What are your opinions on the use of sniffer dogs in research?
Answers
A sniffer dog is a dog that is trained to use its senses to detect substances such as explosives, illegal drugs, wildlife scat, currency, blood, and contraband electronics such as illicit mobile phones. The sense most used by detection dogs is smell. Hunting dogs that search for game, and search dogs that work to find missing humans are generally not considered detection dogs. There is some overlap, as in the case of cadaver dogs, trained to search for human remains. A police dog is essentially a detection dog that is used as a resource for police in specific scenarios such as conducting drug raids, finding missing criminals, and locating stashed currency.
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What is a sniffer dog?
A detection dog or sniffer dog is a dog that is trained to use its senses to detect substances such as explosives, illegal drugs, wildlife scat, currency, blood, and contraband electronics such as illicit mobile phones. The sense most used by detection dogs is smell. Hunting dogs that search for game, and search dogs that work to find missing humans are generally not considered detection dogs. There is some overlap, as in the case of cadaver dogs, trained to search for human remains. A police dog is essentially a detection dog that is used as a resource for police in specific scenarios such as conducting drug raids, finding missing criminals, and locating stashed currency.
Sniffer dogs in research
Dogs have an acute sense of smell. They have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to six million in humans, making their smell receptors up 10,000 to 100,000 more powerful than humans. The part of a dog's brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than humans. Trained sniffer dogs can detect diseases such as malaria, cancer, and even viral infections.
Now, a team of German researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover, the German Armed Forces, and the Hannover Medical School revealed that dogs can discriminate between human saliva samples infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and non-infected samples with a 94 percent overall success rate. Their research is BMC infectious diseases.
Accurate and reliable
To arrive at their findings, the team trained eight detection dogs to sniff out SARS-CoV-2-infected samples for one week. The training aims to hone the smelling power of the dogs to detect saliva or tracheobronchial secretions of infected patients in a randomized, double-blinded, and controlled study.
The trained dogs sniffed the saliva of more than 1,000 people that were either healthy or infected with the virus. The samples of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients were distributed at random.
During the study, the dogs achieved an overall average detection rate of 94 percent with 157 correct indications of positive, 792 correct rejections of negative, 33 incorrect indications of negative or incorrect rejections of 30 positive sample presentations.
"These preliminary findings indicate that trained detection dogs can identify respiratory secretion samples from hospitalized and clinically diseased SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals by discriminating between samples from SARS-CoV-2 infected patients and negative controls. This data may form the basis for the reliable screening method of SARS-CoV-2 infected people," the researchers concluded in the study.
During the study, the dogs achieved an overall average detection rate of 94 percent with 157 correct indications of positive, 792 correct rejections of negative, 33 incorrect indications of negative or incorrect rejections of 30 positive sample presentations.
Therefore it might be a good thing to have sniffer dogs in research.