Detection Dog Trials.
The international standard for detection dog sport.
The Standard
DDT measures the team
Not the dog. Not the clock. The team. Both ends of the leash. Every search. Every element. Every trial.
Nine scoring categories built around a single truth. What a dog and handler accomplish together is more than the sum of what either can do alone. The communication between them. The decisions made under pressure. The trust they have built showing up quietly in the work when it matters most.
Time exists here only as a boundary. What happens inside it is everything.
The same nine categories. The same standard. Applied completely and equally to every team that enters it. Whether the dog weighs eight pounds or eighty. Whether this is the first trial or the fiftieth.
The standard sees the work for what it is.
And what it finds there is always worth seeing.
The Trial
Every element. Every score. Every team.
Each trial is made up of elements. A room. A vehicle. An outdoor space. An industrial area. Up to four per trial. Each one a distinct search environment, judged on its own merits, finished with immediate feedback from the judge who watched every second of it.
Inside each element, your team is evaluated across nine scoring categories. The communication. The precision. The decisions made under pressure. The quality of the partnership that makes all of it possible. Not the dog alone. Not the handler alone. The team.
Three divisions. Prelim, Novice, and Intermediate. The hides scale. The time allowed scales. The nine categories and the way they see your team do not.
Every score is recorded. Every result is permanent.
Upcoming Trials
Find a trial
Every registered trial worldwide. Entry through DDT Pro.
DDT Pro
Every trial. Every score. Every record. Transparent and permanent.
DDT Pro is the platform behind the standard. Handler records. Live results. Championship tracking. Judge integrity. Every trial ever run under this standard lives there. Every score ever given. Transparent and permanent.
Dexter
The Founding Partner
Before Detection Dog Trials. Before the standard. Before handlers and their dogs competed in aviation museums and football stadiums and working environments around the globe.
There was a dog doing his job.
Dexter was an air scent Search and Rescue dog trained to find missing people. He searched when asked. He communicated what he found. He worked with the kind of complete commitment that only exists when a dog and handler have built something genuinely real between them.
That partnership planted something in his handler that would eventually change detection sport forever.
Some things are inevitable. You can only see them clearly looking back.
"He is still and always will be my absolute dog in a million."
Georgie Jones
Founder, Detection Dog Trials
Georgie Jones didn't set out to build an international sport. She set out to find somewhere worthy of the work her dogs were doing.
What she found instead was a gap so fundamental it could only be filled by building something entirely new.
The trials that existed were few. They were judged on time. They were held in village halls. They specified a single odour. They measured the clock and nothing else. Everything a handler had built with their dog was invisible to the system designed to evaluate them.
Georgie saw it differently.
She saw what genuine detection teamwork actually looked like. She had lived it. So she built something that could see it. Any odour. Any venue. Judged not on speed but on the quality of the work itself.
A structure so precisely conceived that when the right people eventually found it they recognised immediately that nothing needed to change. Only the reach.
"You will succeed by working as a team and having fun."
Georgie Jones built the perfect game. The world is still catching up to it.
Our People
The people behind the standard
Two people. Two countries. One sport built exactly right from the beginning.
Georgie Jones
Founder, Detection Dog Trials
She saw what genuine detection teamwork looked like and built something that could finally see it. Everything that exists in this sport traces back to her
Theresa Foster
Detection Dog Trials CEO
Five operational certified detection dogs. A career at the intersection of sport and professional detection work. One of the first people in the US to recognise what DDT was.
