Drug Detector Dogs - How accurate are they?

[Timtammi]

I'm pretty sure the drug detector dogs are completely separate from the food detector dogs ie they are trained differently and they use different breed types I believe. I think they mainly use beagles for the food detection (as beagles are the dog breed most motivated by food, believe me I know, I have owned 2 of them!). The drug detector dogs tend to be other breeds (labs or lab crosses in my experience), perhaps they are more intelligent? I don't know..

Cheers

 

[harvyk]

I used to work at Edmund Barton Building down in the Basement (EBB was the AQIS head office until recently). Now a little known fact of EBB is that the basement was where Customs did their dog training (I don't know where they do the training now as EBB is undergoing renovations). From time to time we'd see a store room with a Customs guard standing outside. They'd plant something in the room and then put the dogs into it for about 2 minutes. I'd guess 90% of the time the dogs found the "drugs". You could always tell, if you saw a very happy dog holding what looked to be a white pillow in it's mouth you knew it had found something. (EBB was not a place you'd hide your own personal stash)

The problem is that their sense of smell is unbelievably powerful, which is both a blessing and a curse. They can detect the smallest amount of drugs, but that smallest amount may have attached itself (eg residue) when your bag came in contact with another bag containing a larger amount.

I never got to see the AQIS dogs in training from memory there was a training facility somewhere else in Canberra which they used for training, but I never had the need to go out there.

There are two types of dogs. Passive dogs which simply sit if they detect something, and Active dogs which basically "go nuts" if they detect something. An active dog will actively paw at a bag (or parcel) which it finds something (having done work out at Sydney airport, it's kinda of cool to watch the dogs find stuff). Active dogs typically are not used in front of the public, but I do believe they use them in the back of house whilst your bags are been off loaded etc... So there is a chance that your bags have been checked by an Active dog, and that's why it didn't sit.


Hopefully that answers your questions... (BTW profiling is a big part of how they work out who to question, it's just they are not officially allowed to say it)

 

[harvyk]

I'm pretty sure the drug detector dogs are completely separate from the food detector dogs ie they are trained differently and they use different breed types I believe. I think they mainly use beagles for the food detection (as beagles are the dog breed most motivated by food, believe me I know, I have owned 2 of them!). The drug detector dogs tend to be other breeds (labs or lab crosses in my experience), perhaps they are more intelligent? I don't know..

Cheers

That is correct, see above post...

 

[Timtammi]

There are two types of dogs. Passive dogs which simply sit if they detect something, and Active dogs which basically "go nuts" if they detect something. An active dog will actively paw at a bag (or parcel) which it finds something (having done work out at Sydney airport, it's kinda of cool to watch the dogs find stuff). Active dogs typically are not used in front of the public, but I do believe they use them in the back of house whilst your bags are been off loaded etc... So there is a chance that your bags have been checked by an Active dog, and that's why it didn't sit.

Thanks for the info Harvyk, very interesting. However,the bag could not have been checked behind the scenes because it was a carry-on bag, this happened before entering the area to retrieve check-in baggage. The dog was not just interested in the bag, but the passenger in question generally, but did not sit. Just showed more than passing interest is how it was described to me. The drug swab at search turned up nothing though and the bag is quite new, only second time travelled with and both times on business trips where the only places it went was from airport to hotel to office.

Cheers

 

[mysavings789]

that's quite interesting, thank you for sharing!