dog scent training

Teach your dog to find missing people like a pro with dog scent training . 

What is mantrailing?


Mantrailing is when a dog uses his nose to find a person, because they are missing or maybe just for fun.

Each person has a unique scent, made up of all the debris that falls off our body as we go about day to day life. It might contain your skin cells, sweat, hormones and bacteria.

As we move our scent billows from us and moves around with the air before settling and sticking in the environment.

We give the dog an article, contaminated with the scent of the person to sniff. Then our dogs can follow these trails of scent to locate that specific person using scent detection This life saving skill is used by search and rescue, police and military forces across the world.

However, Mantrailing is not just for use by professionals, but is also a great activity for anyone who wants to spend quality time with their dog doing nose work. 

Tracking involves training a dog to follow a ground scent trail and find any discarded articles of clothing along the track using scent detection . Dogs need to wear a tracking harness and be at the end of a minimum 10-metre lead, but length can be shortened if the terrain requires it.

There are two types of scents, ground, and body scents.

Ground scent: is the scent of the ground disturbance left where the tracklayer has come into contact with. It contains odours coming from the bruising and damaging of grass and foliage, the crushing of roots and the scent of soil bacteria and moulds, released where surfaces of soil soil has been broken by the tracklayer. As a track ages, the scent of the decay organisms working on the damaged roots and plants is present.

Body Scent: is a personal scent left by the tracklayer coming from normal body odour left in the air. The tracklayer may have also touched a scrub or grass leaving their scent on it. Scent can also come from particles of skin, hair, clothing, fluff, or shoe leather shed on the track.

A trained tracking dog is expected to smell an article belonging to a tracklayer and find the track, following it until it finds the end of the track.A dog must

also find and indicate any articles dropped along the track by its tracklayer.

Dogs are taught to search an area of ground to find any articles bearing human scent using scent detection. 

Owners are taught the theory of scent so that they are able to understand more about the world of scent that their dog lives in.

This training is the same basic scent training that is taught to operational Police Dogs and Handlers.

One of our most popular courses!