Sniffydog — Train Your Dog’s Nose

Sunny and I once responded on a search at the far end of our main service area, arriving rather later than the couple who lived on the nearest highway.  I had to pinball across quite a lot of rural area on three different arteries, and never have figured out why it was impossible to get from the second-largest town in the region to anywhere else!  The person in charge of the canine unit that night decided to give Sunny a try as a trailing dog, since the problem was pretty well solved already and she was deployed primarily as an air-scent dog in most situations.

Now, we had been working tracking on our own for a long time, and when we were working in semi-urban areas in a team training (where the air-scent dog will find the odd hundred people before the one she’s looking for) I had put her on trailing problems occasionally.  At that point also, I had been working with another teammate on training his trailing dog, and had been working Sunny more in that sort of problem just out of cameraderie.  I was willing to give a real-world search a try.

I harnessed her up; I took her to the plastic bag containing the scent article.  One of the other canine handlers came with me as a backup person, carrying the radio and the flashlight while I dealt with the leash.  Sunny discovered the bag and knew what it meant, stuck her face to the opening for a good sniff, then turned around and gave my backup a good nose-poke on the leg and a wag.  “Did you collect the scent article?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“I was so careful!” my backup answered.  She had worn rubber gloves, taken the pillowcase off the pillow, folded it, and crammed it into a plastic baggie, which she then sealed, all at arm’s length.  Sunny still knew.  However, she also knew that the person standing next to her was not the only one scenting up the pillowcase, and dutifully scanned the yard for the other person’s scent.  We went flying off down the driveway a few minutes later.

What happened?  Remember, humans put off enough skin rafts to be scented by a dog at least a mile off in good conditions.  How many are there going to be flying around at a mere arm’s length, settling onto everything available?  There’s probably no such thing as an “uncontaminated” scent article, not unless the missing person has the sweetness to bag up an article before disappearing.  Even then, there’s the outside of the bag to think about, and anyone else in the household of the missing person.  On the whole, it’s better to expose your dog to deliberately-contaminated scent articles to see what he does about them, rather than pretend there will always be as-clean-as-possible articles to work from.  If you know he’ll find ALL the people he’s smelled on the article, you know what he’s doing on your search when he snuffles up to your incident commander.  It’s far better PR to say, “Were you anywhere near the scent-article collection?” than “No, I have no idea why he’s so interested in you,” for one thing.

If you know your dog goes for the dominant scent, and you’ve encouraged that, or if you know your dog goes for most recent scent first instead of the heaviest, then you know something useful in either case.  Likewise, your dog knows what you mean when you say, “Not that one; find the other one,” once you’ve done it a few times in training.  The first time to do this is not when the temperature is falling and the small child whose mother still dresses her is missing, nor when the family says helpfully, “We bagged up all his stuff for your dogs!”  Give the dog some credit — but also give him the needed experience to figure out how to solve these problems.