Scent can certainly be reduced, but not completely "contained", that I am aware off. Narcotics detection dogs are trained to alert to certain amounts of scent, so that they don't alert to residual odor, or in the case of certain search areas, small amounts of drugs...but they do smell them without alerting. I know this. The more an area is saturated with human smell, the more animals will avoid it. I also know that the worse (more) a person smells, the less game they (I)see.
At what amount do they stop alerting?
Travis
When training a dog, you "disipline" them when they alert to a controlled find that is of smaller amounts than you want them to alert on. For instance, allowing a dog to alert to the odor of residue, or recently removed, narcotics, will result in false alerts. It's not that the odor isn't there, just nothing to recover. Dogs that are uses for searching high trafficking areas, like the borders, are trained to alert only on larger quantities, as are most dogs in urban areas (cause every car's got seeds and smoke in 'em.). Dogs used to search schools and private industry are often trained to alert on small amounts.
It's not difficult to train a dog to alert at a certain threshhold.
