Mantrailing Puzzle Rally
What is mantrailing all about? Put simply, the dog has to find a person by following the individual scent trail of that person. This requires any object that carries the scent of the target person. With its excellent sense of smell, the dog can then find the right track and thus the person from the countless smells in the environment. And this even works when the scent is many hours old.
The event was organised by Karina Kalks, mantrailing expert and head of the Mantrail Academy Austria. I was commissioned to photograph the whole thing.
In the morning, first the trails were laid. In this case, used socks were the scent carriers :-) Then we started in 4 teams with 4 dogs each. Each team had to walk a trail with one dog. When the teams arrived back at the starting point, another trail was searched with the next dog in the team until all trails had been completed. The trails were about 800 metres long and of course it became more and more difficult for the dogs as the trail got older and older. For situations where the dog was unsure, there were still telephone jokers with which one could get little tips. But of course this cost penalty points!
Later in the afternoon, the last teams arrived back at the starting point and you could clearly see how exhausting the trails were. But the event was not over yet. Now came the games, which were also part of the evaluation. Here, too, the participants gave their best until they were totally exhausted :-) Afterwards, there was of course an award ceremony with many nice prizes.
In summary, it was a very interesting and really fun event and I had a lot of fun photographing the mantrailing rally. Finally, some impressions of the day:
