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Fri 9 Apr, 2004 01:16 pm
First of all, how the hell do you train a dog to sniff out a bomb in the first place? Aren't there different ingredients in different types of bombs? Is there some common ingredient in all bombs that they would be trained to sniff out? And how would you know that the dog wasn't just sniffing some sausages that some guy had in his bag? How accurate could they possibly be? Any animal that licks his own balls can't be all that bright, can it?
Uh......why do you wanna know, kicky?
'Tis a fair question. It is tax season.
... maybe the inaccurate one's got blown away !
(Sorry... I've got this cartoon vision of that dog in Sylvester and Tweety Pie ...with a blackened face)
most chemical bombs are based in nitrogen compounds. nobody much uses gunpowders any more. All the explosive Nitrogen compounds have a series of similar odors and dogs that are bomb sniffers have a sense of smell as good as a Gas Chromatograph. Even a nuke has a chemical detonator and , usually a PETN ignition system
My breeder who sold me my catahoula trains bomb sniffing hounds and SWAT dogs in Louisiana and he uses everything from tissues to bottles containing stuff like TNT , RDX, c compounds , diazo salts, ANFO etc, and it all starts as play and reward.
I dont know how he trains them to detect the detonators or PETN detchord, or physical stuff like timers. His dogs can sniff traces of explosives on someones clothes . I understand that the dogs can be confused by certain things though.
Most sniffer dogs are trained to sit down and not budge from the location. My catahoula , whenever I hide a cookie, will start shhredding whatever i put the cookie in. this, I feel , is not a good thing in a real bomb sniffer. I have no idea how he trains that response. Thats the hard part.
Drug dogs get similar training but i think their scent vocabulary is even more complex.
Farmer, thanks a lot. That is really interesting. I'm glad you were here. I really appreciate it when I ask a question that I think nobody is going to know, and then, low and behold, there's always somoeone on this site with an answer. Awesome.
theres a web page on the features of the catahoula , its
http.www.catahoulaleopard.com I havent visited the site in over a year but There was one of the breeders who had some info on his SWAT and "special " service dogs . Most of the pix are of the dogs indefatigable spirit and tenacious attitude as drivers of unruly stock and as hunting dogs. They are very smart dogs that are always finding ways to push the envelope. So challenging them with special tasks is right where they live.
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