What Your Beagle Is Smelling?

The Beagle is a very intelligent, loving,successful at tracking a scent from the ground than
food-motivated dog. This make the breed highlythey are from an arbitrary place in the air, but they
trainable and has helped the Beagle successfully enterstill excel at both skills. Most beagles can even track
and dominate the work force. The real reasonscents across water. It's very hard to outsmart a
Beagles excel as working dogs, however, is theirbeagle when he has a good whiff of a subjects
impeccably accurate sense of smell. For this reason,scent.
Beagles are often used as detection and trackingThe Beagle's excessively effective sense of smell is a
dogs in rescue operations and law enforcement.huge benefit and asset to a working dog, but can
They are used to track and locate missing persons,turn into a significant obstacle when dealing with a
and they are used as both rescue and cadaver dogs,household pet. With such accurate noses, the Beagle
helping seek out living victims and bodies in thewill always know when you are eating and what you
wreckage from buildings collapsing, fires, or naturalare eating, or if there is something they might want
disasters.to get at inside the garbage can! This can be difficult
Though Beagles were originally developed asto deal with, being that Beagles are notoriously
high-powered game detectors for hunters, its role infood-motivated animals. The easiest way to
modern-day society has expanded vastly. Thecounteract this behavior is to train against garbage
Beagle's sense of smell is so accurate that they aredigging or begging for people food, starting from
employed by the United States Department ofpuppyhood. If your dog knows he will never get to
Agriculture to detect contraband fruits andeat the bacon he smells on your breath, he will be
vegetables that may be smuggled into the country.less likely to go digging for the wrapper in your trash
They even have a name for this Beagle-based team:bin.
The USDA Beagle Brigade! Beagles are also used toAnother problem with household pet Beagles and
detect things as strange as termites in homes and astheir sense of sent is their innate desire to always
common as drugs in airports. They are a favoritetrack a smell that makes them curious. If you live in a
choice of law enforcement agents because of theirrural area, this can mean your dog wandering miles
obedient nature and high intelligence. They also haveaway in search of a rabbit that could have bounced
one of the most sensitive noses of any of thethrough your back yard two days ago. Invisible
hounds.fences or shock collars are virtually useless against
It is said that the Beagle's floppy ears andBeagles, as they just don't care about something
moderately long snout help the breed when followinggiving them a light shock when they are following
scents by gathering the molecules from whateversomething they could eat, play with, or even just
smell it is that they are following. Beagles are morefollow!