The Dog Charmer by Tom Shelby

Teaching Your Dog to 'Go Find'

I was at a dinner the other night and one of the guests evidently heard that I'm a dog trainer and did K-9 SAR (search and rescue) for many years. She has a French bulldog—which, by the way, has recently replaced the Labrador retriever as the most popular dog in the U.S.—and she wanted to know how to teach a dog to "go find."

I told her that as we were sitting at the dinner table we were dropping 40,000 dead skin cells a minute and the average mid-sized mutt probably has more than 200 million olfactory cells in his nose, while we two-leggeds have about 5 million. I also told her that the part of a dog's brain that discerns what the smells are is about 40 times larger than a human's, relatively speaking. It was Mark Twain who said, "If dogs could talk, no one would own them." So when you come home and your dog smells your pants, he knows where you were, who you touched and what you ate.