What is Mantrailing?

Me and Washee Mantrailing

Mantrailing is not a new way to train dogs, this way of finding people with dogs has been used by bloodhound owners for hundreds of years. Mantrailing is using a dog’s natural ability to follow cold aged trails to find a specific person who is hidden or missing.

This method of finding people with a dog is quickly becoming a fun way to exercise reactive and high energy pet dogs that need more to do. Similar to hide and seek with a dog, owners of all breeds of dogs are learning how exciting this type of dog work is to participate in for fun and sport.

Mantrailing is best known as a type of K9 Search and Rescue specialty in which the dog discriminates one person’s scent from all other person’s scent to locate the one particular person. Mantrailing is used by search and rescue dog teams or police to find missing persons and criminals. A few prisons today continue to use this type of trained dog and long ago plantations used mantrailing hounds to hunt down runaways.

Me and Washee Mantrailing

We found him.. look at my dog smile when she finds the boy!

Dogs really love to find people!

Where Mantrailing got its Name

“Mantrailing” gets its name from bloodhounds. Many people believe the breed was named bloodhound because the dogs track blood trails which is not true.

The dogs do not follow the person’s blood trail.

The dogs follow the scent particles left by a person, sometimes many days, weeks and years later.

The breed is named a bloodhound because this is the first dog breed to have a written recorded pedigree of its bloodline hundreds of years ago. They are the first “pure blood-ed -hound” or bloodhound.

Bloodhound handlers long ago gave this type of scent work the name “Mantrailing” because the bloodhound is the trailing dog that hunts people.

My bloodhounds taught me how to Mantrail and now all dog breeds are learning how to do what bloodhounds do naturally.

Family Disaster Dogs use Mantrailing to find missing and trapped family members after disasters. Any dog can learn to help its family in some way with the Family Disaster Dogs book.

Anyone who wants to train a dog to find people for Sport and Work can learn step by step with my new book "Start Mantrailing"