Dogs’ sniffing skills may soon get a boost, thanks to a groundbreaking discovery by animal behavior experts in the United Kingdom.
Since detection dogs use their exceptional sense of smell to sniff out a wide variety of substances — including explosives, drugs, money, blood, or even certain diseases or medical conditions — the team wondered if a new training method could improve dogs’ success rates for such important work.
As the University of Lincoln explained, detection dogs are typically trained using a single-odor method, meaning the dogs are taught to detect one odor at a time, with new smells learned successively. Researchers from the university noted that while this method helps dogs become familiar with specific odors, it’s probably not ideal if multiple smells are present in the environment.
That’s why animal behavior experts recommended a different approach to training sniffer dogs, which entails an “intermixed” method where the dogs are exposed to multiple smells during training sessions, allowing them to get acquainted with various scents simultaneously.
“This novel training approach made dogs better able to alert to slightly different versions of their target odor, something that is really important in working dogs who will come across lots of variation to the targets whilst working,” Anna Wilkinson, professor of animal cognition at the University of Lincoln, said in the research summary.
In the study published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, the team found that dogs in the intermixed group showed higher rates of olfactory generalization — where a detection dog demonstrates the same trained behavioral response to variations of a learned odor. For example, a dog trained to detect a specific disease marker might alert to other disease markers that share similar odor profiles.
That means the detection dogs from the intermixed group would perform better in a real-world situation than those trained using traditional methods. And that difference could be life-saving, depending on what the dogs are trying to find.
Organizations have started employing detection dogs to help save the environment from destructive invasive species such as spotted lanternflies, harmful mussel species, and even mice and rats that have upset Hawaiʻi’s delicate ecosystems.
Detection dogs have a crucial role to play in safeguarding people, animals, and the planet, and as the warming climate brings new challenges, it’s important that they have the proper training to tackle them.
“Canines are going to start to play a huge role in the conservation field just because of their amazing detection skills, especially when resources are limited, staff is limited and you have to search potentially thousands of acres or miles of shoreline,” Cory Gritzmacher, the director of operations at Wisconsin’s Mequon Nature Preserve, once told Wisconsin Life.
TCD Picks » Upway Spotlight
💡Upway makes it easy to find discounts of up to 60% on premium e-bike brands
Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don’t miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
