Detector Dogs: Training

music
ambience: dog barking, dog sniffs

Searching for drugs or explosives is all in a day’s work, for a scent-detecting dog. Keeping these dogs up to snuff is the life’s work of their trainers. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. It takes between 5 to12 weeks to get a new dog ready to first go out into the field, but the training doesn’t stop there. When they aren’t on the job, these dogs stay in practice sniffing samples that their handlers lay out for them. Lawrence Myers is a professor of veterinary medicine at Auburn University in Alabama.

“There probably isn’t such a thing as typical training. There are a lot ways to do it. You have to reward the dog for doing what you want to do and not reward it for what you don’t want it to do. It’s absolutely necessary to keep training the animal and keep training it well. An animal that is performing extremely well when it’s delivered, say, to a particular handler — if the handler does not maintain the training well with that animal, the dog very quickly is really worthless in terms of scent detection.”

Training a dog well requires careful preparation.

“The most difficult part of training for detector dogs is how you present the samples — what you’re trying to train the dog on. A great deal of care has to be exercised to make sure that, say we’re having a dog detect explosives, that the explosives would be pure, uncontaminated by anything else. That would include the scent of human hand, that would include the scent of a gloved human hand, that would include the scent of other explosives in the area. Drugs, plastics, any number of things can foul what you’re trying to train your dogs on, and hence your dog can learn to detect the wrong thing in the process.”

We’ll learn more about scent detector dogs in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Science Foundation.

music

Detector Dogs: Training

Training dogs for specialized scent detection is a masterly science.
Air Date:07/17/2002
Scientist:
Transcript:


music
ambience: dog barking, dog sniffs

Searching for drugs or explosives is all in a day’s work, for a scent-detecting dog. Keeping these dogs up to snuff is the life's work of their trainers. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. It takes between 5 to12 weeks to get a new dog ready to first go out into the field, but the training doesn't stop there. When they aren't on the job, these dogs stay in practice sniffing samples that their handlers lay out for them. Lawrence Myers is a professor of veterinary medicine at Auburn University in Alabama.

"There probably isn’t such a thing as typical training. There are a lot ways to do it. You have to reward the dog for doing what you want to do and not reward it for what you don’t want it to do. It’s absolutely necessary to keep training the animal and keep training it well. An animal that is performing extremely well when it’s delivered, say, to a particular handler -- if the handler does not maintain the training well with that animal, the dog very quickly is really worthless in terms of scent detection."

Training a dog well requires careful preparation.

"The most difficult part of training for detector dogs is how you present the samples -- what you’re trying to train the dog on. A great deal of care has to be exercised to make sure that, say we're having a dog detect explosives, that the explosives would be pure, uncontaminated by anything else. That would include the scent of human hand, that would include the scent of a gloved human hand, that would include the scent of other explosives in the area. Drugs, plastics, any number of things can foul what you’re trying to train your dogs on, and hence your dog can learn to detect the wrong thing in the process."

We'll learn more about scent detector dogs in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Science Foundation.

music