Dogs and Their Fine Noses Find New Career Paths

[nifer]

June 13, 2006
Dogs and Their Fine Noses Find New Career Paths
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

A year ago, Jada, a frisky black mutt, was living in a Florida pound, her days numbered. Today she commands hundreds of dollars an hour at some of Manhattan's most exclusive hotels and apartment buildings. Her fate turned on her newly gained ability to sniff out something reviled in New York these days: bedbugs.

Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America started using two dogs, Lucky and Flo, to sniff out DVD's in the cargo area of Heathrow Airport in London, a major transit point for pirated DVD's. "First we had Lassie, then Rin Tin Tin and now Lucky and Flo," said Dan Glickman, the president of the association.

Dogs have long been partners in law enforcement's searches for narcotics, explosives and people (both dead and alive). But now their keen noses are being put to use in a wider variety of areas, like medicine, environmental protection and anti-piracy efforts. The number of dogs with the new, specialized skills remains but a fraction of the number trained for more traditional law enforcement uses.

Still, dogs are entering new career paths, learning to sniff out mercury in Minnesota schools, invasive weeds in Montana, cancer in people — even cows in heat.

"The dogs do better than bulls," said Lawrence J. Myers, a professor of veterinary science at Auburn University who wanted to increase the success rate of impregnation attempts, a pressing demand in the dairy industry. Dr. Myers, a leading expert on dogs' sense of smell, added that because dogs "have no innate interest in cows in heat," it takes repetitive training to teach them how to know when the cows are ready. (The bulls do not benefit from the dogs' work. Dairy cows are usually artificially inseminated.)

Dogs' sniffing prowess, well known for ages, lends itself to any number of needs. "Cocaine or peanut butter: whatever you want to find, we can train a dog to find it," said Bill Whitstine, Jada's original trainer and the founder of the Florida Canine Academy in Safety Harbor, Fla.

Engineers are still years away from creating instruments as sensitive or as flexible as a dog's nose. Until then, Mother Nature remains the master engineer. "You can train a dog for anything that has a unique or mostly unique odor," Dr. Myers said. In the case of DVD's, the smell that Lucky and Flo have been trained to detect is polycarbonate plastic. In the case of cancer, scientists believe that dogs may be picking up biological compounds, like alkanes and benzene derivatives, that are not found in healthy tissue.

The cancer detection research is in a preliminary stage, but some early tests with a variety of cancers like lung and bladder show a success rate better than conventional tests'.

Because dogs have 20 to 40 times the number of nasal receptor cells that humans do, they can detect the tiniest levels of odors, even a few parts per billion, Dr. Myers said. In addition, the dogs' nasal anatomy is very effective at sampling air, so much so that researchers are studying whether they can adapt it for a mechanical detector.

To be sure, dogs are but one animal with an extremely acute sense of smell (think European pigs and truffles), but being man's best friend helps with employment opportunities.

"I don't think you could ever get a police officer to get a pig around a car for a narcotics search," said David Latimer, a dog trainer in Birmingham, Ala., who has taught a dog to sniff out cellphones, part of an effort to thwart terrorists who plan to use them to detonate bombs. The dog has not been put to use in the field, however.

The training process is similar for almost all odors. For months, the dogs are given multiple items in succession to smell. When they come to the target odor — bedbugs or mold, for example — they get a reward. Eventually they associate the odor with the reward.

"All animals strive for food, sex and praise," Mr. Whitstine said. "We can't give them the middle one, but we can give them the food and praise." The more odors a dog is being asked to pick out, the longer the training. Mold dogs, for example, are taught to detect about 18 toxic molds, some of which cause allergies.

The training has to continue even after the dogs start working, so they remain sharp. Every day, Jada gets a refresher course from her owner, Carl Massicott, who runs Advanced K9 Detectives in Milford, Conn. To conduct the retraining, he built a contraption out of aluminum bars, a lazy susan and plastic containers. He spins the wheel and says, "Jada! Seek! Seek!"

Jada sniffed around the containers — one containing bedbug carcasses and the others containing decoy materials like carpet and plaster. When she got to the one with the dead bedbugs, she stopped. Then she tapped the container with her paw. "Good girl!" Mr. Massicott said, giving her a snack out of his waist pack.

He also uses live bedbugs for the retraining, which troubles his wife. Once, one escaped. "We weren't going to bed until we found it," Mr. Massicott said. Jada tracked the wayward bedbug down.

Jada needs only two minutes to check a room that can take a human up to half an hour to inspect. She has rooted out clusters of bedbugs in $500-a-night hotel rooms, elegant Park Avenue co-op buildings and Queens low-rise rentals. She has found bedbugs behind radiators and in cracks in the wall.

Many dogs who end up as career sniffers are rescued from shelters or pounds, just as Jada was, because the most important trait for them is not pedigree but personality. Trainers look for dogs that are eager and enjoy games. A common test is to see if they react enthusiastically to a tennis ball.

"Some dogs are too smart," said Alice Whitelaw, who works for a nonprofit conservation group in Montana and uses dogs to track wild animal excrement for biological surveying. "They're like, 'I don't need this. I could be lying down all day.' "

There are other limitations, since dogs are not machines. Jada can look for bedbugs only six hours a day before her accuracy declines. Dogs get tired. They are temperamental. They make mistakes in trying to please their handlers. In fact, overly high expectations helped fuel a boom and bust in termite-sniffing dogs in the 1980's. "We realize their fallibility," said Mr. Latimer, the trainer from Birmingham who is also training bedbug dogs. "I think that has caused them to gain in popularity and, quite frankly, in credibility."

Also, using sniffing dogs makes economic sense only when there is sufficient demand, like the recent surge in bedbugs in New York City.

As for sensing cows in heat, Dr. Myers sighed. "There is economic interest, but not enough to sustain it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/ny...rtner=homepage