I refer to my ESD cousins — short for electronic detection dogs — mostly dogs that failed as guide dogs because they were a little hyperactive but are now properly appreciated for their tech-sniffing qualities.
Among these are the ability to sniff out things such as mobile phones, hard drives, USB sticks, flash drives and SD cards, all of which apparently figure increasingly in the lives of drug smugglers, criminal gangs and paedophiles.
Now, there’s nothing miraculous about this: I am evidence that a dog will quickly learn to do whatever it takes to get a feed. So I am constantly learning — and uncovering new ways I can usefully trade expertise for food, with The Boss.
The ESD trend started in Connecticut a few years ago with a dog named Bear. It was the Connecticut state police who trained the first arson-sniffing dog a decade ago and so they had form in the canine-training department. They wondered if dogs might also be capable of sniffing out hard drives and other devices.
They persuaded a chemical scientist to take a look at it and he spent six months scratching his head and testing components to see what might be a common denominator. He ended up focusing on circuit boards, which are in most devices. He isolated a compound widely used on circuit boards to reduce the impact of heat — and this compound is what the dogs are gradually trained on, in increasingly smaller quantities.
They end up selecting those dogs who are so motivated by the food reward that they will persevere until they come across the tiniest whiff of the circuit board compound — I would be a natural for this, of course, as was Bear.
Bear claimed plaudits when he found a hidden flash drive in the home office of Jared Fogle, a promoter and spokesman for Subway. It turned out Fogle was involved in child pornography distribution and was jailed for 15 years. So Bear got his evening meal.
Which is the ancient trade-off we dogs have had with you for ever: we’ll be useful to you, provided you feed us. There are now more than a dozen ESD dogs working in Australia for the Australian Federal Police.
The AFP says that, while their dogs are deployed across a range of investigations, including counter-terrorism, drug crime and state and territory police operations, about 40 per cent are related to child protection. That’s a sad fact for a dog to contemplate. Woof!
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