BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How can a dog sniff through concrete?
26 February 2008 rbbm.
''When police suspected human remains were buried on the site of a former children's home in Jersey, the springer spaniel was part of the specialist team brought in to investigate.
Jersey Police said
the seven-year-old dog located parts of a child's body even though they were buried under several inches of concrete. So how did he do it?''
''Eddie is an enhanced victim recovery dog and is specially trained to detect the scent of human remains. He is able to smell through solid materials, like concrete, because of scientific training techniques.
It's this training that sets him apart from standard police sniffer dogs, which are able to detect human remains in shallow graves. The springer's nose is more sensitive and he is called in on more complicated cases.''
''The specialist training techniques - which are highly confidential - were developed by Eddie's handler Martin Grime, along with the UK's National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) and America's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
They are scientifically based and rely on how dogs smell and the chemicals involved''
"In the Jersey case, parts of a child's body were found on Saturday.
The remains are thought to date from the early 1980s. Police have yet to say whether they are male or female.''
New Technique Finds Buried Bodies Better
rbbm.
''Because the method relies on a
superthin, flexible tube to catch faint chemical signatures in air pockets near the corpse, it may be used to detect bodies buried in hard-to-reach areas, such as under concrete slabs.''
Currently, people use corpse-sniffing dogs, ground-penetrating radar, and chemical analyses of air and soil to pinpoint buried bodies. But study coauthor Thomas Bruno of the National Institute of Standards and Technology campus in Boulder, Colorado, says that
none of these methods would work in every situation.
The new method promises to be specific, sensitive and, importantly, flexible, Bruno says.
The tube could be inserted into a small hole drilled into a concrete slab or rubble to sniff out bodies buried underneath. “For a body buried under a concrete slab, there is nothing else that would work,” Bruno says. “Ground-penetrating radar has problems, and you don’t have access to the soil to do analyses.”