Air scent dogs

Search dogs and rescue dogs are known vent. These are used to find victims buried in avalanches or landslides, drowning, evidence at crime scenes, etc..

Unlike tracking dogs, the vent but do not follow a track human scent looking around for what are the best choice when you need to locate victims that may be buried anywhere on the site of a disaster.

Since we do not follow a trail, the dogs do not seek to vent their noses to the ground. Instead, bring the nose up and go sniffing the air. In this way fail to capture the odor emitted by people.

How to work the scent dogs

Because these dogs do not follow a specific scent, can give false alarms to follow the scent of a person who is present in the area but not a victim. To avoid this, the area is generally divided into grids (although this depends on the situation) and each team works on a single grid. Each team consists of the dog and handler and sometimes an assistant.

The scent dogs need to start working with the wind against them, as would otherwise be unable to perceive the smell of the victims. When it comes to looking over relatively large areas, the dogs start following a path perpendicular to the wind. This increases the probability of detecting an odor, even small concentration.

Then, when they detected the presence of the odor, they can focus on locating the source.

Of course, the way they work depends largely on the situation faced by rescue dogs and their handlers. For example, it may be impossible for the dogs do a course perpendicular to the direction of wind in urban areas. What usually happens is that landslides in dogs and guides work directly on the surface, using the breeze to detect odors.

It is thought that air scent dogs to locate victims following the odor concentration of the same. The smell would be less concentrated in locations away from the victim, and would concentrate in the vicinity of the victim. Thus, rescue dogs follow a scent cone, wider and less concentrated in the far reaches of the victim and more localized and concentrated in the vicinity of the victim.

Specialties vent dogs

The scent dogs can be classified into different categories according to their specialties. The main specialties of these dogs are:

- Dogs of corpses. They are the ones that detect human remains. Used to locate people killed in accidents or natural disasters.

- Search Dogs of water. They are also dead dogs as looking human remains and living individuals. However, they differ from previous ones in that they are trained to vent above the water, usually from a boat.

- Dogs of urban disaster. Are those dogs used to detect people trapped in collapsing buildings. Unlike the dead dogs, disaster dogs are looking for people alive. However, when no longer expect to find living people, are often used dogs to find bodies who could not survive the disaster.

- Dogs of avalanches. The name says it all. They used dogs to search for people buried by avalanches. They are trained to find people alive, not dead.

- Dogs of evidence. They are dogs trained to find human evidence at crime scenes.