Dogs...my favorite subject

What the Dog Knows
by Cat Warren

 A splendid mixture of science and personal experience! As she trains her cadaver dog Solo, she researches and writes about dog and their amazing scent tracking skills. And that's a big topic to tackle--while we all know that bloodhound have the highest number of scent receptor cells, does that make them the best trackers?

"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.  [...and...] Pip could get into small spaces, unlike Solo, who is huge and clumsy.

National Institute of Justice researcher Lester Shubin wrote of his research on bomb sniffing, 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 reports. "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."

But human beings, unlike dogs, aren't perfect. In a later chapter she discusses the human tendency to exaggerate, over-promise, and hate to fail which leads into deception and deceit.

When handlers lie about or exaggerate their dogs' capabilities under oath, it poisons the well for handler testimony and the credibility of the dog's nose.
[from Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association] What undermines the work are the lies he hears in training and on the witness stand. The stories can become albatrosses around the necks of conscientious trainers and handlers. "On occasion, it has become outrageous," Roger said of handlers' claims. "Four months old? Impossible. People who put trails out in January to run in May are full of it."
The danger signals are clear, Roger said. "It's the handler who wants to be a legend in his own mind."

She goes on to tell the story of Keith Pikett, a former Texas sheriff's deputy, whose "claims about his bloodhounds' scenting abilities resulted in what the Texas Innocence Project told the New York Times amounts to fifteen to twenty people in prison "based on virtually nothing but Pikett's testimony."  Of the thousands of people he helped put in prison with his deliberately faked "scent lineups,"  case after case of people have eventually been dismissed based on DNA evidence or simple common sense.
Texas Monthly Article Weird Science.