SMART DOG
It’s hard to conceive of a more brilliant tool than a canine’s nose for sniffing out danger
When it comes to sniffing out criminals, a dog’s nose may never be topped.
WHEN I FIRST MEET a young Labrador named Merry, she is clearing her nostrils with nine or ten sharp snorts before she snuffles along a row of pieces of luggage, all different makes and models. They’re lined up against the wall of a large hangar outside Hartford, Connecticut. This is where MSA Security trains what are known in the security trade as explosive
detection canines, or EDCs. Most people call them bomb dogs.
The luggage pieces joined shrinkwrapped pallets, car-shaped cut-outs, and concrete blocks on the campus of MSA’s ‘Bomb Dog Unit.’ Dogs don’t need to be taught how to smell, of course, but they do need to be taught where to smell – along the seams of a suitcase, say, or underneath a pallet,
where the vapours that are heavier than air settle.
In the shrouded world of bombdog education, MSA is an elite academy. Its teams deploy mostly to big cities, and each dog works with one specific handler, usually for eight or nine years. MSA also furnishes dogs for what it describes only as “a government agency referred to by three initials for use in Middle East conflict zones.”
Strictly speaking, the dog doesn’t smell the bomb. It deconstructs an odour into its components, picking out the culprit chemicals it has been trained to detect. Zane Roberts, MSA’s former lead canine trainer and current programme manager, uses a food analogy: “When you walk into a kitchen where someone is making spaghetti sauce, your nose says, ‘Aha, spaghetti sauce.’ A dog’s nose doesn’t say that. Instinctively, it says, ‘tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, onion, oregano.’” It’s the handler who says, “spaghetti sauce” or, in this case, “bomb”.
MSA’s dogs arrive when they are between the ages of one and one-anda- half. They begin building their vocabulary of suspicious odours by working with more than 100 identical cans laid out in a grid. Ingredients from the basic chemical families of explosives are placed in random cans.
Merry works eagerly down the row, wagging her tail briskly and pulling slightly on the leash. This is a bomb dog’s idea of a good time. Snort, snort, sniff, snort, snort, sniff, snort, snort, sniff. Suddenly, Merry sits down. All bomb dogs are schooled to respond this way when they’ve found what they’re looking for. No-one wants a dog pawing and scratching at something that could explode.
“Good dog,” says Roberts. He reaches into a pouch on his belt for the kibble that is the working dog’s wage.
Thirty-five per cent of a dog’s brain is assigned to smell-related operations
IT WOULD BE TOUGH to conceive of a better smelling machine than a dog. Thirty-five per cent of a dog’s brain is assigned to smell-related operations, whereas a human brain lends only five per cent of its cellular resources to the task. In her book Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz, a psychology professor at Barnard College in New York, notes that while a human might smell a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee, a dog could detect a teaspoon in four million litres of water – around about enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.
Where bomb dogs have really proved their mettle is on the battlefield. Before joining MSA as vice president of operations, Joe Atherall was a marine and headed a battalion
in Iraq’s Al Anbar province. The unit had three dog teams attached to it.
“One day, intel directed us to a school, but we didn’t find a lot. Then we brought in the dogs,” recalls Atherall. “There were French drains around the outside of the school, and the dogs started hitting on them. When we opened t hem up, we found an extensive IED cache, small arms weapons and mortar rounds, along with detonation cord and other explosive material.” Detonation cord is the dog whistle of odours, with nearly unsmellable vapour pressure.
“I loved those dogs,” says Atherall. “They were lifesavers.”
It is hard to imagine a more bighearted warrior than a dog. The canines work for love, they work for praise, they work for food, but mostly they work for the fun of it. “It’s all just a big game to them,” says Mike Wynn, MSA’s director of canine training. “The best bomb dogs are the dogs that really like to play.”
This doesn’t mean that war is a lark for dogs. In 2007, Army veterinarians started seeing dogs that showed signs of canine post- traumatic stress disorder.
“We’re seeing dogs that are over-responsive to sights and sounds or that become hypervigilant – like humans that are shaken up after a car accident,” says Dr Walter Burghardt of the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Caught early enough, says Burghardt, half the affected dogs can be treated and returned to active duty. “The other half just have to find something else to do for a living.”
Because of the emotional wear on the dogs, scientists have been trying to build a machine that can out-smell them. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State, scientists are working on ionisation technology to ‘see’ vapours the way a dog does – the same basic technology used at airports but far more sensitive.
However, says Robert Ewing, a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest, dogs have been doing this job for years. “I don’t know that you could ever replace them.”