“Having conducted this review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during pandemics, potentially as part of rapid health screenings in public spaces.”

~ Professor Tommy Dickey, University of California, Santa Barbara 

I’ve had dogs pretty much my whole life. When I was at home, my dad raised bird dogs for hunting and my mom had a toy poodle. The hunting dogs were trained by my dad to find quail, but could retrieve ducks or dove in a pinch. One of his dogs was extremely good at finding armadillos, which were plentiful where we hunted in Texas, but not something we shot. (I always wondered about ‘Armadillo on the half shell’…) My dogs have included a lab, setter, beagle, cocker spaniel, hound and several unidentifiable mixed breeds.

Our dog Rosie is a sweetie, but is very adept at hunting down and finding dropped Fritos (or other tidbits). A mixed breed, I believe she comes from a long line of Cheeto dogs. She is sometimes fearful of strangers, but once she gets to know you she will gleefully stick her nose in your crotch to check you out — maybe to see if there are any lost Fritos there?

Dogs have an incredible sense of smell, and have been used for years for tracking, drug or weapons surveillance, and as guards, as well as fetching and pointing. Recently, Melissa Breyer reported that dogs can help in diagnosing some kinds of illnesses, including certain cancers, Parkinson’s, and diabetes.

“A review of recent research concluded that scent dogs may represent a cheaper, faster, and more effective way to detect COVID-19 and could be a key tool in future pandemics. This could be a game-changer for sustainability as well, eliminating the enormous amount of waste that comes with billions of testing kits …The review … found that scent dogs are as effective, or even more effective, than conventional COVID-19 tests such as PCR tests … But additionally, and importantly, scent tests by dogs don’t require expensive lab equipment or create mountains of plastic waste, unlike conventional diagnostic approaches.”

“A major benefit of using the dogs is their speed. In one study, researchers were able to do a lineup with 40 samples, including sample collection, lineup loading, and unloading, within just 3 minutes.”

The study authors noted, “Again, if scent dogs directly sniff individuals, results are learned in seconds, or a few minutes if samples are taken and sniffed soon after by the dogs … The criticality of the speed of the return of test results cannot be overemphasized.”

It seems that the dogged research into dog diagnoses (diag-noses?) is nothing to sniff at. Another reason to acknowledge that dogs are indeed Man’s Best Friend.

Maybe I need to drop another Frito …

Additional information:

Melissa Breyer, Dogs Could Revolutionize the Sustainability of Future Pandemic Testing, July 17, 2023, TreeHugger