mmh, forgot about this topic

And it's totally in my league... :lol:
Right, so you want to find four lost kids that wondered off into the woods. We recently had a training in Germany to test our dogs for an actual disaster. We only got directions to where teh persons were lost seen. Some of them had been drinking (just a story ofcourse..) and got lost in the woods. What we do then is look at circumstances such as weather (wind, temperature, rain, snow etc.) From this we make our searchplan and decide which combinates handler/dog we will use.
In this test they used me with Dingo to go round the top of the hill, and another dog (lexi) to start in the middle. Why? Hot air always rises, so on top of a hill a dog will smell a lot, depending on weather.
We've trained our dogs in all disciplines, they may use tracks, air scenting, even eyesight. If the handler has a good plan for walking the area, you will find ALL humans. And so we did, Dingo went down the hill at one point and started barking 30 meters below me. Good boy! 8)
We train our dogs for living, wounded persons, so any person walking will be ignored, so will dead people, unless there only are dead people and no more living.
So mantracking with several layers is no problem, after finding one person, the dog will continue to the next.
A common seen thing is "scent discrimination" We walk with the handler to watch, sometimes in training the dog will smell several human scents, but doesn't know which one is the "victim" The dog will than come back to the handler and people walking allong to pick up their smell and single out the missing one, that's the victim :wink: Very nice to see the dog work like that 8)