Context Ferryman, not cherrypicking. The writer of this report does not say Rex is not a tracking dog. He says searchng a bunch of apartments is not usual or within the training of this tracker dog.
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On 7th May the same searches were continued, being extended to to the entire northern part of Almadena to the site of Espojeiro and the verges of the EN125 until the Boi valley.
At about 19.. the undersigned officer, accompanied by the Commander, Officer Silva, took part in a meetings with the PJ Directorate, being asked by the PJ about the viability of giving the girl's clothes to the dogs for the dogs to sniff again, and if by means of the odour inhaled, they would be able to mark an identical odour in one of the resort apartments even though its door was closed.
With regard to this task, Officer Silva referred to the fact that the time that had passed would be a crucial condition for the dogs' work in obtaining results and that the entirety of the human odours existing in the apartments and access paths could make the dogs' searches very difficult. However,
in spite of not being a normal situation for tracking, it could be attempted, whilst the operation should be carried out as quickly as possible and not directed towards one but to all the apartments in the resort, it being appropriate for the handler not to know which apartment was chosen, so as not the be conditioned.
In this concrete situation, the objective would be for the dogs to carry out a discontinuous search, in other words, to sniff the girl's clothes and immediately search near to the apartments, checking to see if there was any change in the behaviour of the dogs.
At about 23.00 accompanied by a PJ inspector, the searches were begun. After Rex was given the girl's clothing to sniff, [he began to search on the ground floor of block 5 and when he passed the door of apartment 5 A (the place the girl had disappeared from) according to his handler, officer Fernandes, the dog altered its behaviour, sniffing with greater intensity than he had done before. Apartment 5J of the same block was also checked as the dog had been more agitated than before as if there were a very strong strange odour there. It was stated that this apartment had been unoccupied for some time. Afterwards, the same kind of search was carried out using the dog Zarus which in general terms showed the same behaviour in the same places as Rex had done.
It was only when all the searches of the apartments in blocks 4 and 5 were complete, that the behaviour described above was registered. It is certain that this kind of work does not correspond to the area that these dogs were trained in,
but given that these types of dogs manage to discriminate a specific odour from others, although it could be a remote possibility that they related the odour of the missing girl with a possible location where she could have been.
http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/GNR_SNIFFER.htmPage 3517
ergo
not a generic human scent