GrainneDhu
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Um. The US record for a dog trailing a live human being is 5.5 days. That is, the human being was at the point last seen 5.5 days before the Bloodhound was taken to the scene.
In my own experience, the oldest trail successfully worked was by the mother and brother of one of my own dogs, working in tandem with their handler. It was Louisiana in the summer, the temps were hot and way humid, so she would work one dog while leaving the other to cool off and re-hydrate, then she would work the other dog. Working like that, they figured out a trail that was over 80 hours old. This was confirmed by the victim, who was an elderly man who was not lost but was making a point to his granddaughter that he did not need to go into assisted living. He was an old Cajun and he deliberately laid a trail that a lifetime of hunting experience told him would be tough for dogs to figure out.
I don't know any reputable handler who would expect to get results on a trail older than a week. They would try but they would be certain to make it clear that a lack of results would have no real meaning.
As for finding something, it depends on what and how the dogs were trained for. Dogs that have been trained for live searches sometimes indicate human remains but they don't always. Dogs trained exclusively for human remains detection do not indicate on scent left by a live human. Dogs that are cross trained indicate on both, of course.
Training and handling a high level SAR or HRD dog amounts to taking on a full time job. They need all the things that the average house dog needs, plus an exercise program aimed at keeping them in condition equivalent to a human marathon runner, plus several scent training problems a week.
In the US, all that is mostly provided by volunteers, who not only volunteer their training time but often pay for travel, room and board while deployed.
I have no idea how Nepal organises the training of their dog/handler teams. It is certainly a nontrivial expense, no matter who foots the bill.
Even highly qualified dog/handler teams can make mistakes. I don't know a single SAR dog handler who hasn't had the experience of clearing an area only to find out that the victim was in the area cleared.
So using dogs is like certain medical tests. A positive is a positive but a negative doesn't mean anything more than that a specific dog/handler team did not find anything in the area searched.
