AN ESSEX police officer has been awarded a Home Office police research grant to train two bloodhounds, Sherlock and Morse , to become police tracker dogs.

The grant, which is over £11,000, is funding the dogs, associated costs such as equipment and vet fees, and research costs for a year.

It is the result of three years of research already carried out by PC Malcolm Fish, who works as an instructor at Sandon dog unit, into the use of scent discrimination tracking by police dogs.

PC Fish has been researching the possibility of training a dog to follow a specific scent, ignoring all others, even through an area scented by other people. Bloodhounds have been actively used in other countries to do just this.

Sherlock and Morse start their work this month, and will be the only police bloodhounds in the country.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000.Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.