Ability of explosives detector dogs to generalize odor of TNT

摘要

The use of explosive detector dogs has become quite common worldwide over the last decades. Despite enormous efforts that were invested into the research of olfaction principles there still remains lot of unanswered questions regarding olfaction and use of specially trained dogs. In our study we used explosive detector dogs (n=5) that were previously trained to detect flaked pure TNT, to see if they would be able to generalize trained odor and detect TNT of different origin and content of volatiles. Despite the fact that dogs demonstrated flawlessly their ability to detect flaked TNT they failed to respond to the TNT sample of different origin.