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Scent: What is the dog following? © 2003 Ed Presnall 
Many people have tried to define what scent is. Webster defines it as “an emanation from a substance that effects the sense of smell” or “an odor left by an animal or person by which it is tracked in hunting”.After years of research by the government, scientists, enthusiasts and other trackers, I have concluded as William R. Koehler so eloquently put it “We humans cannot track by scent and know little of scent’s mysteries, so obviously there is no positive way we can make a dog use his ability to track.” Although we cannot make our dogs track, we can train then to discriminate between scents and therefore work tracks acording to our preset rules and regulations. As a person walks through a field, his scent is embedded into the grass, dirt and brush. The scent is a combination of body scent, individual chemical make-up of the person, the fabric and texture of their clothes and footwear, soap, perfume, deodorant, hair spray, smoke odor and their body weight. The basis of the individuality of each person’s scent is thought by scientists to come from a natural skin lubricant called sebum. Scent duration is affected by many environmental factors such as the following weather conditions:
Types of ScentGround scent is a trail of molecular level smells left on the ground, on the grass and brush which is touched or stepped on by a persons walking over the terrain. Airborne scent is the molecular level smell distributed by wind currents either upwind or downwind of the original ground scent. What Seems To Affect Scent or Your Dog’s Scenting Ability
Contrary to what many people seem to think, we feel that in VST the longer the track has aged, the easier it is for the dog to follow it. Fresh tracks, under 1 hour in age, sometimes seem to be too hot for the dog to stay exactly on the track. Once the scent cone has dispersed and the majority of the scent which remains is in the footsteps, typically 3 to 5 hours, the dog has an easier time of staying on the track and negotiating non-vegetated turns.
Typically, the higher the elevation, the faster the scent tends to age. In low humidity areas you will find your dog working harder and appearing to have less scent to follow. In higher humidity areas, the tracks will not age as fast and the scent will be held closer to the actual footsteps of the tracklayer. 
Most dogs can determine the difference between the two scent trails and most will alternate their tracking by lifting their noses from the “footsteps” to sniff the wind as they work a track. As changes in terrain or conditions occur during the track, the dog may favor one of these trails over another. Your basic objective in training will be to try to keep your dog’s nose “glued” to the ground.The easiest method of accomplishing this is to utilize short training tracks with a reasonable amount of ground cover. To make it easier for your dog, plot the track through a field of grass, rather than across a parking lot. As your dog becomes aware of what VST tracking is all about, and you become more accomplished in “reading” your dog, you will vary your tracking site to include short grass, long grass, mulch, dirt, gravel, asphalt and concrete to enhance your dogs ability to work on various surfaces. To help you grasp the concept of scent, attempt to think about your track in the following manner. Pretend that the scent you are leaving as you lay a track is a heavy fog. As you walk through the field, this fog clings to the ground, grass and any hedge or building you might walk by. Now consider that if a wind is blowing, the fog will drift along the ground in the direction the wind is blowing. The fog will also collect or become saturated in low spots, along fences or hedges, in and next to ditches or culverts or simply next to changes in the height of grasses. A change in height as small as the paint on a stripe in a parking lot or the depression made by an edger next to a sidewalk is enough to hold the scent. Think about this as you lay the track and again while you are watching your dog search for the track. It will give you a better appreciation for the working ability of your dog’s nose. Remember, the dog has the advantage with its ability to differentiate between approximately 1 million different scents using its 100 million or so olfactory cells, versus our ability to only differentiate between several thousand scents using our 5 million olfactory cells. |
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