Oh, and this was different from the tracking I'm used to as well-the dogs in SAR hit on ANY human scent, not one particular person.
So it's not like sport tracking at all. It is the more I think on it, very much like a hunting dog. Any rabbit or deer or person will do. Yes, this means you may "find" a hiker or a hobo instead of your missing person.
This is the best way for SAR dogs-in say a diaster situation, you can't have your beast looking only for person X when the whole alphabet is missing.

David, I've seen dogs that do both; either airscent/cadaver, or groundscent/cadaver, or even airscent/groundscent/cadaver (and then there's water cadaver). I'm not sure that it matters much, as long as the training methods are sound.
I have heard of some people who think that dogs should be either live or cadaver, but not both. And I've heard of some folks who think that a dog should have some airscent experience before starting cadaver, since there are elements of airscenting that transfer over to cadaver work.
I've seen dogs do all of the above successfully, so I'm not sure that it matters as much as some people think, as long as your training is sound. But I'm not very experienced, so I'm sure there are things that I'm not thinking about.

I think Alex and Lisa explained it well. The dogs on our team have not been trained to track (FST) but will drop their nose to the ground in trying to find the victim, Live or dead. Most dogs will instinctively use all methods unless they have been taught FST as a sport. I don't think it is an advantage for SAR. Today we worked the dogs on cadaver scent that was placed 8-10ft up a tree.As teh wind changed, the dogs tecniques changed with it. One dog came down the hill practically on his hind legs,picking up the hight scent.

I do agree that cadaver dogs should be taught to find live scents too.But in my experince in training police dogs to track I teach them to track before they learn article searches also I train them by keeping the wind to my back when laying tracks because I dont want them to air scent but to keep their nose on the ground to find me.So you see Im not talking about sport tracking. Im talking about a dog that has had time spent on teaching it to depend on keeping its nose down and following a track.Now here is the root of my initial question. If a SaR person wants me train a cadaver dog for them and wants me to use their dog that tracks( not air scents) should I advise them to not do that because if time has been spent on teaching the dog to track and not air scent that a better choice would be to use a different dog that does not track but air scents only.This is my question.So would I really want to teach a dog that tracks to then learn to pick its head up off the ground to air scent live and cadaver scent. I wouldnt want to do something that would make an existing tracking dog less reliable by teaching it to air scent too.

Originally posted by David Morris:
I do agree that cadaver dogs should be taught to find live scents too....But in my experince in training police dogs Now here is the root of my initial question. If a SaR person wants me train a cadaver dog for them and wants me to use their dog that tracks( not air scents) should I advise them to not do that because if time has been spent on teaching the dog to track and not air scent that a better choice would be to use a different dog that does not track but air scents only. In Virginia we teach our Wilderness Air Scent dogs to locate cadaver, b/c unfortunately, by the time SAR teams are dispatched, that is often what we are looking for and/or find. These dogs should be able to locate a recently deceased person or sizable fragments thereof. On my team this is NOT what we consider a Cadaver or Human Remains Detection Dog. (In VA, there are standards for Wilderness Air-Scent Dogs only)

To me (and those on our team), a HRD Dog finds ONLY human remains. The dog is more of a detection dog than a tracking or air scent dog in the traditional terms. HRD dogs should be trained to find deceased people, partial/scattered/fragmented remains, aged, recent, skeletal, soft tissue, etc on land and in water... and proofed off of live human and animal remains scent.

There is a lot of debate as to whether dogs should be cross trained or single purpose in various disciplines. I personally feel that HRD, Expolosives and Accelerant detection dogs should be single purpose, for reasons of reliability and that these are disciplines that are complex and important enough to merit single purpose work. Again, JMO.

On my SAR team our dogs are trained to find both live and cadaver. Like John said all of our live airscent dogs will indicate on recently deceased person or large parts thereof. We do have some dogs that are trained for HRD, but they are also live find dogs, except for two, who are HRD only. The handlers use different commands for a known deceased subjusct then on a possible live subject. But they all do it by basically "airscent" methods. However, in alot of cases the dogs, on their own put their noses to the ground to get ot the source of the scent. So its a mixture of both. In places such as the WTC and Pentagon the dogs worked a field of debris that had been "spead ont he ground" their noses were down and they were directed by the handlers which area to search. There was no airscenting involved.

We have found that if searching a large area the dogs will start with airscenting to locate the scentcone and then the noses drop to find the sourse.

In answer to the question, I dont think it really matters unless you are also going to use the dog as a Live find Airscent dog, then it needs to be started in airscent first, IMHO. Most dogs will revert to tracking when they need to after being trained Airscent, but it much harder to get a dogs nose "up" when they have been trained to FST. I went through that with my female who had done Schh tracking prior to doing SAR. It was months of motivational runaways before doing anything else.

For USAR- most will reccomend not to do any cadaver with a USAR dog, as there is way too much at a site.

David,
When you put on his tracking harness and give the command to track, he knows he's going to track a human, right? So, for cadaver scent, don't use a harness, and use a different command than you use for tracking.
I've seen some fantastic multi-discipline dogs, who are very successful. One reason is that it is always clear which scent the handler wants them to find. If they are doing live wilderness airscent, there is a particular ceremony and command that goes with that; the dog knows from the get-go that they're looking for a live human. If they are doing cadaver, there is a different ceremony and command that goes with that activity.
Whether the trained tracking dog will learn to pick his head up instead of keeping it down comes down to training. If the dog is always set up in training to find the live subject by keeping his head down, then he'll keep his head down because that's what works.
It's the same for cadaver. Once you imprint the dog on cadaver scent and he learns that he gets a party when he finds it, he's going to find it in whatever way works.
To me, there's no conflict, because the two activities are different. As long as you make it black and white for the dog, the dog should be reliable.
I think it boils down to being a matter of opinion, unless there have been studies on the subject that I have not heard about.

Also, our team requires that the dog be tested and mission ready in live scent *before* beginning training in cadaver.

Originally posted by Lisa Swanston:
Also, our team requires that the dog be tested and mission ready in live scent *before* beginning training in cadaver. Lisa,
Could you explain the reasoning behind this? I've heard of a number of teams that require this, but don't really understand why.