A United States horse trainer is showing the world that scent-detecting horses can take their place alongside dogs in search and rescue operations.
Terry Nowacki, of Minnesota, has been running courses for the last seven years showing how horses can be trained to follow scents-anything from people to narcotics.
"It works so good it is unbelievable," says Nowacki, who recently completed a course for search and rescue personnel in British Columbia, Canada.
Nowacki, a horseman with 48 years of experience, says riders generally take more training than the horses. Horses quickly learn through reward-based training what to do, but up to 80% of the effort goes into teaching the riders.
"To the horses it is just a game," he says. "They have known all their lives how to follow scents. What we do is show people how to read the signs and allow the horse to follow the scent. The reason it hasn't caught on is that people don't understand how to read the horse correctly. This is the whole key to it."
Nowacki says it is important to distinguish between ground scent, which the likes of bloodhounds are trained to follow, and air scent, which is the horse's forte.
"In traditional horsemanship, we make them do what we want," he says, pointing out that riders of air-scenting horses need to drop their reins and let the horse get on with the job. "It kind of goes away from traditional horsemanship."
Horses in normal conditions have an effective scent range of up to 60m, more than enough for finding people alongside forest trails, or in long grass or brush. The range can be nearly 400m in ideal conditions.
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