Alice White
For hundreds of years, dogs have helped people hunt and survive, searching for game by smell. Warned about the appearance of enemies, again thanks to the scent. They searched for missing people and catching criminals. A dog’s nose is a completely unique tool, and the sense of smell opens up to pets an interesting and incomprehensible world for people, which really exists here and now.
Why Is This Happening?
However, even the most delicate sense of smell will not help a dog without appropriate training to effectively search, for example, children lost in the forest.
Search Techniques
Currently, there are two main terms for trained tracker dogs – trekking and trailing, and, accordingly, two different schools of training for sniffer dogs. Trekking dogs are trained to follow the footprints of the person they are looking for. Trace in the trail. This type of training teaches the dog to follow the track with minimal deviation from the track. However, such a search is a monotonous and rather difficult job for an animal, which requires special attention and the ability to work “nose down”, which tires the dog. The main purpose of training such search animals is to search and collect evidence in the case.
Trailing dogs are allowed to follow an individual scent not mechanically, but instinctively, not following exactly all the loops of the track, but adhering only to a general direction. This training method allows you to expand the search area, use dogs to search for already “cooled” and trampled tracks. A trained trailing dog works much faster than a tracking dog, but the search accuracy is lower.
Benefits of Mentrailing
Mantrailing is the pursuit of a person by a dog based on his individual scent. During training according to this method, dogs are trained only to follow the smell of a person, and not to look for it or inform the instructor that the desired smell is not in the investigated area.
This technique has a number of advantages, including the use of sniffer dogs in different areas, including those “polluted” by odors; more confident work on surfaces such as asphalt and concrete, use even two or three days after the loss of a person. Dogs trained using this method do not get tired so quickly and are able to search for a trail without its physical imprints – for example, if the child was carried in their arms or carried on a bicycle.
At the same time, the search for a dog trained in this method is a real pleasure, and not a necessity, but a tedious routine.
The disadvantage of mentrailing is that dogs cannot clearly show where exactly a person was walking, trace his path as accurately as possible.
