One inspired by The Simpsons so I know we’ll have our finest minds on this one in a jiffy - a scene we’ve seen loads of time in cartoons; someone’s chased by dogs but fortunately has a string of sausages which they throw to distract them and make good their escape.
So if I was being chased by trained guard dogs, be they for security or police dogs but had a string of sausages about my person, would they actually be distracted by them? Would they be best raw or cooked?
As I recall, Mythbusters did a number of dog-related myths, including this one. Here’s a link to some of the things they tried: http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2007/03/episode_74_dog_myths.html
Short version: Some of them might work for a little while, but not for long.
ETA: This was specifically testing getting past a guard dog to get at the thing guarded, which might be a bit different from a dog that’s already chasing you. If someone actually commanded their dog to specifically chase and attack you, it might be more likely to ignore distractions than if it was simply wandering around guarding something.
I’d think a string of baby bunnies or kittens, especially poison-coated kittens, would work better. Or maybe a string of skunks.
Dogs that are trained are very hard to dissuade. Hard to outrun, too. I grew up on a farm, and we had about a dozen nameless shepherds that patrolled the 400 or so acres of crops, woods and swamp. They were not trained, but they were suitably vicious. I wouldn’t count on a handful of Hebrew Nationals to delay their wrath long enough to climb a fence or tree.
i think dogs, like most predators, have a “chase” instinct that would override the “mmm … hotdogs!” response.
Obviously, the only thing that would *really *work would be a string of squirrels.
Pepper spray would work better than sausages.
Better to try using cats wrapped in bacon.
Mythbusters also did a segment on fooling tracking dogs, but I don’t have a link to it. As I recall nothing worked.
Pfft. They started teaching “come through distractions” in the beginner-level dog training class, starting with a few toys and progressing to a minefield of yummy treats. If my ridiculous pooch can learn to ignore free food, you’d better believe a trained attack dog would be conditioned to ignore it.
What if, in an even more extreme example, they had trained the dog to sic specific parts of the human anatomy?
I have seen trained attack dogs in action and can tell you they will most definitely ignore whatever you throw at them, unless it is something that disables or blinds them, and if it ONLY blinded them, I would argue they would STILL come after you and get you through a combination of hearing a smell.
The dogs become focused on the chase and don’t concentrate on whatever you are throwing. I can’t speak to the average bored guard dog that is presented with a bacon wrapped poison whatever, but I have to believe they would ignore it.
Hell, the training would be easy enough. Throw bacon all over the ground and put a shock collar on the dog, teaching them that anything not given to them specifically by their handler will cause them pain. I bet you could train that out of even the hungriest and most stubborn of dogs in a few hours.
And soaked overnight in aniseed…
The answer is completely no. You could dissuade a half-hearted, basically friendly, rather greedy chaser. You could not even slow down a trained protection dog. When I was briefly helping train search and rescue dogs, I watched a Labrador, whose reward for finding a ‘victim’ was hotdogs, tiptoe around a minefield of random hotdogs to get to the victim and “her” hotdog. And “finding a victim” is a fairly artificial behavior as opposed to a flat out pursuit (simple prey drive – you are the running squirrel).
Some protection dogs (police K-9s) are trained to go for the gun arm first. But that doesn’t make them opposed to biting you somewhere else.
Throwing poisoned bait over the fence to knock down a loose, patrolling guard dog will work fine unless the dog was professionally trained – not eating anything which isn’t fed in their bowl (often, only after a specific ‘okay’ word) is standard training for such dogs.
As long as it’s from the cartoons: it’ll work every time IF you stick a lit firecracker or piece of dynamite in the sausage before you drop it.