She has helped find missing children, as well as elderly Alzheimer's patients who've wandered off. Puzzle is a veteran of many search-and-rescue missions following tornadoes and flash floods. She's deeply familiar with the myriad smells that humans emit, depending on factors such as age, emotion and whether or not they are alive. Puzzle has been in training for almost all of her life. Charleson likens a dog's ability to find a human scent that may be weeks or months old to our ability to spot a pink dot in a handful of thrown confetti. The landscape of smells that dogs perceive is too rich for humans to even imagine. So we'd have to see which way the scent is moving by which way the dog is moving." The human scent is still there but it would be in motion and then the wind would pick it up. "You are getting a lot of churn from all that car passage. It will go out."Ĭharleson points to the cars zooming by on the highway, perhaps 200 meters to the west. "And we know that when scent hits horizontal surfaces like the sides of buildings, it responds to that. "You've got lots of little hills and valleys that would be channeling scent the way water channels down a physical ravine," she says. The weather and terrain pose some interesting challenges. There are no reported missing persons in Riverside Park today, but Charleson considers how they would begin a search here. Susannah Charleson Charleson and Puzzle take to the field.
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