The best way to answer that is with a story.
Instead, let’s start with some boring facts.
Bloodhounds, and other “hound dogs,” are blessed by Nature with tracking gifts well beyond those of most humans.
The main weapon in a search dog’s arsenal is its amazing sense of smell. On a sunny day with a good headwind, bassets can tell what a fellow pooch had for breakfast – three counties away! But that’s just for starters.
Blue Tick Hounds can sense which of their fleas have been drinking, and which of those have been hitting the cheap stuff!
All those smells are filed and compared in the dog’s “odor bank” of the smells he’s acquired himself and those of his canine friends. Information from other dogs is transmitted by sniffing, through “tail-mail.” This gives him a vast database that he can rummage. Zoologists call this “doggie Google.”
Now, let’s go inside the mind of a trained K-9 police dog, Derrick, as he helps his two-legged partners crack a case involving a missing teenage girl.
First, the officers introduce the dog to articles that the target human has used, for instance a towel. From just a few sniffs, Derrick has picked up a lot of useful information. He can sense that the girl has used three kinds of conditioner, with coconut, lavender, and “rarified lemon grass extract.” So he knows she will have lustrous, manageable hair and be surrounded by insects.
He also detects five different types of eye shadow, telling him she is indecisive and easily manipulated by influencers on social media. On the off chance that she is actually wearing all five colors of eye shadow at once, searchers should check circuses in a twenty-mile radius.
Next Derrick snuffles articles of clothing. He takes his time because he knows it creeps out the officers when he lingers over underwear. His levity is lost on the humans.
Getting down to business, he notes that heavy use of deodorant cannot mask the smell of fear. He sniffs books on the desk and smells fresh highlighter ink in dense concentration. He notices a pile of used tissues overflowing from the wastebasket and picks up the scent of saltwater (tears) and nasal secretions (snot).
He sees crumped pieces of paper with markings on them that he knows are important to humans. Most of the “words” have a big mark at the beginning. That usually means a person’s name. There are other scratches that the officers call “hearts.” As he expects, those marks combine with mating pheromones to suggest that the target may be in heat.
Next there is a strong whiff of woodland dirt in an empty space on the girl’s shoe rack. The smell repeats on the windowsill, along with the deodorant.
His human partners are looking around and scratching their top fur in confusion. But now Derrick knows how to solve the case.
He whimpers and whines the key information: the missing girl is stressed about exams and desperate for a date to the prom. She has run off to meet a potential boyfriend at the abandoned logging camp south of town. If she is like Freida, the labradoodle at the 23rd precinct, she’s probably so hormonal she’s not thinking straight.
They need to get going now to stop the young girl. And to see if there’s any reason why the mystery boy shouldn’t be gnawed to the bone from the ground up.
Derrick tells them all this, but they just say, “Good boy” and don’t even glance his way. The men will need to look around more and “speak” at each other and pace until finally they turn Derrick loose to “Find her, boy!”
Derrick lets out a long doggie sigh and sits. Stays.
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Image-CJMalloy at Morguefile
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