Smart Dog!

It’s hard to conceive of a more brilliant tool than a canine’s nose for sniffing out danger in public places.

- Joshua Levine 

WHEN I FIRST MEET A young Labrador named Merry, she is clearing her nostrils with nine or ten sharp snorts before she snuffles along a row of luggage in a large hangar outside Hartford, Connecticut. This is Bomb Dog U, where MSA Security trains what are known in the security trade as explosive detection canines, or EDCs. Most people call them bomb dogs. 

The luggage pieces joined shrink wrapped pallets, car-shaped cutouts, and concrete blocks on the campus of MSA’s “Bomb Dog U.” Dogs don’t need to be taught how to smell, of course, but they do need to be taught where to smell—along the seams of a suitcase, say, or underneath a pallet, where the vapors that are heavier than air settle.

In the shrouded world of bombdog education, MSA is an elite academy. Started in 1987 with a handful of dogs, it currently fields 160 teams. Its teams deploy mostly to the country’s big cities, and each dog works with one specific handler, usually for eight or nine years. MSA also furnishes dogs for what it describes only as “a government agency referred to by three initials for use in Middle East conflict zones.”

Strictly speaking, the dog doesn’t smell the bomb. It deconstructs an odor into its components, picking out the culprit chemicals it has been trained to detect. Zane Roberts, MSA’s former lead canine trainer and current deputy program manager, uses a cooking analogy: “When you walk into a kitchen where someone is making spaghetti sauce, your nose says, Aha, spaghetti sauce. A dog’s nose doesn’t say that. Instinctively, it says tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, onion, oregano.” It’s the handler who says spaghetti sauce or, in this case, bomb.