About Canine Detection

Using dogs for a variety of detection tasks began more than five decades ago. Today, dogs are widely used by local, state, and federal law enforcement, the military, and security companies. This growth and widespread acceptance is explained by one key factor ‚dogs can be extremely effective.

It has been estimated that a dog's olfactory system is 10 thousand to 10 million times greater than that of a human. A dog has 220 million scent cells as compared to about 5 million for a human. Dog scent cells line the canine mucosa, a membrane at the rear of the snout, which is folded so many times that, if smoothed out, it would be larger than the dog's body.

Based on laboratory testing at Auburn University's Canine and Detection Research Institute, dogs can detect certain scents in a concentration at least as low as 500 parts per trillion. To put that into perspective, that's like buying one lottery ticket out of two billion (a third of world's population) and winning every time.

Dr. L. Paul Waggoner, Interim Director of the Canine Detection Research Institute at Auburn University, says that the other characteristics of dogs may be even more important than their odor detection sensitivity in field detection work, especially compared with other detection methods:

• Rapid: Canine detection is the only readily available tool that can detect target odors "real time."
• Mobile: Canines can interrogate larger areas in a given period of time than any other method.
• Versatile: Explosive Detection Dogs (EDD) can detect a wide spectrum of substances.
• Focused: Canines can detect target odors in a very "odor noisy" environment, which often compromises the effectiveness of electronic sensors.
• Able to Find Source: Only canines cantrack chemical vapor to its source; no instrumental device presently is capable of doing this.
• Selective:  Dogs can discriminate between very similar chemical compounds and are not very susceptible to false alerts. Data collected by K-9 SOS concerning its own operations verifies this point. K-9 SOS conducted more than 550,000 searches nationwide and is operating at a false alert percentage of .003%

Dr. Waggoner summarizes a great deal of research:

The bottom line is that the properly trained and maintained EDD is the most effective readily available explosive detection tool and across most parameters exceeds the capability and especially the utility of available instrumental technology.