Week 18

This week, we had a talk from a couple who train sniffer dogs to suit the needs of customers. This included searching for bodies and living people in accidents or natural disasters, finding drugs or sniffing out cancer in people. The man had been on several programs and news broadcasts about his work in helping solve crimes and helping people survive. I didn’t realise there were so many things that a dog was able to do through smell alone.

He currently has dogs in Bangladesh where they are searching for people injured in a building collapse. We saw pictures and he was explaining how they used diggers to slowly work there way through the collapsed building to find pockets where people could survive and then they sent dogs in to see if there were any survivors. He also showed us a news report video about him and a dog that was used to find scrap metal that had been stolen and sold to a scrap metal company. People could have a marker smell put on their property which the dog was trained to sniff out, it could then go around scrap yards to find the stolen property. This has helped a lot after people were steeling railway tracks.

They also trained dogs to help find the victims of the Saddleworth moors murders. Although there is still one body left to find, the dogs helped find all of the other 4 victims. This was the first time that dogs had been used by police in the UK. It is now a lot more common.

The couple also brought 2 of the dogs in that they were training. One was their own pet who would be used by the man in future investigations and the other was to be passed on to someone else who it would then live with. The 2 black Labradors were being trained to identify smelling markers on sticks and computer hard drives.

The dogs would have a trigger collar or badge that would let them know that they were now working. He would tell them to sit and they would only go once he said to. Once they identified the marker, they would look at the man for approval. Once they got it correct, he used a clicker and gave them a tennis ball. the tennis ball was their reward.