Many dog handlers are ruled to be Expert Witnessess when giving court testimony (and expert according to my dictionary is someone with a high degree of skill or knowledge of a specific subject.) And while it may surprise you, dog handlers dont operate on faith. We cant. What we operate on is the training, education, and experience. Training Records is what allows us to draw determinations on the reliability of a particular dog and team. We also tend to run more than one dog over a given area to either confirm or not other alerts. Documentation of what the dog is taught, how often it is done, substances used and of what variety and how much, age of the substances and/or how long it was placed in a location prior to being worked, etc. Many include weather and terrain features such as altitude, wind, humidity, time of day, temperature, barometer reading, what type of clouds cover is present, ground cover, distracters such as food or dead animals, etc. And we conduct on our own research into Scent Theory and Movement, bodily fluids, gases, particles, bacteria. Sad to say my household budget cannot support the full-size research lab I would like so I have to wait until some scientist decides they want to validate in the lab something we are doing in the field. By the way, the definition of scientist is a person of science. Science is defined as the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena. So in many ways, I am also a scientist because I am a person who is engaged in the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena. If anyone is up for a bit of light reading, you can get further understanding through some of the following links. If necessary you can cut and paste into your brower.
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/Scent/Settles_Sniffers.pdf - Sniffers: Fluid-Dynamic Sampling
for Olfactory Trace Detection in Nature and Homeland SecurityThe 2004 Freeman Scholar Lecture
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/Scent/Settles 1997 Full-ScaleVentilation.pdf - Visualizing Full-Scale Ventilation Airflows
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/Learning/Bentosela 2008.pdf - Effect of reinforcement, reinforcer omission and extinction on a communicative response in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/Scent/Craven_2009.pdf - The fluid dynamics of canine olfaction:
unique nasal airflow patterns as an explanation of macrosmia
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/HRD/Curran_2011.pdf - Evaluation of selected sorbent materials for the collection of volatile organic compounds related to human scent using non-contact sampling mode
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/HRD/Hoffman_2009.pdf - Characterization of the volatile organic compounds present in the headspace of decomposing human remains
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/HRD/Vass.pdf : Decompositional Odor Analysis Database Phase I
http://www.pawsoflife.org/Library/Scent/lorenzo.pdf : Laboratory and field experiments used to identify
Canis lupus var. familiaris active odor signature chemicals from drugs, explosives, and humans
I used to have to hunt for these articles there is a wonderful website at
www.pawsoflife.org. Who has gone through the trouble for me. Go to the right side and click on the library link. Its broken down into subject matter or general topics.
Cops love it (as well as the prosecuting attorneys) when they can actually find what they want to find. And I dont think anyone here is debating that but we dont call dogs a scientific tool. What they are is an investigative tool. They are informants. They are giving you a potential lead or avenue for further investigation. Their testimony (if you characterize it as such) is considered circumstantial and should undergo further verification. Mr. Grimes said that multiple times in his report. However, here is where I think the conflict starts. When we have a dog alert and nothing is able to be located. Does this invalidate the alert? No.
Let me pull the following example. A person go up to a house, opens the door, steps inside a moment, stands there looking around before leaving, shutting the door. You get home from a day at work. You get to the front door, open it, and a blast of unwashed body odor hits you in the face. You know that odor shouldnt be there. You have just moved into this house because in your last house you had several incidents of break-ins by some unwashed goons of the Skunk Squad before the cops arrested them. So you know what that odor means. The Skunk Squad is back! You call the cops, telling them you think someone broke into your flat. The responding officers dont smell anything as you walk around saying dont you smell that? but decide to humor you by calling in Forensics. Forensics, of course, dont find any fingerprints or evidence of forced entry. Does this mean that someone wasnt in your flat? No, of course not. It just means forensics was unable to recover physical evidence that someone opened the door and entered your flat. It doesnt mean that the door wasnt opened. It doesnt mean that someone didnt come in. It doesnt mean that you didnt smell what you smelt. So now we have you (playing the part of the dog) saying the door was opened and someone with reeking BO was there (the dog alert) but forensics saying you are a liar because there is no evidence of such. Who is believed? So what any good detective do when faced with conflicting data does, he looks for third party verification. He goes and knocks on a few doors until he finds someone who says they saw someone hanging around the front of your house. But that doesnt mean anyone entered your house. Still knocking at doors he finds someone who says they saw a person standing at your door. But this doesnt mean that someone entered your flat (which means you are still wrong), so he knocks further until, finally, he finds someone who saw a person exiting out of the door of your flat. With this the cop comes back to you with a guess-there-was-someone-in-your-flat statement and finally agrees with you that, yes, you were right. Gee, dont you feel happy now? The cops were finally agreed with you that someone was in your flat as you stand there saying Of-course-I-told-you-that.
Welcome to the world of canine scent detection.
None us blindly follow our dogs. Most of us have
years of training documentation on each and every dog we work. In other words if you did a task in the past and were right 9 times out of 10 in the past, the chances are 90% that you are right this time. Why would I not give you the benefit that you are not right? This isn't blind faith, this is earned respect. And we are our biggest doubters of our own dogs. We are constantly training, testing, and documenting what we do. We have to. Not only for our own peace of mind but to be able to deal with situations like this.