I’m watching ‘Nightline’ – they’re doing a piece on ‘Traffic’ and the drug wars – and they’re talking about customs agents’ reliance on drug sniffing dogs, X-ray machines and their own instincts as primary weapons in detecting smuggled loads.
X-rayed items can be disguised with effort, and agents’ instincts can be led astray, I think - but how can you beat the dogs? Are there chemicals that can mask certain odors to dogs’ olfactory senses? Or repel dogs entirely?
What about those old prison break movies where, like, a prisoner is on the run in the woods, the hounds are chasing him, so he throws cayenne pepper / sneeze powder on the ground to shake off the dogs’ scent? Does that actually work like the movies depict? What about walking in a stream, can you really throw off dogs that way?
If I invented a cologne/perfume that had an “underscent” that mimmicked the smell of cocaine – not strong enough for the average human to detect, but enough to make drug-sniffing dogs react by giving a lot of false alarms – how many millions am I looking at, marketing it in Tijuana?
If you made cats – or if you prefer, female dogs in heat – swallow condoms filled with cocaine and smuggled them across the border, and the drug-sniffing dogs picked up the scent, how would you know what the dogs were reacting to?
I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I’m not answering without a guaranteed cut of the profits.
I would posit this, though. I have seen a lot of stuff on artificial corpse scent for training dogs. The difficult, and therefore interesting, part was figuring out which compounds elicited a reaction from the dogs. Seems simple for cocaine, as it’s a single compound rather than the complex potpourri of, say, another dog’s urine. You might not get that cocaine smell without the compound itself (then again, maybe you could try some closely related but legal compound).
Let’s say you use something intense like vanillin or capsaicin(sp?) to throw off the dog. He’ll still react to the package, which is the handler’s cue that funny business is afoot.
I’ve heard that since coffee was found to be an effective masking material (put your stuff in baggies, which are then put in containers filled with coffee grounds) that dogs are now trained to alert on coffee and other substances used to mask it.
You’d think that running through a stream would through off the scent, but its the cool, damp environment which actually holds the sent…oftem for as long as six months!
Concrete or asphalt, baking in the summer noonday sun, won’t hold onto scent for more than 10 minutes.
I thought the point of the stream was that the rapidly moving water would quickly wash away the scent. While a cool, damp environment (like, I dunno, a basement) might hold the scent, it seems like a stream would quickly wash it away.
I’ll go find a tracking dog cite later if you want me to, but basically tracking dogs (bloodhounds, etc.) work much, much more sloooowwwwlllllyyyyy than that. That whole “baying hounds chasing the escaped prisoner” isn’t really the way it works. Bloodhounds are really marvelously gentle (not to say dim-witted ), and, far from biting a chunk out of his leg, are always perfectly delighted to meet up with the person they’ve tracked down.
Now if you’re talking baying German shepherds on the end of a leash held by a Gestapo agent, or the Rottweiler/Doberman/security guard scenario, that’s a little different, because in the storyline, the scent is very hot, the escapee is right there directly ahead of the dog, so the dog has no trouble in following him. But give the scent a few hours to grow stale, and normally German shepherds/Rottweilers/Dobermans have trouble following it. Only tracking dogs, like bloodhounds, have the talent to follow an old scent, and they do it at a walking pace. (Now I’m gonna get jumped on by all the folks with I Heart German Shepherds/Rottweilers/Dobermans bumper stickers on their cars… )
And P.S. bloodhounds don’t bark (or bay) while they’re tracking, either. That’s foxhounds that do that.
Actually most big seizures are the result of intelligence and prior investigation rather than a lucky hit with a dog. If customs believe you have the stuff on you there is nowhere they won’t look to find it.
Thanks for the reply, Duck Duck Goose! So is the whole cayenne-pepper-on-the-scent-trail-to-shake-the-dogs thing, a fake, too?
and ticker: not to get too far off-topic, but is prior intelligence how they found out about that underground mile-long tunnel that went under the border that was built (and maybe never even used) to smuggle drugs?
Here’s a whole message board full of suggestions, including red pepper, black pepper, skunk scent, garlic, ammonia, and a bitch in heat (“stops all dogs”). But beware: strong-smelling things like gasoline are unfortunately apparent to the handler, too, and he’ll just take the dog around it.
I guess it must have been tried but why not just spray the drugs bag with that repellent stuff they give you to drive cats and dogs away from prized family heirlooms?
Okay. I’m doing my own research into the OP, and while I haven’t found any instances in using “bitches in heat” to smuggle condom-filled drugs, I have seen a site whereboa constrictors were used… Euw! How do they squeeze `em back out?
), and, far from biting a chunk out of his leg, are always perfectly delighted to meet up with the person they’ve tracked down.