Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
to compare human noses with dog noses. Yet he couldn't help doing a couple of quick, in-
formal experiments comparing his lab workers' noses with dogs' noses on odors. Myers tested
one group of workers and dogs on acetone, a cleaning solvent common around labs. “My
lab workers could smell it at lower concentrations than the dogs could.” But with eugonal,
a carnation-ey, clove-y compound that Myers started using as a standard pretest compound
before having dogs perform more elaborate tests, they showed a response at one millionth of
the concentration that lab workers could.
The old dogs' tales don't end at levels of concentration. There's also the strict correlation
between the number of dogs' smell receptor cells and their scenting ability. At first, as I read
the nose literature, I ranked a German shepherd's nose below a bloodhound's but well above
most other breeds'. Solo's nose on this spreadsheet was very good but not excellent. Much of
the best-selling dog literature promotes the concept that the more smell receptor cells a dog
has in its nose, the better its scenting ability: “For example, the Dachshund has around 125
million smell receptor cells, while a Fox terrier has 147 million and the German Shepherd has
about 225 million.” The bloodhound has all those breeds beat, with 300 million receptors.
Nancy Hook thinks such distinctions are silly. If she wanted to, she said scornfully to me,
she could train her daughter's Chihuahua, Pip, to find bodies. Lindsay drove the point home
with smug delight by pointing out that her Pip could get into small spaces, unlike Solo, who
is huge and clumsy.
Nancy and Lindsay were right. I ran across a National Institute of Justice report that
quoted Lester Shubin, then a program manager with the NIJ. He and another researcher,
Nicholas Montanarelli, would go on to collaborate on a number of projects, but at that time,
Nick was a project director for the U.S. Army's Land Warfare Laboratory in Maryland. He
was a military researcher who had started thinking early on about the potential of working
dogs. He and Shubin were early proponents of bomb-detection dogs in the mid-1960s, when
skepticism ran high about any dog's abilities. The two men didn't consider just German shep-
herds or Labradors—they worked with poodles and other breeds. Unlike me, Montanarelli
and Shubin had open minds, uncontaminated by the love of shepherd.
“We learned that basically any dog could find explosives or drugs, even very small dogs
like Chihuahuas whose size could be an advantage,” Shubin wrote in the NIJ report. “Who is
going to look twice at someone in a fur coat carrying a dog? But that dog could smell a bomb
as well as the German shepherd.”
• • •
And when the bloodhound came to the chief market-town, he passed through the streets without
taking any notice of any of the people there, and left not till he had gone to the house where the man
