K-9 Officer Maverick Finds Missing Boy Using His Super-Powered Nose

• Dogs have been used for sniffing narcotics and tracking missing persons.
• Union Country K-9 Officer Maverick was donated to the department and got training for obedience, narcotics detection and scent tracking.
• Maverick sniffed a missing boy’s blanket and led them to the boy’s location.

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Humans have up to six million olfactory receptors in their noses. Dogs have up to 300 million!  That is why dogs are used to sniff out the bad stuff like drugs and ammunition.  They also do excellent scent-based tracking.

This is what the Union County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina did to be able to find a missing boy just this August.

An English Labrador Retriever named Maverick and his handler, Joshua Dye, led the search for the missing boy.

K-9 Officer Maverick’s powerful nose located the missing boy after he sniffed the boy’s blanket and led them to the boy’s position.

Dye said, “We tracked down to a pretty busy highway, made one turn, went down another road. When the juvenile saw us coming down the road, he actually came out of the woods and came to us, and Maverick ran right up to him and that’s how we found him.”

Dye added that if not for Maverick’s work of narcotics detection and scent tracking, the search for the young boy would have been difficult.  The boy’s cell phone was turned off which made it hard to track him.

Even with the success of the rescue, we just hope that cases needing Maverick’s powerful nose abilities would not happen often.  Way to go, K-9 Officer Maverick!  

Source: Daily Paws