Cocker Spaniel Police Dogs
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The war on terrorism has thrown up an unusual shortage of police
personnel - sniffer dogs. The Metropolitan Police force is appealing to dog owners thinking
about giving up their pets to hand them over for training. The best dogs are the more robust, attention seeking and naughty
dogs who people may feel are too much bother the Metropolitan
Police said in particular, they are looking to recruit Cocker and Springer
Spaniels and Labradors aged between one and two years. The dogs will be trained in tracking drugs, counterfeit money and
explosives at the Met's specialist training centre in
Kent. |
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A police sniffer dog checks under buses used
for delegates to China's National People's Congress, in Beijing's
Tiananmen Square during the 4th plenary session of the congress |
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Policewomen walk with
sniffer dogs in Tiananmen Square on the fourth day of the National
People's Congress, China's parliament, in Beijing The dogs are
trained to detect explosives.
-Training Fetch- |
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A British study shows dogs can detect cancer. The urine of a
man who was thought to be cancer free was used as a control.
When he was tested further, he was found to have a kidney tumour,
and his life was saved.
Two of the spaniels were right five out of nine times. Church, a dog fancier, said he was
inspired by a 1989 anecdotal report in The Lancet, another British
medical journal, about a border collie-Doberman mix that kept nosing
a mole on its owner's leg and even tried to nip it off. When
removed, the mole turned out to be malignant.
Walker's gas chromatography studies have shown that some tumours
exude minute amounts of formaldehyde, alkanes and benzene
derivatives not found in healthy tissue. Walker's institute has done
experiments showing that dogs can detect chemicals at one
ten-thousandth to one hundred-thousandth the concentrations that
humans can, while ignoring other odours.
Historically, doctors have used smell to make some diagnoses.
Hippocrates described the fruity odour of diabetes in the breath and
the musty odour of liver disease. In China, The Yellow Emperor's
Classic of Internal Medicine counseled diagnosing lung infections by
having patients spit into a fire; bacteria-laden sputum smells
putrid.
Although the British study claims to be the most rigorously
validated and is the first to be published in a major medical
journal, other individual dogs have been trained to recognize
cancers.
The leader of the pack was George, originally a police bomb-sniffer,
he was retrained in 1993 to find test tubes with cancer cells, then
encouraged to sniff humans lying on a low table and to place his paw
on tumours. |
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-Home-
-Training- |
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