Scent sports
The dog works with its nose pressed to the ground and retraces a person's exact route, footstep by footstep. It's the most methodical of the scent sports, and the one people most often mix up with mantrailing.
About the discipline
A lot of people assume a tracking dog is following the person's scent. What it's really following is the disturbance left by their footsteps: churned earth, crushed grass, broken plants. That's why it works nose down and sticks to the track step by step.
You lay a training track across a field, leave it to "age" for a while, and only then bring the dog out to work it. Small articles go down along the route, and the dog has to indicate each one by taking up a position next to it.
That's a big difference from mantrailing. In mantrailing the dog hunts for one particular person's individual scent and can work off to the side, where the wind has pushed it. In tracking it follows the physical track, exactly where the feet landed.
How it works in practice
Frequently asked questions
In tracking the dog follows the disturbance left by footsteps, nose down, right on the route. In mantrailing it follows one specific person's individual scent and can work off to the side, wherever the wind carried it. Put simply: tracking follows the track, mantrailing follows the human.
You start with fresh tracks, a few minutes old. With training, advanced teams work tracks several hours old, and those are a lot harder.
No. Every dog's nose is incomparably better than ours. Breed matters far less than your method, your patience and training regularly in the same way.
The rule figures on this page come from FCI - International Utility Dog Regulations (IGP), 2025. Rules change and federations differ - always check the rulebook of the competition you are entering.
From the same category
Finding a hidden target odour in all sorts of places.
Finding and indicating odours set in advance, under rules close to real detection work.
The dog hunts out small articles that carry human scent.
The dog finds a protected rat hidden in a course built from straw bales.
This page is informational. We work in mantrailing, search and rescue and preparation for the TSAC and BH exams - but if you want an honest opinion on what would suit your dog, write to us anytime.