And a new study published in the chemistry journal Forensic Chemistry has revealed that they can smell gasoline smells in very small amounts - only a billionth of a teaspoon. The findings highlight the effectiveness of dog use in investigating fires.
In a fire investigation, a dog can be used to search for debris containing flammable liquids - thereby supporting the suspicion that the fire was intentional - the team leader, Robin Abel - a chemical engineer - explains.
Of course, a dog cannot testify in court, so the debris the dog identifies will need to be taken back to the lab for analysis. This estimate provides targets for forensic laboratories when dealing with evidence that dogs find in locations likely to be intentionally set on fire.
The study observed a dog and its instructor tried to detect a wide range of flammable liquids, while another sniffing dog checked only for gasoline.
The results showed that the dog was tasked with detecting a variety of flammable liquids that performed well in detecting all the catalysts. However, a dog trained only to detect gasoline cannot detect other substances at extremely low concentrations, but it can detect traces of gasoline with only one billionth of a teaspoon.
Dogs in this study can detect a billionth of a teaspoon - or 5pL (picolit - 1pL = 1x10 -9 ml) of gasoline, associate Professor James Harynuk - supervisor of the study - said. Their are extremely sensitive. "
The small research is acknowledged also facilitated the development of a new protocol, which can be used to create the super-clean substrates necessary to test the skills of catalyst detection dogs in future, to see if they can successfully detect different amounts of catalysts.
Mr. Harynuk shared, in this field, it is known that dogs are much more sensitive than conventional laboratory tests. There have been many cases where dogs marked debris after which laboratory tests were negative.
In order for us to improve the laboratory techniques to match the performance of these dogs, we first need to evaluate the dogs first. This work gives us a challenging goal to meet the experimental methods.
