Training the Lost Pet Detective Dog

"I trust my search dogs more than I do a sighting," says Oklahoma-based Karen Goin. "There’s no doubt about it, the nose knows.”
Up to 8 million animals end up in shelters, though not all of these are strays, according to the Humane Society of the United States. Of stray animals that are brought to a shelter, up to 30 percent of dogs are eventually returned to their owner, while only about 5 percent of cats make it home. For frantic owners of a missing pet, there's a good reason to call a professional. Up to 50 percent of all unclaimed pets are euthanized, according to the Humane Society. And it's not only runaway canines that get tracked.

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Any breed of dog can be a Pet Detective. All dogs have an incredible nose compared to a human, even those breeds with squished snouts. I’ve trained many a boxer mix as Medical Alert Service dogs and they are awesome. Just like with service dogs, a Pet Detective can be any dog with the appropriate temperament. Age is no barrier either. As part of testing the games in this course, games that were created just for this course and not general scent games, I tested on my two 11 year old dogs and the 2 year old. They all were able to find a “lost” pet over several miles and hours of searching.

There is no sense so intimate—or mysterious—as smell. Unlike other senses smell is wired directly to the emotional centers in our brain. The reason for this remains obscure, but the setup gives odors an uncanny power to unlock hidden memories. Chemically, smell is enigmatic as well. Similarly shaped molecules can have quite different odors, and molecules that look nothing alike can smell almost the same. But thanks to an innovative new study, scientists have finally gotten some traction on olfaction, allowing them to match specific chemical features to specific odors for the first time.

Training a Pet Detective Dog is similar to training the Scent Discrimination Dog, Search and Rescue or Tracking Dog. The dog must find a variety of scents in different scenarios. That scent is presented to the dog first, then the dog is told to search for more. We could train a specific cue for each scent, but there are so many different species of pets that could be searched for, it’s faster and easier to train the dog to Match-To-Sample Search. In other words, present an odor, ask the dog to find more of that odor and alert when found.

Here are some advanced scent detection components you may want to train at some point. They are not necessary but can be used to troubleshoot issues your dog might be having. The last three articles are very important, however. Training a search and rescue is much different than tracking, especially sport tracking. You will do the training with a variety of odors from different critters, but as mentioned earlier, all creatures have a unique smell. So, learning Match To Sample is a must.

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