Tracking, trailing and other forms of scent work are activities that bring you to the very essence of what a dog is. Scent work is a partnership in which you are asking the dog to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. It is at once humbling and enlightening.

When you work with a dog in scent work you quickly learn that the dog knows a different world. While we are used to the idea of one scent "covering up" another that rarely applies to dogs. To us scent is something like having blurred vision. If you were to look at this text with a magnifying glass smeared with oil the text would blur. The text would be just as sharp and individual but you would not be able to perceive it. Instead the individual elements would overlap. That is how we experience scent. The dog picks out and distinguishes scent with a clarity we can't match.