The Importance of Being Focused
Among recent news posts about how humans are recognizing and learning to exploit the sensory abilities of dogs, comes one about a scent dog trained to identify explosives at a US airport who alerted instead to food items. I had to laugh, and just for fun, I included such an incident in my current Work In Progress, where a dog scenting for a kidnapper alerts to the kidnapper’s supply of food instead. Finding food is usually its own reward, so we shouldn’t be surprised when the occasional dog goes off target and spots a half-eaten Slim Jim, right? Wrong, as it turns out.
Imagine my surprise when, the following week in our “nose-work” class, the dogs were challenged to find a target scent among boxes and bags, one of which also contained a piece of several days’ old and quite pungent cheese. Even I could smell that, whereas I can never smell the other targets the dogs are finding. All of the dogs showed some interest in the box containing the cheese, but none of them alerted and none were rewarded. In this way, dogs are trained to ignore otherwise interesting smells when they are working, and focus on the scent they are bing trained to find.
And their powers are nothing short of phenomenal. I encountered a sweet fox hound while heading for Customs last year at LAX. Passing us going the other direction, the dog made a quick 180 and smiled up at my friend. The human Customs official took friend by the arm, “You’ll have to come with me, ma-am.” Yikes! It turned out my friend was still carrying an apple she’d been given hours before in Budapest. From fifteen feet away, the dog smelled the apple in her bag and alerted the handler. Can you even imagine the skill and training involved in achieving that level of competence?
Two lessons here: I know you’re bleary-eyed and exhausted in that last half hour of a transatlantic flight when they hand out those Customs forms, and your reading glasses are buried at the bottom of that bag stuffed under the seat in front of you, but don’t just check “no” on all those little boxes without reading them. And the second lesson is, don’t ever try to fool those airport sniffer dogs!
Keep me inspired! Send me a photo of yourself reading one of my books, exotic location optional, and I’ll post it here or on my Facebook page and my office wall, where it will inspire me to keeping working on the next story. If you must post a bathtub shot, please try to be discreet. Thank you for your support!
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