Trying again about the cadaver dogs. Where I work, there are three main types of dogs. Sniffer dogs (that follow a trail after being primed with a scent - those are the kinds of dogs we saw used in the Barbara Thompson missing persons case).
Then, there are drug sniffing dogs, as seen at airports and checkpoints.
And then, there are cadaver dogs (HRDD's or human remains discovery dogs), who are trained on the odors of human decomp. Here are the citations:
The exploration of cadaver dogs as an accuracy and reliability tool in the field of forensic science. Due to limited research on cadaver dogs, this paper will illustrate the main factors that are crucial to making reliable and accurate scent detection dogs. It also highlights the olfactory...
scholarworks.sjsu.edu
At this point in my career, I teach a low level introductory forensic lab in which we teach students about the chemical structure that separates human decomp from other decomp (at a very basic level) and they are trained to do entry level forensic jobs in the field. Training cadaver dogs properly requires...a human body. So, there are a series of legal and ethical rules that everyone must follow, which is part of what I teach. Here's the biochemistry behind it:
In general, in my region, the bodies are "donated to science" and then used as cadavers in many applications within much more sophisticated labs than mine (we have no ability to actually provide cadavers except in the one class the requires them absolutely, which is anatomy lab). Instead, we do more on the mechanics of running lab tests on small samples that we buy from a medical lab resource. We do not open the samples, we run them through spectrometers and watch the process of ascertaining human byproducts and DNA from cadavers so that students can go on to do more sophisticated jobs with upper division training. One of my colleagues is involved in blind sampling and assessment at one of the FBI's body farms, resulting in work like this:
