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Kentucky Scent Trailing Air and Rescue (KSTAR) K9 Seminar is a 4-day man trailing workshop hosted at our cost of $500.00 (including food, lodging, instruction and a t-shirt). The objective is to educate and train canine handlers on real world man trailing strategies and applications to increase the percentages of successful man hunter searches. For information on attending our workshop or testing for KSTAR's Nationally Recognized Man Trailing Certification, contact us for more details. 

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Level one - Scent Dogs; Man Trailing Assessment Based on Last Known Position 

Cost per evaluation: $250.00 (at KSTAR Workshop $200 per test).

Canine team shall be assessed in the following ways; 

A successful completion of the man trailing assessment requires the canine and handler team to navigate to the completion of a double blind trail within parameters based on mission oriented environments and indicate the correct unknown target within 60 minutes.⁃ 

Both the target trail layer and canine team shall have their tracks documented with a gps device.

All handlers must illustrate proper control over canine as well as the ability to read their canine. ⁃ 

Each team shall be tested on a separate track/trail⁃ 

Each assessment shall be ran in double blind conditions where neither track/trail nor target location is known to any persons present with the testing canine⁃ Both target and distractor to be unknown to the canine team testing⁃ 

Animal/human distractions should be present along track/trail.⁃ Both target track/trail and distractor track/trail to remain at least 10 foot apart but no more than 30 foot apart. They shall lay their tracks randomly crossing one another. The track/trail shall have a minimum of two turns and two surface transitions and be at least one half (.5) mile but no more than one (1) mile long.

The target track/trail and distractor track/trail shall be aged to at least 60 minutes but no more than four hours.⁃ 

Scent article to be placed in the two bags, double bagged, with the outer bag marked with identification of the target track/trail layer. The inner bag, unmarked, shall be given to the canine handler before starting at the target’s last known position, which shall be indicated by the evaluator. 

⁃ Track/trail shall be navigated to the completion where correct target is identified within 60 minutes from the start. ⁃ Wrong target identified results in a failure. ⁃ An evaluator can stop the test at any time for safety or lack of work

level 2: Along with the above requirements of distractions, cross tracks, double blind, etc; the level two certification will require 1-2 miles, trail aged 12-24 hours (where the trail layer leaves an article at the end to mimic the expected scent pool), 4+ turns, 3+ surface transitions and the handler must identify the correct target with 2+ decoys within 2 hours and 30 minutes.