oils may not be high on the average guardian’s list of things to do with their dog, it is, indeed, fun. Nose work is also a great method of mental stimulation — which, as animal behaviorists have proved through multiple studies, can be as important for a dog’s well-being as exercise. There are other benefits, too. “I have had huge success with shy dogs where it has increased their confidence. It is also a chance for dogs to be dogs in a controlled but fun way,” Scott-Fox said.
Sarah Owings and Tucker. Photo by Marcella Winslow, courtesy of Sarah Owings
Owings believes that nose work may even have a transformative effect on dog owners, helping view their relationship with their canine companions in an entirely new light. The dogs possess superior sniffing abilities, and by default cannot be viewed as inferior to their human counterparts. “In order to really succeed in the sport, people have to do what we call ‘trust their dogs.’ In my experience, trusting your dog means fully letting go of the idea of being in control of either the dog or the search,” Owings said.“It definitely means letting go of outdated and debunked ideas about needing to be a ‘pack leader. Once you cross that start line, the dog is in charge. He has the nose. He leads the search. It’s a humbling and, I feel, important role reversal for the human part of the team. Once you get into this game, it’s like going down a rabbit hole of ever-deepening interspecies communication. You’ll never relate to your dog quite the same way again.”
Hey you! We want to know what you think about The Outline (and you can win some cool swag too). We know you love to answer questions, so take our 5 minute survey.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment