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The Smell of the Wonder Dogs
Can you get dogs to sniff out COVID-19? Absolutely yes, say British researchers. And they can do it better and quicker than most other ‘scientific’ tests.
Claiming an accuracy rate of between 82 per cent and 94 per cent, researchers in England were able to expose dogs to T-shirt samples, some of which were ever so slightly infected with the coronavirus, and have the dogs correctly identify the infected shirts. The dogs were equally good at identifying true negatives—a 92 per cent rating. The study has yet to be peer reviewed, but researchers were so excited by their results that they made them public.
It’s a real victory for the canines, who have a sensory setup that is 60 time more powerful than human receptors. By way of illustration, one researcher compared a dog’s sensory capacity to the ability to find a teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic sized swimming pool, (There it is again—the invidious Olympic swimming pool comparison. How abundant are the dandelions on my lawn? Well, enough to cover the floor of an Olympic swimming pool—twice! And I assume the pool was chlorinated.)
The authors of the study—from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Durham University and a charity called Medical Detection Dogs—say that, once trained, a dog can sniff out 300 people in half an hour. That makes the use of dogs viable at airport and sports stadiums and anywhere else a large crowd might gather.
The breeds most likely to succeed at this task are Labradors, golden retrievers and cocker spaniels—all known to be on the meeker side of the aggressiveness spectrum. Just imagine, however, how quickly a crowd could be shaken down using dobermans, pit bulls and German shepherds: they could track down and smell the fear in an instant.
In point of fact, dog smelling is already recognized as a diagnostic tool, having been used to detect Parkinson’s, malaria and bladder cancer. So why not look more widely afield for potential uses for canine sensory abilities?
Well, one enterprising vintner in the County is doing just that. Yvonne Tailfeather, the proprietor of the Hillier area winery Stony Soils Vineyards, is planning to bring her companion dog Rex with her to her new retail shop when it opens after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
Rex, claims Tailfeather, can sniff out a Chardonnay from a Pinot Noir, and tell when he’s being offered a Cabernet Franc and not a Riesling. He has also, she says, beaten experts from the Ontario Wine Guild in testing varietal wines in blind challenges. He can identify the vintage year of the product— barking once if the wine is last year’s, twice if it is two years old, and ten times if it ten or more years old.
Tailfeather eschews any comparison to the legendary ‘Clever Hans, the horse who could count,’ and who caused a sensation back in 1904; but who was in fact just responding to subconscious cues from his master.) “Rex really can smell the difference,” she asserts—and the results for the COVID- 19 wonder dogs appear to back her up.
Tailfeather has great plans for Rex. She has her eye on politicians and the next federal election, expected to come this fall. “Right now I’m training him in bafflegab detection. People give off a certain odour from heightened stress when they don’t really believe what they are saying. If I can just get enough T-shirt samples from known liars, I figure I can take him to some all-candidates meetings and really set the cat among the pigeons, as it were!”
In fact, she claims, dogs like Rex would be very useful to police agencies in determining whether to charge suspects and to judges and juries assessing guilt or innocence. “Think of all the time and money that our justice system could save,” she notes, “and we’d still come out with a 90 per cent accuracy rating,” She also raves about the possibility of taking Rex to car dealers, and determining whether she is really being offered the ‘lowest clearout prices,’ and perhaps also to churches, where she can determine, using Rex, whether clergy really believe what they are preaching.
In the meantime, Tailfeather plans to use Rex as the public face of the new vineyard. He will appear on every wine label, and every bottle she sells will carry the “Rex-tested” imprimatur as a guarantee of purity.
She is also preparing to rent out Rex to wine tasting events and bachelorette parties that will supposedly take place in the County during the summer. “If you’ve got a rooster that lays golden eggs,” she asserts blithely, “you’ve got to milk him for all he’s worth.”
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