07/10/2025
Mantrailing Training Update
Pick-Ups and Verifying Witness Spots
Our operational environment is mainly downtown and urban, which creates unique challenges for our mantrailing teams. In many real operations, the track of the missing person ends because they enter a bus, subway, or car.
That’s where our work continues: we often have to verify new areas based on witness reports. When we get fresh information, we move to that spot and start the dogs again to answer a critical question:
- Was the person really here?
Or
- Is there perhaps an older scent track from the same person?
From a scientific point of view, a dog can remember an individual human scent being off the track for about 30 minutes. If the scent is not encountered again within that window, or if the dog fails to reconnect to the trail, it becomes much harder to pick it up later due to olfactory saturation — the overload of other organic scents in the environment.
To prevent this and keep the scent sharp, we re-present the scent article before restarting the search.
In our recent training scenario, we tested this exact situation:
- The first trail was 21 hours and 20 minutes old, ending with a vehicle pick-up.
- After a one-hour break, we moved to verify another possible location where a 23-hour-old trail was present.
Weather and environmental conditions, of course, can alter scent and track behavior in many ways — making this type of work even more complex.
The outcome: our dogs did not go for the older track.
The question is — do we want our dogs to go on an older track?
“Older” doesn’t necessarily mean older in real time, because what matters to us is the starting time of the track the dog was given, not when the scent was originally laid. It’s a very complex concept.
This type of training needs to be regularly repeated and closely observed to rule out coincidence.
