Dogs Take Their Place in Arsenal Against Chemical Attack
New York Times, May 12, 2003
In the hunt for terrorists who might try to use unconventional weapons
on
American soil, the federal government is enlisting an old, and very
trusted,
ally.
The Department of Homeland Security says that in a research program kept
quiet for months, it has determined, apparently for the first time, that
ordinary dogs can be trained to sniff out trace amounts of the nonlethal
components of chemical weapons, including sarin and cyanide.
As a result, the department's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection
has
begun to train a corps of so-called chemical detector dogs and is
planning
to deploy them at airports, seaports, government buildings and other
potential terrorist targets, where they will work alongside the police
dogs
that have long been used to sniff out narcotics, explosives and human
remains.
So far, several dogs the department will not give an exact number,
saying
that to do so would tip off terrorists to the scope of the program have
been given chemical training at Fort McClellan, Ala. Hundreds more are
expected to be added to the program in the next two years.
The department is studying whether dogs may also be effective in the
search
for biological weapons, although officials are less optimistic about the
program's usefulness in this area, since many germ agents have no
distinctive odor.
The discovery that dogs can apparently detect components of chemical
weapons
has implications beyond national security. Officials hope it will also
mean
budget savings for the federal government, which now spends hundreds of
millions of dollars a year on research to develop machinery to detect
chemical weapons. Given the initial results of the new program,
officials
say, some of that high-tech detection equipment may prove no more
sensitive
than a dog's snout.
The work with the dogs is "very promising," said Robert C. Bonner, the
commissioner of customs and border protection, who championed the
program
and helped find $2 million in the budget to get it started.
"After 9/11, and with the continuing terrorist threat, we began asking
the
question of how we could improve our capability against terrorist
weapons,
specifically against weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Bonner said. "And
there had been some initial research that suggested that canines might
be
effective with chemicals."
Dogs, he said, provide "portability, and they also allow you to detect
chemical weapons before they are released."
Officials say they have kept quiet about the program until now because
they
did not want to raise hopes about its usefulness prematurely, or alert
terrorists that the government might soon have a new defense against
chemical attack.
Animal researchers and other scientists say they are not surprised by
dogs'
ability to detect the components of chemical weapons. The Pentagon has
long
used dogs for chemical detection, most recently in Iraq, where they
helped
in the search for traditional weapons and explosives.
"Dogs can detect compounds that the human nose could never pick up at
the
same concentration: the concentration can be a hundred- or a thousand-fold
weaker," said Charles J. Wysocki, a neuroscientist at the Monell
Chemical
Senses Center, a research institute in Philadelphia.
"Conceptually, there's no difference between training a dog to find an
explosive material that has a residual odor to it and training a dog to
detect a chemical weapon that has a residual odor," Dr. Wysocki said.
Jim Watson, a veteran dog trainer who is secretary of the North American
Police Work Dog Association, said he knew of no previous research on
dogs
and chemical weapons. "But when it comes to training dogs to smell
something," he said, "the sky's the limit."
Officials with the Homeland Security Department said the training
program
began last October, after federal laboratories identified a group of
chemicals that, though used to make sarin and other chemical weapons,
were
harmless by themselves and could be detected by dogs in trace amounts. "The
idea is this: If I'm looking for a Big Mac and I know that Big Macs are
deadly, I'm looking for the special sauce that is not lethal," said Lee
T.
Titus, director of the canine enforcement program for the Bureau of
Customs
and Border Protection.
The dogs in the initial training program were chosen from three breeds
especially talented at detection work and easy to train: Labrador
retrievers, German shepherds and Belgian Malinois, which resemble
shepherds.
All the dogs were new to detection work; the Homeland Security
Department
said it had decided not to shift over any of its existing narcotics- or
explosives-detection dogs because this task was so different. A
narcotics
dog, for example, is taught to bite and scratch at the source of
contraband.
But that could be deadly for a chemical-detection dog and its handler if
the
dog came upon chemical weapons.
So a dog in the chemical-detection program is taught to alert its
handler by
some signal like snapping its head back or perking up its ears, and then
by
sitting in place.
Mr. Titus said that while the first dogs used in the program had been
bought
from breeders, he planned to select most of the animals in the future
from
public dog pounds, the source of almost 80 percent of the animals his
office
trains for other detection work. "It's an extra benefit," he said. "I
can
save some really good dogs from the pound."
