Trained bloodhounds make communities safer places to live

"Police bloodhounds to track criminals."

That was the headline of the Aug. 31, 1907, edition of The New York Times. The city's detectives were frustrated by the Long Island murder of 15-year-old Amelia Staffeldt and the wave of crime that followed. The Times reported, "The bloodhounds will go on duty before Winter sets in, and police stations in the sparsely settled environs of Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island will have kennels annexed."

More than a century later, the environs are no longer sparsely settled, but the use of man-trailing bloodhounds has proved successful beyond those early detectives' imaginations.

Fast-forward 90 years.

Ronin became the first bloodhound put to work as a full-time patrol dog for a municipal police department in the state of California. His inaugural case involved two armed bank robbers. One was caught by police officers immediately after the act. The other eluded officers for hours before Ronin was called to the scene. What a slew of officers were unable to accomplish in more than four hours, Ronin was able to do in 45 minutes.

Jump forward another 11 years. On Oct. 3, at a banquet in Long Beach, Calif., the American Bloodhound Club honored K-9 Taffy, a member of the Orange County Sheriff's Department's Search and Rescue, with a Meritorious Service Award. Taffy's owner and handler, Reserve Lt. Doug Williams, said his dog has "found numerous lost children and has helped capture a career's worth of criminals, including some who were sent to prison for murder."

As far back as the 16th century, two words are commonly heard in tandem with "bloodhound": tracking and trailing.

Tracking in its simplest definition is the dog's ability to follow human scent and identify articles along the way. Trailing, by contrast, involves the dog's ability to distinguish and follow one person's scent and to identify that person.

A professionally trained bloodhound can do both exceptionally well, and both come in handy.

In fact, scent discrimination — the talent that enables the bloodhound to trail a specific person — is what makes these hounds so essential to modern law enforcement, right up there with DNA and fingerprints.