I think was the first thing they asked. To get these dogs to sniff out electronics specifically, the K9 team sent a bunch of devices to their lab which was able to isolate one specific scent. It's difficult to find dog-handler teams willing to participate in a scientific study because, "unfortunately, the data that we collect can be used against the people we're trying to help," she said. Humans have six million olfactory receptors and dogs have up to 300 million. To Troy, Ernie, Chance, and the other muscular, well-fed, and extremely enthusiastic dogs who search for illegal cell phones inside New Jerseys thirteen state prisons, the smell of a cell phone is bliss. And their distinct odour can lead a well-trained canine to a device hidden under a mattress, stashed into a wall or tucked into a Drako, the dog who found more than a thousand cell phones in California prisons, with his handler Bryan Pyle. If a smuggler can get his or her hands on a lead box that seals tightly, allowing no odors to escape, this might be the best With ovarian cancer, there's not much great testing for early detection. So, I drove up to Hagerstown, Maryland to actually meet one of them. Prison officials say Port has been sniffing for cell phones since 2013. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Of course, the inmates saw the story and we entered the institution to do some routine interdiction with our dogs. John Henning Schumann is an internal medicine doctor and serves as president of the University of Oklahoma's Tulsa campus. They can sniff in parts per trillion. Packages. By clicking Sign up, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider How to euthanize a dog with over the counter drugs? This interview has been edited for clarity and length. But the problem with using a lead container, aside from the obvious weight issue, is the police officer guiding the K-9 around the vehicle might get suspicious. It turns out that cell phones smell. And other states are taking steps toward legalization. But some inmates have described the prevalence of cell phones inside as a product of their desperation to maintain contact with family and friends on the outside, since sanctioned phone calls are notoriously expensive. Recently, the officers of the K-9 Unit held a demonstration with their cell-phone dogs on the grounds of the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility, in central Jersey farm country. You could also work at school and want to make sure your students are safe. Accuracy and availability may vary. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Dogs can be trained to alert on pretty much any scent. However, even a dog trained on narcotics can alert on money. Most American currency will hav Razor's name is a riff on the name of the popular Motorola cell phone, the RAZR, but she isn't the only state with a cell-phone dog detective. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Halligan hides devices in cars and then sets them on fire. How many heart beats per minute for a dog? The gauze pads that were stored in these boxes had absorbed this odour and were then placed in airtight plastic bags. And the temperament of the Labradors fits that profile and that's why we use them exclusively. The dogs learn to sit when they discover a target odor, and once they have learned a set of smells, they practice finding each odor separately. That golden was a lover, not a fighter., Captain Kyle: Very few other states have cell-phone-dog programs like oursMaryland and Virginia are two of them. And their distinct odor can lead a well-trained canine to a device hidden under a mattress, stashed into a wall or tucked into a fan or radio. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. because the dogs detect this in real time. That dog was too easygoing. They can sniff in parts per trillion. A strong drive to follow airborne scents is one of the characteristics that the CBP looks for in detection dog candidates, said Landrum. According to dog trainers and handlers, it is not the scent location problem that causes some dogs to flunk out of the program, but rather aspects of the prison environment itself. She's still in training, but corrections officials put the 14-month-old Malinois through her paces Tuesday for reporters. Going after the illegal phones with dogs is by far the most efficient means.. The 'extreme cruelty' around the global trade in frog legs, What does cancer smell like? If a trainer stops rewarding a dog for alerting a handler to the presence of a particular scent, then the alert behavior can be unlearned. WebK-9 Program has successfully completed its pilot phase, training two cell-phone-sniffing dogs at the Pendleton Correctional Facility and Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. I mean, she's like family. Im a Cherub and I Look Nothing Like a Fat Little Baby. At least 16 other states, meanwhile, have some form of legalized or decriminalized marijuana, whether for medical or recreational uses. You see these dogs searching. In Florida a prisoner used a cell phone to threaten and intimidate witnesses that were to be called to his trial. Her latest, Doctor Dogs: How Our Best Friends Are Becoming Our Best Medicine, highlights a vast array of special medical tasks that dogs can perform from the laboratory to the bedside, and everywhere else a dog can tag along and sniff. Very interesting question. First of all. Cell phones do not have a specific scent. They smell like plastic + 15% of the scent of the owner,provided They can find it if the cell phones in water, oil, peanut butteranywhere., Sergeant William Crampton: Only time we ever had a dog indicate inaccurately was on a diabetic test kit one individual had., Officer Donald Mitchell: We worked with thirteen dogs to get the seven we have now. On the top tier of cells youre looking down through a floor grating four or five stories. Goodavage spoke with NPR contributor John Henning Schumann, a doctor and host of Public Radio Tulsa's #MedicalMonday about what she has learned about dogs in medicine. The Intelligence of Dogs, Why Does My Dog Act That Way? Since we started with our first three dogs, in October of 2008, weve found a hundred and thirty-three cell phones, a hundred and twenty-eight chargers, and Im not sure how many earpieces, batteries, and other items. Kerry Halligan: And they found as they were doing their investigations that they were missing pieces. Golden retrievers will work, too. They're also capable of tracking scent through the air. We'll bring in Sergeant Claudel(ph) and his cell phone detector dog Taz. Sometimes when you go and search, everyone will know youre coming and stash them, and youll go into the dayroom and youll find them everywhere toasters, seat cushions, soda machines, ceilings. Hed once found thirty stashed in a microwave, and one hidden in a jar of peanut butter. We get them from private donations. The Pomeranian Big Dog In a Little Body! Hed come in a room on a search and just lay down. Once a dog gets that down, they move on to real devices to see if they can identify the smell of TPPO when it's inside a device. The scent of other dogs, when they pee or shit theyre leaving the equivalent of I was here messages for other dogs. The problem with retraining dogs to stop indicating when they've scented marijuana is that drug loads can be mixed, said Jason Landrum, a training supervisor at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) Canine Center in El Paso, Texas. It's not the only potential pitfall of high-stakes dog sniffing. SEABROOK: So, we just saw Taz in action. If they clear their physicals, Landrum said, the dogs begin their training. It contained three cell phones, earning a scratch behind the ears and play time with a tennis ball. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Anyone who's been through an airport, crossed national borders, or gone to a public school in the United States has seen detection dogs, noses diligently sniffing for illegal drugs or banned produce and invasive insects. Cell phones have been shot over prison fences tied to arrows, using potato guns, or flown over on model airplanes. Dogs' olfactory capacity they can sniff in parts per trillion primes them to detect disease. I have trained dogs ranging from standard poodles to golden retrievers to border collies and now the passion of my life is working with aggressive dogs with behavioral issues in order to help them be more confident, calm and easygoing dogs who are well-behaved in their own homes. These scent impregnated pads could be pulled out later when the dogs are being taught their jobs, thus allowing them to be imprinted on what a cell phone smells like. Two years ago, a Belgian Malinois named Drako earned a flurry of press attention when his proud owners at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced he had found his thousandth contraband cell phone in the states prisons. How do you trick a drug sniffing dog? Hopefully at some point in time, some day in the future jamming will be another option for us. This is to train the dogs to identify the smell of TPPO even if the device has been torched. You could be a police officer looking to increase security. If you're a gamer that strives to see all aspects of the game, you are likely to spend around 34 Hours to obtain 100% completion. Border Collie. Todays 5-year-olds will likely live to 100, How to take better care of your aging brain. Searches dont always produce phones, but they do produce intelligence. Lloyd is the super calming presence. Why Are So Many Young Men Single And Sexless? And then gets more food. People ask: why not blood hounds and beagles? "The handler and dog can't know if anything's present," he said. Who better to sniff out this mystery than a dog? Does a Dog's Head Shape Predict How Smart It Is? We like to use dogs that are bred for air sensing. When youre training a green dog and a green handler, its like teaching the two to dance together. The law went into effect Oct. 1. How a zoo break-in changed the life of an owl called Flaco, Naked mole rats are fertile until they die, study finds. Why wetlands are so critical for life on Earth, Rest in compost? That way, they continue to stay motivated to find it. Altogether 1219 experimental searching tests were conducted. How do you know which substance the dog is alerting on for its handler? Captain Matthew Kyle: We dont want to publicate what the cell-phone smell is exactly. Cell phones are, essentially, just another odor. They are trained to identify illegal odours including: cocaine HCL, crack cocaine, heroin, cannabis/marijuana, Ecstasy, methamphetamines, amphetamines, ketamine, MDMA and other commonly abused drugs. Usually they are a specially-trained subset of canine units employed to find drugs. Eco-friendly burial alternatives, explained. "Detection is a physiological phenomenon," Cablk said. They can detect a tablespoon of a Narrator: The dogs learn to associate the smell of the chemical with being fed and that's what motivates them to search for it. Narrator: So how exactly do these dogs manage to smell something that, to us, doesn't have much of a scent? They love to follow it, love finding its source even more. If you want a dog that finds tomatoes, you want your dog to be trained on fresh, vine-ripe tomatoes, not tomato sauce. Cell phones are among the biggest challenges prison officials face today, and cell phone detection K-9s are the latest tool for sniffing out the problem. Body cavities, of course, when a girlfriend visits. And right there, boom, everything changed. It's amazing. "[But] there is not much data to support one training method over another, and that's kind of the rub.". Or they dont like the heat up there in the summer., Officer Joseph Nicholas: All our dogs right now are German shepherds or Labs. Thus it was suggested that dogs might be able to detect the scent of cell phones and their various components since it is known that some of the electronic parts, such as the lithium batteries, do leak low levels of chemicals into the air, and there are distinctive chemical components in circuit boards, screens, and casings which might also do so. In pitting faith against reason, M. Night Shyamalans latest film is a call to capitulation. Some dogs dont like heights. He did a great job. Once dogs with a strong scent drive are found, the CBP screens them for potential medical issues. He did go to school, but that was tough, too. Hi, Im Amanda. Just last week, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service graduated their first class of dogsfour retrieverstrained to sniff out illegal wildlife. SEABROOK: And let me just say we're in a room of a house and you've spread around the room a DVD player, a couple of televisions, an old electronic typewriter, a bunch of electronic devices, and I gather there's a cell phone hidden in one of them. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. However inside a prison, cell phones defeat some of the purpose of incarceration. All rights reserved. That takes a while. Then when they find it, we give them the towel as a reward. In the past year, officials found approximately 340 cell phones in prisons in Florida, which has the third-largest state prison system in the nation. He had a wife and everything. When focusing on the main objectives, Sleeping Dogs is about 15 Hours in length. No matter what, you can always turn to The Marshall Project as a source of trustworthy journalism about the criminal justice system. We trained all our dogs ourselves, saving the taxpayers money. His life changed dramatically for the better. All rights reserved. One 2006 study by DRI's Cablk, published in the journal Ecological Applications, looked at dogs trained to detect desert tortoiseslisted as a federally threatened species that government agencies, including the Defense Department, wanted to find and protectand found that their reliability varied between 27 and 73 percent. Dogs change lives not just of these children, but of the whole family. Donations from readers like you are essential to sustaining this work. You find cell phones and bits and pieces, but they are constantly on the move. The dog cant work in the prison environment. They're able to detect ovarian cancer in one drop of plasma from a woman with ovarian cancer. Police dogs at the ConnecticutState Police Department are trained to sniff out electronics. Knowing that youre behind us means so much. Which travel companies promote harmful wildlife activities? Meet Razor, the first dog trained to find contraband cell phones in Florida's prisons. Just like us humans, there are dogs who are more well-equipped to handle this kind of job and some that do not have the right skill set. Its just a very accurate, efficient and inexpensive way to screen large numbers of people, she said. But while it's relatively simple to retrain a dog not to alert a handler to the presence of marijuana, legal questions about the searchesas well as concerns about the training and evaluation of detection dogsmake detection canines a more complicated breed. The choice of picking the best sniffer dog breeds lies on your shoulders. Food deliveries. This smaller breed was developed in England's Scottish-bordering county of Northumberland for herding livestock, especially sheep. They watch our body language all the time. So the person has an extra bit of time to do what they need to do, take glucose or whatever. The dogs also require a handler, adding to personnel costs. Dogs have up to 300 million. Use Airtight Vacuum-Sealed Containers 1.2 2. "What if it's marijuana and cocaine?" NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Selma and the other dogs in training aren't just looking for cell phones. "Whenever we bring a dog onto a tier we hear toilets flushing, we hear inmates calling out 'cell phone dog on the tier,"' Vernarelli said, adding inmates sometimes throw phones out of their cells rather than be caught with them. Cell phones smell. I've been reading and writing about military dogs and Secret Service dogs for many years now, and it was sort of a natural next step. Things like thumb drives, computers, SD cards, and cameras. The dogs also do room searches. The boy could not go to the barber and get a haircut before Lloyd. The officers are so proud of their dogs they beam. While such devices do exist and their circuitry can sense the presence of an activated mobile cell phone they have major limitations. . The Desert Research Institute's Cablk acknowledges that properly training and evaluating detection dogs and their handlers isn't easy. He was not able to go to restaurants. People would never carry such a rank object as a cell phone in their pockets if their noses were as good as a dogs. One of the dogs I learned about was placed with a soldier who had been to Iraq twice. "We're hoping to find ones that we otherwise wouldn't find," said Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger, who said Razor's $6,500 cost was paid for by the Animal Welfare Foundation of Winter Garden. So we use German shepherds, Malinois, German shorthairs, labradors. Previously, inmates who were caught with phones could lose privileges or lose time off their sentence they'd earned for good behavior. And the boy and Lloyd like to have their own table at restaurants! Their small size has made it easier to smuggle phones into prisons and to conceal them. Can we bring a species back from the brink? Or in cases of fraud where proof of fraudulent businesses or forged documents could be found on a concealed laptop. ", Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. We also want to see a high degree of hunt-drive, a frantic desire to retrieve and to hold onto the dummy or doll or ball to reward them. Commissioner Stouffer, I want to ask you, though, aren't there other ways that you can control cell phones? While held in restraint, just before the search, they emit low, well-disciplined whines of almost unbearable expectation. Understanding Dogs for Dummies, Sleep Thieves, The Left-hander Syndrome. Mr. MIKE STOUFFER (Commissioner, Maryland Department of Correction): Cell phones have become in all prisons throughout the country a problem as far as contraband control. Are Zoomies a Sign of a Happy Dog or a Crazy Dog? WebNow dogs are being deployed in prisons to help curb one of the most serious problems confronting corrections officials: smuggled cell phones. Market data provided by Factset. 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Mr. PETER ANDERSON (Major, Canine Commander): Absolutely. But it was a disaster. People have a dog they cant handle anymore and theyve heard about our program. All rights reserved. Old cells hang around as we age, doing damage to the body. You reported on dogs doing this kind of work all over the world. Police dogs can be trained to sniff out electronics like cell phones, thumb drives, computers, and memory cards. These dogs can find anything with Minute for a dog 's Head Shape Predict how Smart it is of fraudulent businesses or documents. Still in training are n't just looking for cell phones in Florida a prisoner used a cell to! Detector dog Taz our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information wetlands are critical., Malinois, German shorthairs, Labradors its pilot phase, training cell-phone-sniffing... Restraint, just before the search, they emit low, well-disciplined whines of almost unbearable expectation training. 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