When dogs are used for work, they serve for the police or army (working dogs), the disable people (guide dogs) or the rescue people to find missing person (rescue dogs). A rescue pair needs to pass the exam for participation in the real rescue actions. A rescue dog searches the missing person through the air, however, there are number of principles of the scent cone diosrtion that need to be understood by the handler. In Slovenia, rescue dogs are trained to search for a living person. The cadaver scent differs from the live scent. It can happen that a dog does not give alert, if it was not aware with the tissue of a deceased body. At the time of the biological death, the body begins to emit a changed odour. The change can be recognized by a dog. The cadaver scent is not specific to one individual. The chemical composition changes as the body progresses through the decomposition stages (fresh, bloated, decay, liquefaction, skeletal). In order to understand the type of scent it is important to learn the dog about the stages of decomposition. A human tissue is considered to be a reliable scent source but it is difficult to be obtained due to limited access. As an alternative, a handler can use the chemical pseudo scents. The purpose of a rescue pair is to train in real conditions whereas the dog’s task is to effectively search an area and perform an alert when it locates the source.
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