History Main / TheyHaveTheScent

* ''Literature/{{Discworld}} Noir''.

-->'''Don Knotts:''' You don't follow the smell of the socks! You follow the smell of the man who wore them!"

** In the ''A mammoth's Christmas'' special, when Peaches, Sid, Crash and Eddie are missing, Ellie and Manny ask Diego for help to find them:

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[[folder: Fan Works]]

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[[folder: Video Games ]]

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''VideoGame/MonsterHunterWorld'': Scoutflies will usually aid their Hunter by clustering around objects of interest nearby. But if presented with the scent of a specific monster, they will swarm and form a trail along the scent, allowing the Hunter to easily track their prey. They become more effective at this the more familiar they are with the target's scent.

* In William King's TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}} Literature/SpaceWolf novel ''Grey Hunters'', Sven and Ragnar know there is trouble when they see the Chaos forces have dogs sniffing at a trail.
* In Creator/GrahamMcNeill's TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}} Literature/{{Ultramarines}} novel ''Courage and Honour'', when two dogs grow frantic, Uriel does not use the phrase, but goes to check himself and smells human blood.

* Creator/StephenKing's ''TheGreenMile'' plays with this. A group of dogs track the two kidnapped girls at the beginning of the story, but get mixed up at the creek; two of them want to go in another direction. After the scent is reestablished, they go with the rest of the pack. Later, Paul figures out that it's because those two dogs weren't police dogs and got the smell of the killer and the girls mixed up in their head, so that when the killer ditched the girls at the creek, they went in ''his'' direction, rather than where the girls were eventually taken by John Coffey.

** In ''The Sign of the Four'', one of the criminals steps in creosote leaking from a cracked carboy. Holmes sends Watson to borrow "Toby", a homely mongrel with an amazing nose. At one point, Toby is confused when their quarry crosses paths with a creosote-soaked barrel on a hand trolley and follows the false trail, but they take Toby back to the spot where he appeared confused and he once again picks up the correct trail.
** Toby also makes an appearance in ''The Seven-Per-Cent Solution''.

* In ''N or M'', Creator/AgathaChristie's Tuppence Beresford has rubbed aniseed oil on her shoes so that she can be followed by the officials when she goes to meet a suspected spy. When the person escorting her to the meeting tells her to get into a car, [[spoiler:she expresses doubt about the quality of the tires and kicks it several times, transferring the aniseed oil to the sidewall of the tire.]]

* The titular hero in ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamAsylum''. With his (bat?)scanner, he can extract separate essenses (like tobacco stains or alcohol vapors) and then pinpoint them in the surroundings to track the smoker/drinker.

* In ''N or M'', Creator/AgathaChristie's Tuppence Beresford has rubbed aniseed oil on her shoes so that she can be followed by the officials when she goes to meet a suspected spy. When the person escorting her to the meeting tells her to get into a car, [[spoiler: she expresses doubt about the quality of the tires and kicks it several times, transferring the aniseed oil to the sidewall of the tire.]]

** That is, the tracking dogs had to be primed with a scent, and the scent they were given was of the girls. The police dogs caught the third scent mixed up with them and knew from training that that was the real target [[spoiler: Wild Bill]]'s and tried to hunt that down. The others track what they were given to track. Where the two diverge, they disagree. When they find the scent of the girls minus the third scent, they all chase that down. The search party makes the obvious assumption when the dogs lead them to what is found - a blood-covered ScaryBlackMan with the mangled corpse of a white girl in each hand. PoorCommunicationKills.

* "Ol' Red" is a tune about a prison guard dog with this ability and how a prisoner evades it. [[spoiler: It takes years and help from the outside, but he manages to become the dog's handler, then gets the dog a girlfriend outside the prison walls. When he makes his escape, the dog disregards the scent of his old boss and chases down his poontang instead.]]

* In Creator/AndreNorton's ''Storm Over Literature/{{Warlock}}'', the Throgs have a creature that can track them, and gives an eerie howl when it has their scent. Unsurprisingly, the human name for it is "hound."

If the dogs are hunting people, they are loud enough to be heard by the pursued, who may be the ones who say this. It indicates that TheChase is about to begin in earnest, and that evasion will not be feasible or require throwing the dogs off. Generally a grim point. And the pursuee will almost always go to water or roll in something disgusting to throw the animals off the scent. (This ''always'' works on television. [[RealityIsUnrealistic Contrary to what most people expect]], [[TelevisionIsTryingToKillUs it does not work in real life]].)

* In Creator/DevonMonk's Literature/AllieBeckstrom novel ''Magic To the Bone'', Allie recounts how, to throw a Hound off your trail, you need to avoid using magic and cover up your smell with something else stinky. She opts for garbage.

* ''The Amateur'' by Robert Littell. The protagonist overhears his CIA superior telling how he escaped tracker dogs in WW2 by urinating into the snow, and later uses the same technique to escape tracker dogs behind the Iron Curtain.

* In William King's TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}} SpaceWolf novel ''Grey Hunters'', Sven and Ragnar know there is trouble when they see the Chaos forces have dogs sniffing at a trail.

* In the WesternAnimation/{{Classic Disney Short|s}} ''The Chain Gang'', MickeyMouse is pursued by a pair of bloodhounds after he escapes from prison. The bloodhounds are generally regarded as being the forerunners of PlutoThePup.

* In ''Fanfic/WithStringsAttached'', George becomes a dog in order to track Ringo, who has run off into the forest to escape the craziness in Aurion's tent.

* In Creator/RobertEHoward's "Literature/RedNails", when ConanTheBarbarian and Valeria are inching away from the dragon, the wind abruptly blows directly from them to it. Its reaction is instant, and they ''run''.

* In JohnCWright's ''Literature/TheHermeticMillennia'', the dog things invert; when they are done sniffing around, they howl in frustration at not finding the scent.

* In JohnCWright's ''[[Literature/ChroniclesOfChaos The Orphans of Chaos]]'', when Grum sets Lelaps on Vanity and Amelia's trail, he finds them, turns away, and starts to bay, running off. Grum comments that he's found the scent.

* In one of the [[HeraldsOfValdemar Tarma and Kethry]] short stories, two kidnapped girls drop shreds of white silk out of the wagon they're being transported in. The silk is invisible against the snow the wagon is rolling through, but leaves traces of their scent that Tarma's kyree familiar Warrl can follow.

* In the ClassicDisneyShort ''The Chain Gang'', MickeyMouse is pursued by a pair of bloodhounds after he escapes from prison. The bloodhounds are generally regarded as being the forerunners of PlutoThePup.

If the dogs are hunting people, they are loud enough to be heard by the pursued, who may be the ones who say this. It indicates that TheChase is about to begin in earnest, and that evasion will not be feasible or require throwing the dogs off. Generally a grim point. And the pursuee will almost always go to water or roll in something disgusting to throw the animals off the scent. (This ''always'' works on television. [[RealityIsUnrealistic Contrary to what most people expect]], [[TelevisionIstryingToKillUs it does not work in real life]].)

If the dogs are hunting people, they are loud enough to be heard by the pursued, who may be the ones who say this. It indicates that TheChase is about to begin in earnest, and that evasion will not be feasible or require throwing the dogs off. Generally a grim point. And the pursuee will almost always go to water or roll in something disgusting to throw the animals off the scent. (This ''always'' works on television. [[RealityIsUnrealistic Contrary to what most people expect]], it does not work in real life.)