You Stink

One of the most interesting things I got out of the "Dog Emotion and Cognition" taught by Duke University on Coursera is that dogs are time travelers. Perhaps it is not the traditional way we think of time travel, but a dog, whose sense of smell is on the order of tens of thousands of times better than humans, can tell time from smell. 

From a simple smell, they can tell who has been here in the past. Often, they leave their own calling card for others to find. My mom always called it "pee-mail". They can tell something about where you've been and who you've been with. It seems common knowledge, as I often hear, "She can smell my dogs (or cats or horses)." They can "visit" what has already happened.

When I was little, my dog, "Banjo" would sit at the end of the driveway waiting for the bus to come just minutes before it did. In this course, they discussed that dogs can also tell time because evening smells differently from morning. They know the future as well as the smell of a thing arrives before the thing itself. 

And of course, they can smell what is going on all around them. Enter the Diabetic Alert Dog (DAD). The most frequent question I am asked is how a dog is trained to detect low scent or high scent of a person with diabetes. The quick answer is you don't. Dogs can detect some odors in parts per trillion. It is thought that DADs can detect the chemical isoprene in hypoglycemic people (low blood glucose) and perhaps ketones in hyperglycemic diabetics. They smell it without our need to train them to. The goal is to teach the dog that this particular smell is one you are interested in and to teach the dog to tell you when they smell it.

So, DAD training is really about teaching communication from the dog to you that they detect a low or high smell. Murphy is being trained to alert behaviors which is rewarded. Those alert behaviors are being tied to low scent samples we made. Dental cotton rolls are chewed on by William when he is low and frozen for use with training Murphy that this is the smell we want her to detect. Why focus on the "low"? High is easier for dogs and I'm told it will come naturally; we need only to teach a better alert than eating William's computer cord and emptying the trash can in agitation. (I am told a dog does not like the high smell and they think it "stinks", surprising given my dogs would eat deer poop and opossum carcasses if I let them.)

So, in a nutshell, the dog, already smelling these low and high smells from any body fluid (blood, saliva, sweat) is taught to communicate that it detects that smell and communicates it in some trained alert to a human. The dog must sometimes be persistent and perhaps exhibit "civil disobedience" if the human ignores the alert. Probably all dogs, (although our old brachiocephalic dog, Paris, is probably an exception) can detect these smells. Then, it comes down to whether the dog has the drive and temperament to be a service dog.