No abstract

No abstract

The canine detection community is a diverse one, ranging from scientific fields such as behavior, genetics, veterinary medicine, chemistry, and biology to applications in law enforcement, military, medicine, and agricultural/environmental detection. This diversity has allowed for a flourishing and innovative community, yet it has also led to little acceptance and agreement on terminology. This is especially true when discussing the variety of training aids used in olfactory-based exercises. In general, authentic materials and pseudo-scents are the most commonly discussed, with the former accepted widely for training and certification, and the latter more often disregarded. However, as advances are made in the creation of training materials, alternative training aids are being introduced that do not fit into either of these categories. The misconceptions surrounding how these alternative training aids are manufactured has led to confusion on their classification, and therefore their reliance as an effective tool. This manuscript will review the existing language surrounding canine training aids, address relevant research revealing effectiveness, and clarify the different types based on their manufacture, chemical nature, and fundamental function.

No abstract

Effective explosives detection requires dogs to generalize their response to untrained variations of targets that are related to those with which they were trained. Previous research suggests that dogs tend to be highly specific to their trained odors, and are sensitive to alterations in odor profiles. Triacetone triperoxide (TATP) is an increasingly popular homemade explosive due to the widespread accessibility of starting materials. The large variety of reagent sources and production approaches yields high variability in deployed formulations. Whether dogs trained with pure forms of TATP generalize to other variations is unknown, representing a potentially significant security gap. In the current study, we tested dogs (n = 11) previously trained to detect pure TATP with four variants: diacetone diperoxide (DADP), a homologue often created as a TATP byproduct, and three different clandestine TATP formulations designed to emulate those used by terrorists or insurgents. On average, dogs detected each untrained variant at rates equivalent to the trained TATP (ps > 0.07), with individual variability in first-trial alerts for some of the variants. Chemical analyses paralleled the canine results, showing distinct similarities and differences. For the TATP samples, the laboratory-grade was the purest sample tested and did not contain DADP or the TATP homologue that the three clandestine versions showed in their respective headspace profiles. The headspace results showed that each sample could be clearly identified as TATP, yet they showed recognizable differences due to their individual syntheses. These findings suggest that training on pure TATP may be effective for generalization to untrained variants. Further research is necessary to identify factors that influence individual variation in generalization between dogs, as well as other explosives.