Winning by His Nose: Retired Thoroughbred Uses Scent Detection to Find Lost Hikers

[Wandering Eyes]

When Kristin Pierce of Tacoma, Washington, explains that she owns a retired racehorse who is aspiring to a second career that involves sniffing out lost hikers in the wilderness, even people who are familiar with Thoroughbreds are surprised to learn this olfactory skill comes naturally to horses and that they can learn to master it.

Yet that's precisely what Prayerstone, a 12-year-old by 1996 GI Kentucky Derby champ Grindstone, has been taught to do over the last several years.

Pierce told TDN in a recent interview that the strapping bay absolutely thrives on the scent work that she stumbled upon by chance when trying to come up with creative ways to occupy the gelding's busy mind during a long period of stall rest to recover from injuries.

Now Prayerstone is healed and on the cusp of attempting his final field testing to qualify for a spot on the all-volunteer Northwest Horseback Search and Rescue (NWHSAR) unit that operates under the direction of the King County Sheriff's Office in Seattle.

“Every time I tell someone he's training to be a search-and-rescue horse and working on scent detection, they're just amazed that horses can do that,” Pierce said. “It's not very common. I had never met anyone else who had done it before trying it myself.”

Pierce said that sitting in the saddle atop Prayerstone while he's focused on trying to find a person in dense woods is at once gratifying and enlightening.

“Usually he's a horse that doesn't have a 'stop button.' He just wants to go, go go,” Pierce said. “But when he's scenting, everything slows down, and he's very deliberate about where he puts his feet, where he puts his face, and in which direction he's moving.

“He drops his head to the ground and his nostrils get huge. He is actively scenting. His eyes kind of half-close and his ears stick out to the side, and he is concentrating. So it's really fun to ride him then, because you can feel his whole self is focused on this thing I can't see, and he knows exactly where he's going. I just have to duck for the branches,” Pierce said.

Prayerstone started three times in 2016 and '17 at the now-defunct Portland Meadows while racing for his owner/breeder, Tom Crader. He debuted in a fog-obscured stakes for Oregon-breds and finished eighth out of nine at 35-1 odds. Ten months later, he surprised with a 39-1 second, beaten only a head, when dropping into the maiden-claiming ranks. Start number three was another maiden-claiming attempt in which the 7-1 Prayerstone dueled inside, then steadily retreated to last in a field of eight.

Right about the time that Prayerstone was easing into an early retirement, Pierce herself was getting back into enjoying horses after several decades of being a lapsed equestrian.

“I guess you could call me an adult re-rider,” said Pierce, who is 47. “I rode horses as a kid, all the way up through college, and then took a break when I couldn't afford them. During COVID, I realized that my heart had a horse-shaped hole in it. So I started taking lessons and doing a partial lease at an event barn around here.”

A friend who rode with Pierce found out Prayerstone was available to be re-homed, and thought he would be the perfect companion. She went and got the gelding and dropped him off at the barn for Pierce to check out.

Prayerstone's sire, winner of the 1996 Kentucky Derby, had more traditional Thoroughbred talents | Horsephotos

“He was stunning,” Pierce said. “He's a 17-plus-hand, 1,500-pound, old-fashioned, big, chunky Thoroughbred. And he has the classic Thoroughbred head–the 'look of eagles.' He looks like he's going somewhere.”

Pierce continued: “He was restarted off the track by a phenomenal event trainer named Meika Decher. She did an absolutely beautiful job on his restart, and he lucked out. He got to spend four years in a 40-acre pasture up in the mountains with a bunch of other horses, just horsing around. But she knew that he was never going to be an advanced-level event horse, so she listed him for like $5,000.

“I took him,” Pierce said. “I fell I love with his personality.”

Had Pierce scheduled a pre-purchase veterinary exam prior to falling in love, Prayerstone's story might have turned out differently.

“There were six pages of findings,” Pierce said. “So [Decher] was right that he was never going to be an advanced-level horse. And that was fine, because all I really wanted was a big buddy.”

Pierce rattled off a list Prayerstone's medical shortcomings, focusing on the major issues.

“He has kissing spine in seven places. He has shivers, probably. He also has some sort of horse version of Tourette syndrome. It's similar to headshakers, but all the treatments for headshakers make it worse, so he has a tic in his head and his neck. We've treated him for ulcers. I think I've had every part of him X-rayed and ultra-sounded,” Pierce said.

“We started trying to do low-level eventing and little fun schooling shows, but his body just couldn't handle it. His legs seem to be made out of tissue paper, and he can't feel his feet, so he kind of runs like a Muppet. We tried to do a low-level cross-country event, but he smacked his legs into each other hard enough that he broke both his front splint bones and pulled a suspensory, so that was 10 months of stall rest to get him back together.”

While confined to the stable, Pierce taught Prayerstone–whose nickname around the barn is Raven–how to use communication buttons that associate words with actions that some horses seem to understand.

“Raven loves puzzles. He loves games and opening doors. He loves making loud noises and destroying things and generally being a 1,500-pound toddler,” Pierce said.

Pierce faced a dual challenge of trying to keep Prayerstone from being bored in the short term while also knowing that on the other side of his long recovery, he was not going to be able to handle the endurance competing she had initially envisioned. And dressage was out because Pierce herself got bored going around in circles in an arena.

“He will jump anything you point him at. He will happily gallop through a field where he can't see where he is going. But he does not want to be in an arena any more than I do,” Pierce said.

“So we pivoted, and decided that his favorite place to be is out in the woods,” Pierce said. “But he needed some sort of mission in his life. A life of public service is what I thought.”

Pierce is no stranger to second–or even third–career switches. She worked in the medical sector for 15 years testing experimental drugs on people. Then she trained to be a diesel mechanic. Now she's a project manager for Tacoma's wastewater treatment plant.

Pierce happened to find some online literature about equine scent training, and the concept appealed to her because some of the conditioning to hone that skill involved positions she believed would give some relief to where Prayerstone had been hurting.

“Doing all of the rehab, I realized that I needed a way to get him to move in a really biomechanically correct way, where he'd put his nose down and he'd lift his belly, and he'd kind of stretch out all of those spaces in his back where his spine is touching. And scent work seemed to do that,” Pierce said.

“So I bought the Scentwork for Horses book [by Rachaël Draaisma] and I started working through the book by myself, and he just loved it,” Pierce said.

At first the training is done with the horse on a long line without a rider. You show a treat to a horse and let it sniff it, then run backwards about 100 feet.

“And the horse figures out pretty quick they should go find that person and get the cookie,” Pierce said. “After two or three iterations of that, the person can run away and hide behind a tree.”

Pierce said this basic instinct comes naturally to horses.

“Every horse I've presented this to has been interested. When they snuffle your pockets for treats, they're doing scent detection. When they are looking around in their stall for little bits of dropped food, they're doing scent detection. So similar to training dogs, you kind of encourage that, and then make it a little bit harder each time,” Pierce said.

“He would search out lost socks in the arena,” Pierce said. “He would happily find one of my friends who would go hide in the woods.”

Prayerstone's barn backs directly up to a military base that has 60,000 acres of trails, which civilians can access so long as they have a pass. This allowed Pierce to ramp up the scent training over a much wider range.

“You're just promoting that natural behavior, and you're really along for the ride. My job is not to steer. It's really just to stay out of his way,” Pierce said.

“With him, I notice that he will flick an ear in the direction of the scent, or he will swing his whole giant head in the direction of the scent. When he's on the trail, he puts his nose on the ground, arches his back and does this huffing noise. And when he loses the scent, he will start circling until he finds it again, just like a dog, and then follow it off again.”

Pierce said the next big breakthrough for Prayerstone was when she vanned him eight hours into the mountains of central Oregon to attend a week-long clinic hosted by Terry Nowacki of Minnesota, whom Pierce described as “the brain trust behind using horses in scent detection the way that they use dogs.”

Tracking dogs can outperform horses in thick underbrush, but horses have an advantage over longer distances. Their height also aids in picking up airborne scents that rise above the noses of dogs.

“We can cover more ground. We can generally move faster over a longer period of time. And dogs aren't as effective scenting when they're panting,” Pierce said. “Horses don't pant, so when it's really hot or humid, they just keep going.”

In fact, a tired horse will open its nostrils wider, exposing more olfactory receptors, which increases detection ability.

In training for scent detection, the rider knows the parameters of the search. But in a real rescue operation like Prayerstone and Pierce hope to encounter with the NWHSAR, there are no defined borders as to where a lost person might be.

“So we take every opportunity when we go trail riding to find every human being in that area, and I reward him,” Pierce said. “Every time we go out, it's an opportunity for him to find a person, even if I don't know they're there.”

Prayerstone training through fire | Courtesy Kristin Pierce

But can Prayerstone handle the physicality of search and rescue given his medical history?

“Our area is mountainous and forested,” Pierce said, explaining that the terrain is rugged, but the pacing is deliberate, which helps Prayerstone. “We do have some big prairies, but it's mostly mountains and forest and 10-foot tall blackberry bushes and streams and bridges. Obviously, I'm not going to take him up high-angle rock faces, because he can't. But he will happily plow through brush. He loves it.

“Lately we've been working on scent discrimination and tracking,” Pierce continued. “The two different kinds of scent detection are air-scenting and tracking. Air scenting is where you find any human in an area. Tracking is what you think of when you think of bloodhounds. You give them something to smell, and then they go find the thing that smells like that. He seems to enjoy the tracking, because it's a harder puzzle for him.

“The main reward is finding the person, but Raven will never turn down a cookie,” Pierce said.

She added that one time the gelding was so intent on his task that he tried to dig out a volunteer with his hooves when the person was hiding beneath a fallen tree.

Pierce said Prayerstone still needs to pass a 36-point competency test to become a member of the NWHSAR, and she has to prove her map and compass skills.

“Basically, Raven would have to get loaded up with everything he and I would need for three days independently in the woods, and then ride out 10-15 miles and camp, just the two of us. Then we have to go find our volunteer hidden 'victim' and bring him out together to be certified.”

On the NWHSAR team, scent detection is not a requirement. The rescue team does most of its operations by following a search grid, with horses working in small groups to cover an assigned area. Pierce believes that once he's been certified to be on the unit, Prayerstone will be the only horse with that skill, which she hopes will add a specialized element to the searches.

“The national search and rescue organizations don't certify horses for scent, just because there aren't enough of us,” Pierce said. “So right now we're training to take the dog certification. He can perform the tasks for being a scent dog, but we are working to find a group that will let us test as though he were a dog.”

Once on the NWHSAR unit, members are responsible for paying for and maintaining their own horses, trucks and trailers, and they must self-deploy when called by authorities to help with a lost, missing or injured person. This often means getting an emergency call in the middle of the night and/or during foul weather.

Pierce is investing time and money in other skills that might help Prayerstone handle chaos. They recently attended a mounted police skills course hosted by the law enforcement expert who trains New Orleans police horses to handle rowdy crowds during the Mardi Gras celebration.

“The first thing they had us do was they lit off a smoke bomb in the middle of an indoor arena and had the horses walk through the smoke. Raven walked around it a couple times and was like, 'Wait, I know what to do.' And he walked right up to the smoke bomb and stomped on it,” Pierce said with pride.

“That clinic was cool. He walked through fire that they set on the ground. He walked right up to a police car with the lights and sirens going and he stuck his head inside. He walked under an arch of fire,” Pierce said.

“At this point, I know this horse will do anything I ask him to. He's the proverbial bomb-proof horse–quite literally,” Pierce said.

Pierce said her important take-away message for second-career Thoroughbred owners is to consider alternative ways to keep physically challenged horses mentally engaged.

“There are a fair number of ex-racehorses who have physical limitations,” Pierce said. “And I would encourage anyone with a horse like that to work at non-traditional things like this. Even if search and rescue isn't somebody's goal, just doing the mental games of scent detection work is so good for them, and gives them a sense of purpose and meaning.”

The post Winning by His Nose: Retired Thoroughbred Uses Scent Detection to Find Lost Hikers appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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