Of all times to learn this, global warming’s effects will include making us humans even more bad-tempered and violent – and impair the ability of sniffer dogs trained to detect explosives.
That is not a good combination, and recent events do not suggest that humanity is mellowing. As the temperature rises, we are growing more irritated. And now we learn that we may find it easier to blow each other up, in the sense that detective dogs currently help the police detect explosives.
But when we can’t take the frustration of not being able to blast the neighbors to kingdom come anymore, we will be able to dash to our stash that the heat-addled pooch (presumably) missed. The team didn’t check how heat and humidity impair canine ability to detect intoxicants.
All this applied to the eight dogs in the new study. It is not a big study, but as temperatures climb and tempers fray, it is an intriguing one.
The dogs in question were four German shorthaired pointers and four Labrador retrievers. Their names were Zulu, Luna, Moni, Dasty, Jack, Bello, Dalton and Rocket. All were neutered and two were female. They were taken for walkies at least twice a day and subjected to obedience training. before being tested for functionality under conditions of climate change.
Dogs have been working in bomb and accelerant detection for decades, with superb results. But they were trained in what we shall call “standard” climatic conditions. The question is whether they do equally well in 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) and 40 degrees Celsius (and counting).
We already know that, just like us, dogs can suffer from hyperthermia, heat stroke and so on. A hot dog pants to cool itself, and panting has been demonstrated to impair sniffing efficiency.
Also, heavy rain – another bane in the warming world – has been shown to impair dogs’ ability to find land mines. That is not because their noses get wetter, but is thought to be because of the increase in humidity. Or maybe the rain dilutes that lovely scent.
So the team checked how “detection canines” function under different environmental conditions, and reported in PLOS ONE on Wednesday that dogs trained to detect explosives may perform worse in extreme temperature and humidity.
The dogs will take longer to identify explosives, if they find them at all, according to Lauren Fernandez of the Canine Olfaction Research and Education Lab at Texas Tech University, and colleagues.
The dogs were exposed to four types of explosives under three temperature conditions: high, low and standard, each with high and low humidity conditions.
The four explosives were “double-base smokeless powder,” C-4, ammonium nitrate and flake Trinitrotoluene (aka TNT).
Under standard conditions, the dogs could detect all the above.
They could only detect smokeless powder under standard conditions, and detected it least in humidity and heat.
Ammonium nitrate, the poor man’s explosive, was masked by high temperature under any humidity conditions.
As for TNT, well, what can we say – the dogs don’t detect that well under any conditions. Sorry. The team couldn’t tell whether their skill at that worsened under the onerous conditions.
Long story short: the hotter the dog feels, the worse it performs at bomb sniffing, the team managed to demonstrate. Also, the hotter they were, the longer it took to detect. Airport security, now you know.
Although low temperature and low humidity were the best of the tested conditions for the sniffer dogs, in general extreme cold is also not their friend.
The destabilization of the climate is causing temperature spikes in both directions, and cold stress and hypothermia are not conducive to Rover being a good boy. Some tests have demonstrated cold resilience in the dogs, but that hasn’t been tested throughout a working day. Nor has their sensitivity to the smell of explosives in the frost, so that remains to be seen.
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