A toddler is safe at home thanks to the quick work and keen snout of a police K9. WHDH News 7 reported that a 3-year-old went missing in Shelby County, Ohio this week. People were frantically searching in front of the home that the child reportedly went missing from. Officers with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department quickly arrived on the scene. They brought their secret weapon – a K9 named Bandit.
A Quick Response Made For A Successful Rescue
Bandit and his partner, Deputy Frank Bleigh, went to work. Bandit was able to follow the child’s scent and found the missing boy within just ten minutes! The Shelby County Sheriff’s Department posted to their Facebook page after the child was found. They credited Bandit’s excellent tracking and trailing abilities for the successful find.
“Deputy Bleigh and K-9 Bandit started the search at the front of the house and within 10 minutes Bandit had located the child,” they said. “This is exactly why we have dog units, watching this track you could tell very well that Bandit had the scent of the child and was well on his way to finding him.”
Shelby County is a somewhat rural community with only about 50,000 residents. It sits about 90 miles northeast of Columbus. With so much rural land in the surrounding area, K9 Bandit’s swift work truly saved the day.
The Incredible Power Of A Dog’s Nose
What K9 Bandit did to find the missing child is actually referred to as trailing. It is commonly mistaken as tracking. However, tracking is what a dog or human does when they follow a visual cue down a path- footprints, for example. Trailing is what a dog does when using scent to follow a path. Using smell to trail a person or animal allows the dog’s natural instincts to take over and their precision flourishes.
A dog’s sense of smell is an astounding act of science. According to PBS, scientists report it to be anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 times better than a human’s sense of smell. James Walker was the former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University. He described a dog’s sense of smell in terms of vision. This gives us a better understanding of how incredible a dog’s sense of smell really is.
“If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well,” said Walker.
Another scientist described it as being able to detect the smell of one rotten apple in two million barrels of apples!
What can we say? A dog’s nose knows all! Good boy, Bandit!
h/t: WHDH News 7
Featured Photo: ShelbyCountySheriffsOfficeOhio/Facebook
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