Residual Scent Residual scent is scent that is left after you remove the source. Soil from under a body has body fluids in it. It's not residual scent. Sometimes the dogs will "hit" on residual scent as when you are doing a car lineup to see if a body has been inside. We usually don't look for residual scent except at a crime scene. You have to be very careful to read your dog's body language, as you may not get the trained alert. If you are an all around search dog handler, responding to searches in your area, you should expose your dog to cadaver scent. In the days before all these specialties, we expected our dogs to find deceased without any special training, because there was no specialty training. The only concern was that if the dog avoided the scent we might not find the subject. So whenever we had a deceased person we took the dogs up one at a time on lead to familiarize them. It worked great. If the dog has had more cadaver training, it is able to do more difficult problems such as finding buried bodies, doing car line-ups, searching burned scenes, etc. There you have to be aware of your dog's body language and sometimes be able to interpret what is happening. This comes from lots of practice watching your dog on problems and from doing lots of problems. If you are working an area with lots of scent, the dog may not be able to find all the pieces. It has to pick out the pieces from the background of scent.  Note: In our advanced cadaver class we do one exercise with residual scent and video every dog and handler doing it.  It's great fun when you see the dog's body language say yes, but the handler misses it and picks out another "source." It's happened to me!  Marcia Koenig c. 2001

Home | Articles | Instructors | Courses | Schedule | Store | Links | E-Mail Copyright © 2001 Cadaverdog, Inc. All Rights Reserved