Bloodhounds on the Trail
This past Saturday I had another extraordinary exposure to the wonder of dogs. I observed and photographed a police Bloodhound training exercise northwest of Temecula.The dogs were seasoned working dogs, one each from the LAPD Bloodhound Unit (didn’t know they had one!), the Riverside County Sheriff’s unit, and the Salt Lake City PD.
In the first exercise the Bloodhound had to pick up a trail made by someone the day before and track down that person (now hiding in the pinewoods), after being given a sniff of an article with the “lost” person’s scent. In the second, the dog was taken to a vehicle on the side of a road, asked to smell the driver’s seat — which had been vacated minutes earlier — and then track down that person. I was allowed to trail behind to take photographs. “Trailing” is the operative word, since these dogs moved so fast I was practically running to keep up them. With astonishing precision the dogs zig-zagged through high grass, bushes, thickets, pine woods right to the end of the trail, where they proceeded to lunge at the discovered person planting them with wet slobbery kisses. The dogs move silently — baying is a Hollywood myth — noses to the ground, tails held in a high C. As a handler pointed out to me, the dogs’ tails lower and wag furiously as they believe they are close to their scent person, and they point their noses up into the air for the first time — trying to pinpoint the origin of the “cloud scent” surrounding the person for whom they are searching. You will see this in the photographs.
What work do these Bloodhounds do in real life? Representative is LAPD’s Sage — the beautiful big red Bloodhound — who in 2009 undertook 60 missions searching for lost children, Alzheimer’s patients, criminal suspects.
2 years ago • 1 note
