Nellie

Some dogs should be handled more carefully than others, Nellie is one of those dogs. She came out of the shelter at a little over a year old, returned early from foster care with some decidedly unflattering comments in her file. 

 

After extensive rehabilitation Nellie became a Wilderness Search and Rescue trailing dog. In a training exercise, after contaminating a trail with eight other dogs, a mother and a teenage daughter (who lived in the same house) walked the trail to a designated point at which they left the trail in opposite directions and hid about 30’ off the trail. The daughter left an article of clothing at the beginning of the trail.

 

Nellie acquired the scent off the clothing, tracked accurately, pause briefly at the break, identified the correct path, and located the daughter.