Brandon from Custom K9 Unlimited explains article searches, where dogs detect specific human odor on items to locate people or retrieve evidence. Training starts with scented articles on a concentration track, then moves to open-area searches. Scent is loaded from high-odor body areas like armpits and hands onto objects like keys or phones.
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Good afternoon, welcome to today's short set. I am Brandon, a trainer here at Custom K9 Unlimited. Today we're going to talk a little bit about article searches, what they're for, how we train them, and how they can be applied to the real world. Scenarios. Article searches are essentially exactly what it says. Some people refer to them as evidence searches. However, here at CCU, we kind of stick to the term article searches. And what it is, is a K9 is looking for specific human odor on an item that has been dropped, misplaced, or even in missing persons, you know, something gets snagged on a tree, leaves an article. It's something that can be used to help locate that person. Uh, in the law enforcement side of things, a lot of times they are using them, uh, article searches to— criminals will run from the cops and they'll throw out their cell phone, or they'll throw out drugs, or, uh, they'll throw out something along those lines, and we can use K9s to help us locate those items for evidence, just like evidence searches would imply. Uh, the way that we kind of train this here at CCU A lot of times what we'll do is we will put items, AKA articles, on a concentration track. The dog hits that article, gets paid, it's a big deal, and then we move along through the rest of the concentration track. We'll kind of progress that from the concentration tracks to an open area search, very similar to what you would do for an open area human search. Dog is going to kind of go out in an open area. He's going to locate that. He'll alert to that item. Every dog's alert is different depending on how they're trained and where they're trained. And then, you know, for training purposes, they'll get paid once they've alerted to that item. I had mentioned a little bit about how we use items in the training process. And for us here at Custom K9 Unlimited, this is once again not the only way to do this, but it's the way we do it here. we're going to try and get as much human item in the training process. We're going to try and get as much human odor on those items as possible. Uh, a lot of times we'll take, whether it's car keys or a cell phone or something along those lines, while we're, say, laying a concentration track, we'll stick them under our armpits because our bodies produce a lot of odor from our armpits. You can rub them in your hands, parts of the body that have high odor production that you can use as well to get that human odor on them. Ideally, you want to try and get as much human odor on that item before you place it in your concentration track so that we are building that dog's senses to the human odor for those concentration tracks, and then eventually for the article search. Thank you for joining today's Short Set. On Fridays, our full-length podcast comes out on all streaming platforms here at CCU. As well as we have a short set on concentration tracks. If you guys want to kind of learn a little bit more about that, that dives into specifically into concentration track. Thank you for joining today's short set. We will also be at the Army Military Working Dog Symposium May 11th through 17th. Come out, join us. There's going to be a lot of really good information put out by not only CCU but by other handlers and trainers throughout the industry as well, and it is going to be an awesome time if you are in the K9 community.
