If You Spent 200 Hours Training Your Dog, It Might Find Lost People in the Woods Too
Game Warden trained trained K9s Rezi and Spike scan the air itself for human scent, lock onto it, and beeline to the source. Then they bark for more help.
Be honest: most of us can barely get our dogs to sit on command — and we’re talking treats-in-hand, please-and-thank-you sitting. If you can’t convince Buddy to stay off the couch, you probably shouldn’t try teaching him to find missing hikers by smelling the air.
Vermont Game Wardens David Lockerby and Bella Kline went ahead and did it anyway. Eight to ten hours a day, every day, for four straight weeks — in the rain, after dark, across every kind of terrain the state can throw at you — they trained K9s Rezi and Spike to do exactly that. The result: all four are now the first law enforcement team in Vermont to earn Wilderness SAR Air Scent Certifications.
Here’s what makes that nose work special. Air scent dogs aren’t the bloodhounds-on-a-trail you’ve seen on TV. They don’t need a footprint, a tire mark, or a fresh track. They scan the air itself for human scent, lock onto it, and beeline to the source. Once they reach the missing person, they’re trained to stay put and bark until their handler catches up. Old trail, contaminated ground, hours after a hiker wandered off? Doesn’t matter. The breeze does the talking.
The certification test is no walk in the park either. Each team has to search up to 120 acres by day, or 30 acres at night, in under two hours, with nothing to go on but an article of the missing person’s clothing.
The payoff? Working together, Rezi and Spike can theoretically cover roughly 4,800 acres in a single day — about the entire area of Isle La Motte, sniffed in twenty-four hours. Not bad for a pair of dogs whose handlers actually showed up to training.
So the next time your Lab won’t come back inside because there’s a squirrel in the yard, take comfort: somewhere in Vermont, two very serious dogs are out there picking up the slack.
Vermont’s woods just got a little less lonely.