Older Bloodhounds Track Two-Day Old Trail Almost Perfectly in Multiple Environments

A professor and a member of the San Bernardino police department determined to test the tracking abilities of bloodhounds that had received more than 18 months of training against bloodhounds that had received less training. They obtained four dogs in each category and performed the following test. Subjects down trails from a half mile to a mile and a half long in five separate areas at five separate times. Two of the areas were in regional parks,...

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Dogs Detect Scent of Cadavers Up to Two Months After Indirect Contact with Carpeting

A German research team was asked by the Hamburg Police Department how long a dead body would have to have contact with a mattress or a carpet for a cadaver dog to detect that a body had been on the item. This question arose from a real case involving a married couple that went sailing in their yacht. The husband returned alone and reported his wife missing, but the police soon regarded him as a suspect. They brought a cadaver dog onto the yacht,...

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Hollywood Depictions Make Life Harder for Real Dogs

A few blogs ago, Liz Stroter talked about one of the reasons that people do not adapt to dogs and give them up to shelters: the expectations that are created by televisions shows that a stern hand and a few rough words will change the dog’s behavior in a matter of weeks. When the expectations are not fulfilled, the dog goes to the pound. Another reason people give up on dogs is that TV and film depictions lead people to believe—particularly people without experience in raising dogs—that dogs are merely rather simple happy people who cannot speak....

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Sociability of Nursing Home Residents Declines After Pet Visitations Cease

For some years, my consulting practice has allowed me to live in Phoenix in the winter and spring and Stone Ridge, New York, in the summer and fall. This creates a problem in volunteering with Chloe for therapy dog assignments. There comes a time when we must say good-bye for six months. I was particularly worried about this for the nursing home we visit in Youngtown, west of Phoenix. Many of the residents are hospice patients (we visit through the auspices of Hospice of the Valley, a large non-profit hospice system in Arizona), which means...

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How Many Footsteps Do Tracking Dogs Need to Determine Direction of a Scent?

A man crosses a football field. Twenty minutes later a tracking dog is brought to the midpoint of the trail and commanded to TRACK. The dog will sniff the area, perhaps back-track a few steps, and then move in the direction that the man walked across the field. How does the dog know which direction the man was moving in? How many footsteps does the dog need to be able to smell to determine the direction the man was walking? Two researchers in Belfast asked these questions and devised an elegant experiment that may have narrowed the possible...

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Seeing Eye Founder's Famous Saturday Evening Post Article Still Resonates

The first formal service dog organization in the United States was The Seeing Eye, founded by, among others, Dorothy Harrison Eustis and Morris Frank. Eustis was training German Shepherds in Switzerland after World War I and wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post (“The Seeing Eye,” November 5, 1927; the picture on the left is from the original article) about a program of the Shepherd Dog Club of Germany, which was training dog guides for...

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Scenting Skills Now Part of Genetic Research on Dogs

We shed 30,000 to 40,000 skin flakes each minute. (Picture shows electroni microscope image of a desquamated skin flake, at least a thousand of which you'll shed by the time you finish reading this piece.) Clothing is permeable to this particle stream and it comprises between 70% and 90% of house dust. These skin flakes spread up and out from the body by heat and air currents in a pattern known as a plume, and are a major part of the scent trail...

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