How Do Police Dogs Learn to Track?

The process of training a police dog to track is "simple but lengthy," says Patrick T. Merritt, American Police Canine Association vice president. The keys to success are choosing the right dog, having patience and holding your temper. Police forces in the United States and Canada train dogs to track, sharing the same objective -- using their keen sense of smell to locate missing or wanted people. Preferred training methods differ sharply between the countries.

  1. Tracking vs. Trailing

    • Civilians might call it hair-splitting, but in the world of police dog training, tracking and trailing are distinct. When a dog tracks, he follows a combination of scents on the ground connected to the person his handler wants to find. Tracking dogs work most efficiently on an earthen surface with grass or other kinds of vegetation that retain odors after someone steps on them. In paved urban environments, though, a tracking dog is next to useless; so when police want canine assistance to find someone, they bring in dogs trained to follow the trail of scent left by particles falling off the skin of their quarry, whether in the air or on the ground.

    Prerequisites

    • Police dog trainers don't see eye-to-eye on techniques, but general understanding is that two things are absolutely essential: laying down a scent track and providing a motivator that makes the dog eager to follow it. Patrick T. Merritt uses food rewards at the beginning of training but progresses quickly to food smells -- created, for instance, by rubbing a hot dog on the soles of the shoes of the person to be tracked. Norm Nardi of the United States Police Canine Association takes a dim view of edible incentives, preferring to use a decoy or stand-in for the bad guy, right from the start. When the dog finds his quarry, he's rewarded with a happy tussle.

    Foot Step Tracking

    • As the name suggests, a dog trained in Foot Step Tracking or FST, the preferred technique in the United States, follows the scent clues inside each footstep his quarry has taken. From the outset of training, the dog is strictly discouraged from raising his head to sniff the air and from using any sense other than smell. Ideally, his step-by-step track should be continuous and unbroken; if the dog loses the scent, he indicates with a "negative" -- a change in body language -- that his handler understands. When this happens, the handler slowly circles back until the dog recovers the track.

    Tracking Through Drive

    • Ever since Wisconsin-based trainer Ed Frawley saw the way dogs are trained to track by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he's been an outspoken critic of FST, which he considers slow and inefficient. In the sole technique used by the RCMP since 1935, called tracking through drive or TTD, the dog is not required to keep his nose to the ground and moves at a very fast clip, his handler running behind him. TTD challenges the FST assumption that speed causes the dog to lose the scent track. With TTD, when a dog loses the track, he is trained to give his handler a negative within 20 feet, which means that the scent can be quickly picked up again, Frawley says.