Why do people still choose dogs over advanced technology?

[mech-eng]

Okay, dogs have been man's best friend for thousands of years, but today modern technology is in a very advanced level. So probably the devices are better than dogs. Why do people still use dogs when hunting, to rescue people in avalanche or among the ruins of a building after an earthquake, for finding drugs hidden by drug traffickers etc?

Is this just because dogs are cheaper than advanced devices?

Thanks.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Does your cell phone love you?
(OK, Siri does have a thing for me, but still...)

 

[mcastillo356]

Hi,. @mech-eng, welcome. My personal opinion is that we can.get profit from both of them. If I am at a devastated building, and there might be survivors, a dog. If I must face a bomb threat, a machine.
Love, greetings

 

[berkeman]

but today modern technology is in a very advanced level. So probably the devices are better than dogs

That's a good question, and I'd like to respond. But first can you please link to the state-of-the-art for drug and cadaver and bomb detection by machine/instrument detectors, and compare that to what trained dogs can do? I'd rather not have to do that work myself, since you started this thread.

I look forward to your detailed reply with links (which should have been in your OP, BTW)...

 

[russ_watters]

Why do people still use dogs when hunting, to rescue people in avalanche or among the ruins of a building after an earthquake, for finding drugs hidden by drug traffickers etc?

Is this just because dogs are cheaper than advanced devices?.

Dogs are better at it.

 

[DaveE]

Because a well trained detection dog is better. End of story. Maybe someday a machine will be able to do what dogs can. People are working really hard on this problem, especially for remote detection (like, there's a bomb over there because my laser can see it's smell in the air). The odor signature (i.e. GCMS plot) of heroin or C4 is a pretty complicated thing. Does your machine have 1000 chemical sensors integrated with a brain that also controls the motion, sniffing, and rapid response coupling those features? No, not yet? Maybe someday.

[https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cclm-2019-1269/html?lang=en]

I tell my students if they want to get an impression of the dog's umwelt consider switching your visual acuity and processing with your sense of smell. That is the dog's world; smell first, vision second (sort of).

The big problem with detection dogs is that it isn't scalable. You need good well trained dogs and a handler that won't screw it up. That's expensive to actually do. There won't be a factory in Shenzhen turning out 1000 dog teams per day. That's mostly why people want to build machines to do it.

One of my favorite quotes here, which I can only paraphrase (sorry Ken) is "The great thing about detection dogs is they are incredibly sensitive (olfaction-wise), intelligent, and highly trainable. One of the worst things about detection dogs is they are incredibly sensitive (olfaction-wise), intelligent, and highly trainable." - Ken Furton, FIU. You'd understand this if you ever saw a poorly trained detection dog. There is some skill required to train them.

* Fun, but useless, fact: Drug dogs can't smell cocaine, it's an anesthetic that shuts down those receptors. If you are busted by a drug dog for cocaine, it's because they smelled the chemical breakdown products (methyl benzoate primarily and other stuff). The best dogs are trained not to respond to just methyl benzoate, it must be methyl benzoate and the other stuff.

 

[Hornbein]

The sense of smell is the poor relation. We don't even know the basics of how it works. We do have mass spectrometers and such.

 

[DaveE]

The sense of smell is the poor relation. We don't even know the basics of how it works. We do have mass spectrometers and such.

Yes, but we also don't know how to interpret the MS data in real world environments. In the lab there's a ton of sample preparation before the MS machine. You can't do that when you're looking for a bomb in the football stadium, meth in a crack house, or cancer in a urine sample. The dogs can do it, but we don't know how. OK, smell is a "poor relation" in some sense, but it's often the only thing that works. We know how the machines work, but we don't know what to look for in that data. This is the bridging research needed to replace the dogs.

There are also some practical deployment issues. For example, there are dogs that can detect C-Diff in hospital rooms. They are used successfully to determine which rooms require intensive decontamination BEFORE the next patient is exposed. Yes, you could swab EVERY surface and send it to the lab to grow. In a day or two you'd know if you can reuse that room, or which patients you put at risk. The quick response to a bomb, drugs, pathogens, etc. is important.

 

[Mondayman]

I remember watching a Jack Russell Terrier unleashed on a nest of rats that was underneath a stable or grainery. He must have went through forty rats in less than a minute. Just a bite and quick shake of the head to snap its neck, and onto the next one. Pretty efficient.

 

[Hornbein]

I remember watching a Jack Russell Terrier unleashed on a nest of rats that was underneath a stable or grainery. He must have went through forty rats in less than a minute. Just a bite and quick shake of the head to snap its neck, and onto the next one. Pretty efficient.

If they think there is a rat in your car they will tear the upholstery apart.

 

[Rive]

I remember watching a Jack Russell Terrier unleashed on a nest of rats that was underneath a stable or grainery.

Ferrets are good with that too, but also can go down the holes.
... though after solving a difficult case they tend to stay there for a nap ...

 

[DaveC426913]

I tell my students if they want to get an impression of the dog's umwelt consider switching your visual acuity and processing with your sense of smell.

TIL 'umwelt' is a word: an organism's self-centred world/environment.

 

[phinds]

Why do people still use dogs when hunting

You ever taken a machine hunting with you? Yeah, I thought not.

 

[berkeman]

You ever taken a machine hunting with you? Yeah, I thought not.

Nope, just jogging so far. Sure gets a lot of double-takes...

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/...very.gettyimages.com/downloads/1212177356.jpg