Why Canines Make Great Tracking Dogs
A canine can make a great tracking dog. Untrained dogs, however, won't automatically be great at tracking. They require training so that you can communicate with them and they can communicate with you. Yes, it's true that dogs naturally possess the skills required to be trackers, namely an excellent sense of smell. However, unless your dog is trained, you won't be able to train it to track down the specific smells you are looking for.
Tracking dogs can be used in a wide range of activities. From
hunting, to tracking down criminal suspects or missing people, dogs that have
been trained for tracking duties can be a huge help. Fact is, humans don't make
good trackers, especially when it comes to tracking other people in urban
environments and buildings. There are simply too many places for a suspect to
hide and it's too easy for a person to get lost in the woods.
Further, while we humans are clever animals, we lack a strong sense
of smell. We can smell a well cooked dinner and perfume, but when it comes to
smelling people, we're usually at a loss. A dog, on the other hand, can smell
people who are long distances off. In fact, it's estimated that a dog's sense
of smell is generally between 10,000 to 100,000 times as powerful as a human's
sense of smell.
So, how come tracking dogs have such a great sense of smell? For us
humans breathing and smelling are essentially the same process. When we
breathe, we smell. For dogs on the other hand, smelling is actually a separate
process from breathing. When a dog breaths in, a small amount of the air is
pushed into what's called the turbinates system, which specializes specifically
in detecting smells. Meanwhile, dogs also have an organ called the Jacobson's
organ, which specializes specifically in picking up pheromones. We lack these
specialized and sophisticated organs and smelling systems.
Most of the time, professionally trained tracking dogs are used to
track down specific people. Dogs can also be trained to smell for drugs, weapons,
and other things. There's essentially no way a person could smell a bullet or
the trail of someone who walked by minutes earlier. For a trained canine,
however, such a task is very doable. Of course, dogs have
to be trained to look for specific smells and to alert their handlers when said
smells are present.
Source: http://dogcare.dailypuppy.com/far-away-can-dog-smell-4722.html
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