Cadaver Dogs Unreliable? - Page 4

Traci, next question I have a lot of information but always good to hear from someone new...How long before the scent of cadaver is released from a body...?

Also I have read and I ask you to confirm  the fish 'Sea Bass' can emit the same scent as a human cadaver. If this is so could a cadaver dog be confused by this?...I will explain more when you tell me your answer.

Dani..

Traci

I, too, do not rely upon use of psuedo scents for training though my dogs will hit on them. More imporantly - my understanding is they have held up in court and there have been documented finds as a result of their use.  England has a different set of laws to live with than does the United States concerning the use of human remains for training.

Actually, the people I train with question the ability of a collection of the various scent items we use placed together to accurately represent the smell of a decomposing body either. ...but the dogs have enough experienced enough different scents like this catalogued in their brain that they can nail many variations with remarkable accuracy and exclude animal remains.

But, I do believe a lot of how "low" the dog will go in their detection has a lot to do with the training. A detail oriented forensics dog, such as the dogs regularly working and training on bleached blood splatter, laundered clothing, residual scent, archaelogical bones, etc. has to be consistently rewarded for working at that very small level of source.  And then, at that level, you have to qualify any find with the fact that there are "human remains" almost everywhere in trace quantities.

Your typical cadaver dog [and I have twice certified NAPWDA with mine] does not regularly work at that low a threshold. I would want to know the size and nature of sources this dog has proven consistent reliable alert behavior with. SWGDOG clearly recommends documentation of source size in training records and NIMS classifies cadaver dogs, in part, based on quantity of scent detectable by the dog.

Question - the 400 chemicals thing has been out there for awhile. I am not aware of any work this reasercher has done to indicate "400 chemicals that the dog can detect".  I thought it was just 400 chemicals as he is working on a peice of sniffing equipment....Of course the concentration of these 400 chemicals relative to one another can be highly variable.....

The German study as I recall was also done about a year or two ago and when I read it, saw a very small number of dogs a very small repetitions etc. with no real numbers behind it. I will say that at an Advanced Cadaver Seminar my team hosted with Andy Rebmann, Marcia Koenig et al, someone brough a collection of towels that had been cotanimanted, treated with oxy-clean, and I think bleached... and some [but not all] of the dogs were able to differentiate the towels.  One of the prerequisites for the seminar was past attendance at one of their seminars or holding a national cadaver cert.

Nancy

Dani- how long is scent released from the body....we train regularly with cremains. We also trained with a 700 year old tooth and the dogs had no problem finding that in the woods.  Sea Bass? Never heard that one. If you had a concern you would test. Like I said earlier, pigs are so close to humans that we can use their heart valves and skin on our own bodies. Yet we regularly train dogs to ignore pig over here due to the precence of feral pigs in many areas we search. So if dogs can discriminate between pig and human decomp, it would seem fish decomp would be a peice of cake - but I have never tested sea bass.  We have done water cadaver training in salt water with dead fish around and have never had an issue, though.

Hi Nancy and thank you...I remember the Eugene Zapata case. in fact the parents of this missing child had their lawyers contact the legal team of Zapato...this was the time when the Judge threw out the cadaver dog evidence..We of course know later that the dogs were in fact correct when they indicated to human remains in the basement. of zapatas home.

Sadly, in Haiti right now, no dogs are even really needed for the dead. The stench of death is everywhere and nauseatingly so. I have a friend who this morning heard from a mutual friend who is in Haiti Port-au-Price. He reported that it is almost impossible to walk through many areas because bodies are buried in the rubble and decaying. Other bodies have been improperly interred in crypts without any kind of enbalming and the seals are loose and broken bricks!

 As for where anyone is, alive or dead, one just follows the flies. That is often the best hint that the rescuers can use other than "reading" their dog.

As for how reliable dogs are in scenting, I can tell you that I have seen dogs follow human scent for miles and miles of freeway when the victim was in a vehicle and then later dumped. I have also watched my own dogs follow a track set out days before with uncanny accuracy. When participating in tracking, I quickly learned to "read" my dogs and in a very high percentage of situations, when I thought they were wrong, I was incorrect. The ability of a dog to follow scent is amazing. They are almost always correct when routinely and correctly trained. 

But, hodie.....you used a word....."almost"

Typically the reliablity of a dog is expressed in whoe numbers and typically anwywere from the low to mid 90s with expectations, usually, of at least 95%..   Any handler of a detection dog should be able to articulate the reliablity of their dog with unknown problems and have the records to back it up and show consistent performance with the kind of scenario being challenged.  But there is always some level of doubt.

And, most folks are simply not training at that level. A single drop of blood on a q-tip is a large enough scent source that I can smell it [at least I can when it is in the test tube for storage]...eventually the red color will disappear....I cannot detect it at that point, nor can my dog - though he can detect it far longer than can I.  But my dog also did not indicate on the scent left on the treated towels and others did. 

Residual and minute scent is very controversial.

 Yes, Nancy, there is always some level of doubt. I agree with your post.

Hodie , Nancy I am hooked by this information thank you all.

Now with regards to some level of doubt.
How much doubt would there be if a dog trained to detect human blood and another to detect the scent of human remains both pick up on 9 different areas...the home, clothing . car, garden,a childs toy....the mother admits to washing the childs toy at least three times although she claimed to hold it always ,as it was the missing childs pet toy and smelt of her child.

60-40 or higher...

 No Mother would wash a childs toy, while the child was missing. She would want the "smell of the child".  She washes it 3 times???