Every Sunday morning life or death training is going on with some special students.
Highland Park on a Sunday morning is the perfect training ground for the legendary Southern tracking dog, the American bloodhound.
Tracy Orndorff runs Blue Ridge Bloodhounds and every Sunday without exception, she's out training.
This is a nice easy training spot," she says of the park. "We've got some new dogs we're bringing along. Ultimately were going to put them out in 160 acres."
Here's how she does it and it's surprisingly simple; rub the missing persons scent all over some gauze, put it in front of the hound watch it zoom toward the right scent. Bloodhounds are unique because they pick out only one person's scent; just get anything with the missing person's scent.
That was the case this summer in Vinton, when a man with dementia wandered off from his nursing home.
"We went into his laundry and got some socks and we bagged those up and we used those as our scent articles," she says.
If you're curious why Orndorff has picked these dogs with faces only a mother, or trainer, could love, thank Alex Trebek.
"I was watching Jeopardy one night and the question was, 'What is the only non human testimony permitted in a court of law,'" she recalls. "I was racking my brain thinking what exotic animal it could be and it turns out it's from a bloodhound."
That was five years ago. Now she works with law enforcement all over Southwest Virginia.
