Mantrailing
In mantrailing the dog follows one particular person’s scent. At the start it smells something that person has worn – a hat, a glove – and then has to find exactly that person, among every other trail on the same ground. It works as well in town as in the woods, and the dog usually works in a harness on a long line.
How it works in the app
- Whoever is going to hide records the trail on their phone as they walk it, and adds the scent article, the setting and how the start works when they save it.
- The trail is shared with a code or a link to the handler. When the dog starts, the person hiding gets a notification and can follow the dog live on the map.
- When the run is over it is saved with how it ended – found, not found or called off – and the dog’s path is drawn against the trail that was walked.
Follow the dog while you wait
Sitting hidden and waiting is half the training for whoever laid the trail. With live sharing you watch the dog’s path grow on the map, how far it has left along the trail and the straight-line distance to you. The handler can always see that their position is being shared, only with you, and can switch it off.
No score for walking straight
In person tracking and blood tracking, how close the dog keeps to the trail is measured, because it is meant to follow the footsteps. In mantrailing the dog follows the scent, and scent drifts with the wind – ten or fifteen metres off where the person walked can be exactly right. So a mantrailing run gets no score. The app shows the largest deviation as information, so you can see afterwards where the scent went.
Get the app
Whoever hides records the trail and shares the code – and gets a notification when the dog starts, so they can follow it live on the map.
Free to download.