Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 21, 1994 TAG: 9403210097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REX BOWMAN THE DAILY PROGRESS
DATELINE: FORK UNION (AP) LENGTH: Medium
He had wandered away, and searchers couldn't find a trace of him Davis, a Loudoun County sheriff's deputy, let his hound sniff the patient's bedsheets. The floppy-eared, sad-eyed dog led Davis to a ditch, where the elderly man was sleeping.
So it is throughout Virginia. When state officials are looking for people - whether an escaped convict in Richmond, a Cub Scout pack lost in the Shenandoah National Forest or plane crash survivors wandering in a wooded area of Fluvanna County - they call upon the 19 members of the Virginia Bloodhound Search and Rescue Association.
"I'd be happy if there were a bloodhound in every jurisdiction," said Dan Senger, a Buckingham County sheriff's deputy and association member.
But, Senger knows, bloodhounds and trained handlers, though often needed, are few.
That's one reason the association was created two years ago, said group member Buck Garner, a Fluvanna County sheriff's deputy.
Because trained man-trailing bloodhounds and handlers are so often needed, it makes sense that bloodhound owners should form a group that trains both dogs and their handlers in the science of tracking.
Association members include deputies, rescue workers and Department of Corrections employees. Most of them own their own dogs.
The members, Garner said, form emotional attachments to their dogs, which have names like Sandy, Ranger and Beau.
"We know our dogs are big and ugly and smell," Senger said. "But the bloodhound is the father of all scent hounds."
Said Garner: "You spend a lot of time looking at their tail, and you hardly get a chance to look at their face. But they're good dogs."
The dogs indeed are not much to look at. Their skin sags, their eyes look bloodshot, their face is wrinkled and they drool.
"Everywhere you go in public, people say, `God, that dog stinks. And it's ugly,' " Garner lamented.
But, according to association members, the bloodhound is the best dog when it comes to tracking a person. Humans, Senger said, shed 40,000 skin cells a minute, leaving them behind on the asphalt, on the grass and in the leaves: the perfect trail for bloodhounds.
The trail can be days old, said Davis, the association's president, adding that a puppy he trained once followed a 20-day-old scent.
Unlike other breeds, which might follow trails of crushed plant life, for instance, the bloodhound can follow a particular person. A human's skin cells are like fingerprints, Garner said, in that no two individuals' cells smell the same.
A bloodhound can follow a trail for miles, come upon a group of five men standing together and single out the one who left the trail, Garner said.
The dogs cost hundreds of dollars, Davis said, and live to be about 11 years old.
According to Garner, it takes a handler almost that many years to thoroughly know how to "read" his bloodhound.
"The dog will basically do the same thing every time," Garner said. "It was born to track. But it's up to the handler to read the dog. You watch the head or the tail, he'll try to tell you different things, like, `I'm confused,' or `The scent ends here.' "
Another part of the association's mission, Garner said, is public education. For instance, contrary to what viewers see in movies, bloodhounds don't bark when tracking, Garner said. Barking was bred out of the dogs centuries ago.
And bloodhounds don't track in packs, he said, because they work best alone, with handlers who understand them.
"Other dogs can be trained to trail," said Davis, "but bloodhounds do it naturally. The other dogs are trained to be like bloodhounds. But a color TV is better than a black-and-white."
by CNB