What it takes to teach a dog to smell death

A dog’s nose is very sensitive.

According to Sharon Ward, a training officer with Pacific Crest Search Dogs, while humans have 10 million receptors for odor, dogs have 250 million.

“We, for example, smell a chocolate chip cookie,” Ward said. “A dog smells the vanilla, the flour, the chocolate chips, the butter. It smells all of the components where we generalize.”

This is what makes dogs perfect for sniffing out substances and helping authorities track down missing persons. But that isn’t what Ward uses a canine’s incredible receptors for.

She uses them to find human remains.

Ward has been a dog trainer since the 1990s and aids local authorities throughout the Pacific Northwest when they need help. Earlier this month, Jackson County Sheriff’s office used Human Remain Detection dogs, similar to the ones Ward trains, when skeletal remains were found at the Roxy Ann Peak Trail.

Training begins as early as 8 weeks. It involves introducing scent tubes and rewarding puppies, typically with a hot dog, when they put their snout to the tube. Trainers will eventually introduce more tubes with different odors until they continue to sniff out what the trainers are trying to reinforce.