K9 Scent Training

K9 Professional Training Series

In this must-have guide for SAR teams and police K9 trainers and handlers, Dr. Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak present everything you need to know to build or improve a scent training program. Scent training involves high-stakes work, and in the case of a search for a missing person, the right training for your K9 can mean the difference between life and death.

Beginning with the science behind odors and how dogs perceive them, Resi and Ruud show you how to harness that knowledge to eliminate training problems and maximize your dog’s potential. You’ll learn how to start scent training for young dogs using simple exercises before building up to more complex training. Finally, using techniques they’ve perfected over decades, Resi and Ruud share their specialized, step-by-step programs for advanced scent identification training and tracking.

Use proven techniques to train your dog for:

• Scent identification line-ups to indicate a scent connection between crime-scene evidence and a suspect.
• Tracking along a wide variety of track types, including the cold track, the broken-off track and tracks that run over or under cross-tracks.
• Detection work for searches in buildings, vehicles, open terrain and more.

Table of Contents

1. Living in different worlds
2. Human odor on objects
3. Human odor on a track
4. The dog’s nose
5. Odors and perception
6. Scent training for young dogs
7. Training scent identification dogs
8. Training tracking dogs
9. Training detector dogs