© DGPN – SICOP Cisko, one of the police dogs, during a scent detection test.
The dog sniffs the reference scent and then smells a series of five jars containing human scents, one of which corresponds to the reference. If the dog recognizes the reference scent it lies down in front of the relevant jar; if the dog does not find a match, then it does not stop or lie down.
Odorology is a technique that uses specially-trained dogs to identify human scent. It is used in police investigations to establish that an individual has been at the scene of a crime. However, there is no international norm on how these dogs are trained. At the Centre de recherche en neurosciences de Lyon (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1/Inserm), researchers specializing in scents and their memorization have analyzed data, provided since 2003 by the Division of the Technical and Scientific Police (DTSP, Ecully) on dog performances in scent identification tasks. Their results show that, at the end of a 24-month training program, the dogs are able to recognize the smell of an individual in 80-90% of cases and never mistake it for that of another. These findings validate the procedures that are currently in use and should convince the international community of the reliability of this method. This work was published on 10 February 2016 in the journal PLOS ONE .
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