How many times has your pet saved you from a close call? I guess it depends on how long you’ve had your dog for. But the fact that a dog possesses better senses that the average Joe is a well-known truth. This is the reason that dogs are used in many industries and law-enforcement agencies. Their most tuned sense by far is their sense of smell.
Dogs can detect a lot more smells than the average person. When they are professionally trained they can be the difference between life and death in many scenarios. I remember watching a video of a police officer who was about to give a demonstration for a school. He was interviewed before and talked to the reporter about his friend and service dog.
He had been working with this dog for about 6 years and he mentioned that he had full trust in his dog. “If there are drugs or explosives somewhere in this school, he will find them. I am 100% confident.” The reporter asked the police officer if he could do a demonstration for the camera and the police officer agreed. He had brought some items for the demo at the school
The first thing he showed the reporter was a homemade explosive. The police officer went on to explain that these types of explosives are the ones most widely used by terrorists, both domestic and foreign. He took the dog out of the building and then came back and hid the explosive in a bookcase behind some books. “This is probably what a terrorist would do,” he said.
Then, the officer went to get his dog and in less than 10 seconds, the dog had found the explosive. The reporter asked the officer if the reason the dog had found the explosive was that they had worked with it very often. The officer said, “the thing is, the dog didn’t find it because of how it looked, he smelled the components used to make an explosive.”
I don’t know about him, but I was impressed. The officer did the same thing for the drugs but this time he hid them under a plant. When the dog came back inside, he found it very fast as well. The officer mentioned that service dogs are picked for having an excellent sense of smell, and then they go through rigorous training to fine-tune it and be able to distinguish more smells.
A dog’s sense of smell is so powerful, that the dog does not even have to be trained to detect danger. The dog in the following video is a good example of this. This dog is about to be euthanized but he was able to detect a very dangerous gas leak. Click on the video for the full story!
